The forced, media-driven fomenting and fostering of general cultural division along arbitrary, overworn faultlines of emotionally weighted 'purity test' opinions. Those few pious little creeds that divide communities conveniently into tribes - gun control, religion, politics, class - are becoming liabilities to reason, at the least.

Communication has become so clouded by echo-chamber bias and propaganda that it makes it difficult to hear one another truthfully over the noise and nonsense, and the ultimate effect of all that propaganda is an undermining of trust: in information in general, and in each other. I sometimes think we stand at the cusp of an overreaching cultural and intellectual cataclysm, an anti-Renaissance, if this insanity continues much longer.

I'm disturbed by the depth of division aimed for by the media. It bothers me how blind it threatens to make people to one another. It's troublesome how easily lies are substituted for the truth in this disconfigured state of chaos, and how rabidly the media will dog the lie as if repetition were as good as legitimacy.