You probably think of America as the land of opportunity, that opportunity is a good thing. Here’s the definition from Merriam-Webster of opportunism:
: the art, policy, or practice of taking advantage of opportunities or circumstances often with little regard for principles or consequences
I focus on “with little regard for principles or consequences.” Hopefully, when you see opportunity knocking, you automatically make a principled evaluation of the choice before you take the advantage. People who do not consider morality are known as sociopaths. I don’t think America is a majority-sociopath population. Unfortunately, America is, in politics and capitalism, a sociopathic nation. The important part of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) is that it is antisocial. It doesn’t fit into society, the community of fellow human beings.
Capitalism, almost by definition, disregards principles and consequences. At least America’s form of extreme capitalism does. The textbook explanation of capitalism is a benign set of rules. In practice, it is not a static implementation of these simple rules. In practice, it is an evolving complex system. We have seen in our experience of being American that it evolves towards an abusive corruption of social norms and interactions between people.
American politics has adopted a vicious extremism of opportunism. It is fundamentally winner-take-all, but has evolved like contemporary capitalism. The opportunism translates into winning regardless of the cost. It has a practice that the end justifies the means. More and more, all means are normalized in the pursuit of domination.
Furthermore, as capitalism has corrupted politics, politics has corrupted society. The growing division and divisiveness of Americans’ perspective on others is the outcome of the affect of capitalism on the population. It endangers society itself. It is that severe.
When parts of society are too interconnected society becomes brittle, losing flexibility to adapt to change and regain balance. I fear that our society is reaching this point, largely due to how interconnected the Internet and social media have made up. If the global society is too brittle then it cannot change a part of it that has become corrupted.
One of the most important mechanisms for adaptation of a society is to break up into some granularity of component parts, fix parts in need and reconstitute itself in a new society. It is valuable for the survival of people that society has this ability without the need to have a world war. The best way to start to defuse the current crises of economic distress and political upheaval is to break up the United States. That will relieve the pressure that the federal government exerts and free groups of people to more easily pursue their projects. That would be a good start on bringing all of this civilization towards a egalitarian community of peers.