It’s an interesting fact that our political parties seem to have organized themselves broadly based on personality. I have a theory for why this may have happened. Partly it may just be an inevitable consequence of having enough people, and, since personality variation is a huge natural element of human expression, it’s just always going to make itself felt at macroscopic levels of human representation. But I think in America, our system especially the result of what you might call oversampling in our society. We’re not made up out of one fairly uniform racial group.

Races, in a way, are like super-personalities. The world is too big and too complex and too variable for one person or perspective to contain all possible information and approaches. And yet we need flexibility, the ability to see the relevant things when they come up and have the relevant skills and interests when they’re needed. So it’s outsourced to humanity as whole. We get to have it both ways by having to live with both kinds of people (or more accurately many kinds of people, by personality at least as many kinds as you get permutations of the big 5).

And a race is like a super-personality. Adapted for a particular environment, the potential for the things that work in that niche rising to the top and becoming dominant across a group. It’s like a whole society, even having personality differences within it, going as a whole largely down one specific path of personality expression.

And America is odd, because we’re not made of one fairly united group. We’re out of many, one. Forget all the different races, even just among the Europeans there’s a huge gulf of difference that they had to struggle to find commonality among. Irish people have a quite different temperament and history from Germans, who are quite different from Swedes and the Dutch, who are quite different from Russians and Italians, who are quite different from the British and French. And a lot of them spent hundreds of years fighting and hating one another. But we lump them all together as Europeans or homogenize them as white people, as if that wasn’t itself a kind of crazy entity, an insane amalgam formed out of the blending of races and histories and outlooks that is quite unprecedented in history.

And that’s just a single supercategory out of many. We have “black people” or African Americans, and as a group they’re slightly more uniform, being largely from one region of Africa, but it’s still a huge region of many nations and tribes they come from, and they’ve developed an identity quite distinct from the varied identities and histories of their native continent. And the Spanish are a crazy mix of old world Europeans and new world tribal peoples with vastly different societies, and the Asians are a collection of ancient, warring nations and empires that live still largely unmixed.

America is this crazy place where we’ve oversampled humanity. We not only built ourselves out of the usual mix of personalities, we’re made of an unprecedented mix of superpersonalities. If you can pull it off, the huge resource of potential strengths and approaches that might be useful for particular situations is insane, unprecedented. You’ve got a repository of the largest sampling ever of human potential and knowledge. It’s the closest mankind has ever come to becoming a unified, complete whole.

The downside is, the bigger and more radically divergent your group becomes, the harder it is to unify it and make everyone happy. The more likely that the partners involved won’t actually be engaged in the same goals and share common values. A marriage is hard to keep together, and that’s just two people who voluntarily chose one another and we’re pretty picky about it. You need either some serious commonalities or some serious rules to negotiate and maintain the social order if you’re going to build anything lasting out of such a chimeric combination of peoples.

That’s why the most truly dangerous people to our democracy are the people who undermine the institutions and the common attitudes and practices that preserve them (politeness, respect for the rules and limitations that restrain power and influence, the necessity of a certain amount of gridlock and awkwardness). All these things can seem like an annoying hindrance, but they’re actually very necessary to protect such a complex alliance of diverging interests. And the more our interests and beliefs in a unifying superstructure to the world diverge and disintegrate, the harder it will be to keep it all together. Our underlying mental infrastructure is changing and diverging, not just our expression of it or approach to it. We’re not just diverging in the types of people we are, but in what we even understand being a person as being. And the farther we get apart, the harder the marriage is.

If we stonewall and resent and fear one another, if we constantly double down on what separates us, if we make the divergent and conflicting aapects of our existence the defining elements of our identity, we’ll only walk further down that path. And to some degree we will even be right in doing so.

There’s a point at which we aren’t really living in the same world or seeing the same goals or goods as one another. We aren’t using systems that allow cross communication. Our methods for assessing truth and right and wrong are no longer commonly shared. So the belief that we’re radically different and are therefore antagonists and competitors, not partners, is part of the problem, but there’s also a grain of truth in it. There really is an underlying problem growing. Our inability to listen to each other and our fear for one another makes it even harder to learn and change and find that common ground, but our increasingly small actual common ground makes that fear and lack of understanding more and more accurate and inevitable. It’s a vicious cycle.

Generally, when an empire reaches this sort of state, the problem is solved when the system collapses and loses its complexity. You can even see it genetically. The more powerful an empire becomes, the more genetically diverse the DNA of the people buried at its center during that period become, as people from far and wide are attracted to the opportunities they see there and pool more and more of their natural and cultural and intellectual and economic resources. People from all over come in, wanting a part of the big cheese. Then the whole thing collapses under its own weight, the empire falls from greatness, the concentration of power and wealth fractures, and pretty soon the people have moved to congregate somewhere else, and the genetic variation settles back to a more uniform structure. They’ve tracked it very clearly with Rome and England.

And there’s no reason to think there’s anything different happening in America, or that it will end any differently. And every great empire thinks it’s the end of the world, when the greatest thing ever goes down. But it’s happened a hundred times throughout history. Sometimes slowly, sometimes violently, sometimes with a gradual fading and coming apart and smaller groups each going their own way. And sometimes one of those groups becomes the next big thing. That’s history.

America isn’t just a vision of a potential unified humanity, it’s also a vision of the Tower of Babel. Our collection of diversity is losing its coherence and basis for mutual intelligibility and getting closer to the cacophony of many voices that loses cohesion and breaks up and goes separate ways. I think that story was trying to tell us something people learned very early about about how humanity and the cycle of history works. We’ve certainly seen the pattern repeated again and again throughout time in many places.

A great empire is often powered, ideologically, by a single idea, a vision. Something a leader or Philosopher or religion or artist articulates (often it finds representation in all of the above). And that idea guides and powers it through its time of growth and expansion. But eventually the idea declines or is forgotten or loses traction or relevance. The empire becomes more of a mechanism devoted to maintaining the vast infrastructure and complex of institutions it has built. And people are mostly either living off their inherited benefits or seeking to maneuver themselves into a position where they can be a recipient of those benefits.

Ultimately, the trend is toward living off the benefits of what was built. The spirit that built them has passed on, and what’s left is more a slow ( or occasionally very rapid) cannibalization of the edifice. Everyone becomes far more concerned about what share of the inheritance they’re getting than what they’re doing to build up the future estate, which is how you know you’re at a funeral, not a graduation. People. Give long, sad speeches about the deceased and spend their time dissecting old grudges and injustices and reminiscing about the days when what has passed was still alive. We line up our arguments against to another to defend our claims and take each other to court. We make long lists of what we are owed.