Is America Ready for a Reset: Unity?

Issue 169: July 18, 2024

We feel compelled to weigh in on recent developments. As a nation, we appear to be at a crossroads this week. The political discourse has taken another sharp turn, and the divisiveness and unsettling violence in our country keep accelerating. Let’s take a step back and think of the meta description of Americans: We are optimistic, resilient, problem-solvers. Add to that the rugged individualism that led us across the country to live out a manifest destiny. For over two centuries, we have been the envy of the rest of the world for our commitment to our ideals, ability to innovate, and embrace of the future.

American Reset

But that may not be the case any longer. According to Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian: “There is this feeling that there is a divide about what America means, and we don’t have a love for the institutions we used to.” It should be no secret to anyone that the country is changing in its intent, direction and composition. The future remains blurry as we continue to shift and reshape the American Dream.

Change is scary and stress-inducing for most of us regardless of where that change occurs -- at work, home, or across society at large. Change prompts unanswered questions about where we should go and how to get there. Politicians on every side of every aisle are calling for unity. But in real life, there is a general lack of unity and shared purpose. As a result, we are experiencing more stress, anger and sometimes physical and/or psychological violence.

One of our core operating principles at 2040 is that unity and shared purpose are the fundamental foundations for a successful organization undergoing transformation and change. We believe it is equally foundational for a nation to be sustainable and relevant.

Is our American optimistic destiny premise no longer valid? Are we in for a reset?

Individualism

When we seek clarity on complex issues, we turn to neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky. He has written that personal motivation and satisfaction are driven by self - rather than group-derived effort. He adds that “American individualism is about non-cooperation rather than nonconformity.” His theory is that competitive drive is more about getting ahead of everyone else than it is to be collaborative.

Sapolsky’s theory may help explain why something has shifted over the past decades in the American psyche. The Columbine shootings happened in 1999. The leadup to Zuckerberg’s innovation was slow and steady in the early 2000s with MySpace. It’s no coincidence that social media exploded in 2004 with the emergence of Facebook. This public online forum was founded on the principles of self-celebration and competition with others. Social has now become a central conversational thread among people of all ages with the charades of perfect lives rampant online. This drive for personal status is exacerbated by the false images projected on dating sites. And now we have avatars and personas that represent our best selves. Social also amplifies bullying and victimization of marginalized young people.

Okay, we know the negative effects of social media are nothing new but there is something to be said when a medium becomes so deeply ingrained in nearly every aspect of day-to-day life that it seems to be influencing everything. This includes feeding our divisiveness, creating anxiety, instilling shock and anger, and prompting rage. Unity and shared purpose do not seem to be pillars of social media.

Isolation Epidemic

What’s new is a pervasive wave of loneliness and isolation among our citizens, online and offline. We reported several key findings earlier this year and feel they are worth repeating.

• We are politically polarized, each side convinced it is right.
• We are socially alienated, separated by our self-imposed belief systems, fed by our immersion in alerts, notifications and social feeds.
• And we are lonely. In fact, Harvard reports that 75% of Americans say they experience loneliness and Axios states “There aren’t enough therapists and counselors in the U.S. to support every lonely person.” Enter AI as a stand-in for professionally trained mental health providers. We’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

To expand on loneliness, the US Surgeon General announced a loneliness health epidemic, and we see it play out in real life in our organizations. The Wall Street Journal says, “More Americans are profoundly lonely, and the way they work—more digitally linked but less personally connected—is deepening that sense of isolation.” The Journal aggregated some sobering facts. “More than 40% of fully remote workers say they go days without leaving the house.?Those who work in-office spend nearly a quarter of their time in virtual meetings, while face-to-face meetings account for only 8% of their time. Americans have tripled?the time spent in meetings ?since 2020, leaving less time for the casual interactions that social scientists say foster happiness at work. And 68% of workers said they?knew their co-workers ?on a personal level, down from 79% five years ago.”

Displaced Rage

Anger seems to be the emotion felt by most of the public at large. Check out our essay from 2023: Do You Have It? Anger? Rage? We received a significant amount of feedback, affirming that yes, it is a phenomenon, even though when our readers experienced it they weren’t sure why.

Professor Scott Galloway has publicly stated that bored young men are the most dangerous people in the world. “When countries have unemployed young men who are single, the likelihood that country goes to war escalates,“ he says. ?Unlike Sapolsky, Galloway believes, “As a species, humans need physical and social contact. We thrive on deep, meaningful bonds. Men who fail to attach to partners, careers, or communities often grow bitter and seek volatility and unrest. They’re more susceptible to fringe theories and they over-index on online forums filled with?conspiracy theories, misogynistic content and misinformation. ”

We must address the educational elephant in the room. The US high school graduation rate is 87%, although the 54% college graduation rate is lower.? Higher education is optimistically speaking where students learn life skills and critical thinking. But there’s more to the story, Galloway says that ?“Men now account for?41% of college enrollments , down from nearly 60% in 1970. If we talk about graduation rates, it gets even worse: Since men drop out at a faster clip than women, in the next five years there might be two female college graduates for every one male. Fewer men going to college means fewer men on pathways to economic prosperity. College-educated men earn a median of?$900,000 more over their lifetimes ?than those who only graduated from high school.”

Galloway concludes, “The economic system that made baby boomers wealthy now seems hellbent on yanking the rug out from beneath the up-and-comers. Today’s young workers face economic realities that their parents and grandparents simply did not: rising inflation, soaring housing prices, unbridled student debt, AI labor disruptions, and a climate crisis that could someday make all of it moot. The fact that young people aren’t doing as well as their elders, I think it just creates rage and incendiary that’s poured over every movement. I think with young people, we’re sitting on a tinderbox.”

Bowling Alone

Complicating the growing sentiment of loneliness is isolation. Robert Putman, author of Bowling Alone published in 2000, warned us about social isolation and its corrosive effect on democracy a quarter century ago. Putman used extensive data to pronounce, “America was transforming from a nation of joiners to a nation of loners — we were going to church less, joining clubs less and losing trust in our fellow Americans and our institutions.” We agree with The New York Times that things have only gotten worse over the past 24 years.

What’s going on here?? Putman states, “We were socially isolated and distrustful in the early 1900s, but then there was a turning point, and then we had a long upswing from roughly 1900 or 1910 until roughly 1965, and that was the peak of our social capital. People were more trusting then, they were more connected then, they were more likely to be married then, and they were more likely to join clubs. And then for the next 50 years, that trend turned around.”

We know that memberships in social organizations have ebbed in this country. Without meaningful social connections, isolation becomes a looming shadow.? Putman has one explanation. He looks at the phenomenon of busy people, frequently blamed for not joining in. He says that busy people are?more?connected with the rest of the world and not the reason for isolation. He adds, “If you’re asking, ‘Why do we have people no longer connecting face to face,’ it absolutely is not because we’re too busy. My work is designed to show how joining a club — even a trivial pinochle club or whatever — does help democracy. It’s only by connecting with other people that we generalize from our experience. In the running club, you learn that you can trust other people, and learn in a way what you need to do to maintain that trust.”

Trust

There is a difference between trust and trustworthiness. Putman adds, “You begin with trusting other people, and trusting in other people produces a government that’s trustworthy. The virtue here is not trust, it’s?trustworthiness. That sounds like a silly difference, but trust without trustworthiness is just gullibility. I’m not an advocate of pure, blind trust. I’m an advocate of trustworthiness. I want other people to be trustworthy of my trust, and I want the government to be trustworthy.”

Trust is at the core of a healthy organization and workforce community. Without trust, we are stranded.? One could argue that the movement of loneliness and isolation is based on the lack of trust, among each other and our institutions.

Behavioral Shifts

Controversial determinist Sapolsky believes that all behavior has biological underpinnings and is shaped by natural selection, Therefore, we have no free will. He adds that “right-wing authoritarianism has a fondness for hierarchy that provides simple answers which is ideal for people with poor abstract reasoning skills.”

The University of Pennsylvania researched behavior change and revealed “Common approaches focusing on changing knowledge or beliefs are often ineffective. Instead, interventions that enhance social support, behavioral skills, and access to resources show more significant impacts.” The research reports that “traditional methods like modifying beliefs or increasing knowledge have negligible effects on behavior change and strategies that provide practical support and enhance behavioral skills are more successful in influencing actions.” The conclusion is that social support is more effective than information sharing.

Collaboration

If we take all this research to heart, we need a radical reset to change the course of the public conversation. What happens on a meta-level in terms of a society suffering from dysfunction seeps down into our institutions and organizations … even our families. If we take a page out of the survival strategy of our forests, trees support other species of trees, and fungi systems support the health and growth of forests in a mutualistic relationship. The simple explanation from the US Forest Service is that “fungi will combine their mycelium with the tree's roots making it easier for the trees to get more nutrients and moisture from the soil and the fungi get access to sugars from the trees.” It's mutual cooperation and interdependence.

We could all follow the lead of this natural synergistic behavior to work together to course correct the state of the nation. And just maybe we can achieve unity and shared purpose.

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