I have been posting on other forums lately. Let me know if you would like more of the following?

I answered the question of why people become fanatical about political parties as follows>

What accounts for the fanatical loyalty some people have for a sports team? Why does every religion seem to have so many sects? Why do high school kids self segregate into various groups? Why don’t bees join together into one big hive?

Ever social animal has what you might call an optimum group size dependent on environmental conditions. Animosity between groups in the same species help to ensure that there isn’t excess pressure on local resources. For that to happen groups have to have some way to identify who is a member of the group and who is an outsider. It turns out that even in humans the utopian idea of the brotherhood of man can be destructive.

Social organization needs to start at a level where individuals can be recognized. For example what keep black teenage pregnancy rates lower than their white counterparts in the 50s was communities that relied on a bond. Social prejudice and discrimination reinforced the sense of a black community. Often that community was based on a church. As prejudice and discrimination decreased the bond weakened. Successful members of the community fled with their white counterparts to the suburbs and the black community ceased to exist. Add in welfare programs that encouraged black women to not marry and form stable relationships with men and the basic units of social organization were destroyed result in the inner cities we see today.

The biggest problem in the US today is that policies are being set by people immune to the consequences of those policies. California is the canary in the coal mine in terms of social disorganization. It is losing it’s stabilizing middle class because of energy prices, high taxes, a failure to address issues such as water storage and homelessness. The people that can afford high energy prices, solar cells and electric vehicles, high tax rates, have their own water resources, and don’t walk on the streets or have businesses where the homeless live are immune to the consequences of social diaspora. If they had lived with, worked with, and gone to the same church as the other classes policies would be much different.

What made life good in the US in the 50s and sixties was a growing stabilizing middle class. After WWII and the experience of the rich fighting along side the other classes the boot was lifted off of the lower classes. Education opportunities were made more meritocratic and open to the lower classes. Basic infrastructure such as energy, water systems and roads were heavily invested in. Labor started getting fair wages and rose into the middle class. The good times however produced a generation of weak individuals. An upper class unwilling to make sacrifices in the name of community. Talent flocked to easy money.

Financial empires tend to break up societies. The Western financial empire backed by US military superiority created what Eisenhower called the "military industrial complex". What we have come to call corpocracy or the incestuous relationship between government and finance. Laws and policies were written that favored finance over productivity. It became more profitable to break up industries and ship pollution and slave labor to China. The effect is evident in what has been called the rust belt. A dystopian wilderness of decaying industrial buildings and displaced labor. Cities ended up with two classes the rich and the poor. Drug abuse and violent crime finished off what was left of community.

The middle class played a role in its own destruction. They abandoned thriving communities for the suburbs as soon as they were able. Worst of all when they fled to the suburbs they took the not in my backyard attitude with them. They were more than happy to see the destruction of dirty industries. No longer living with the rich they could pretend to have made it. Everyone wanted an estate a kind of perverted and delusional return to landed aristocracy in the form of 5 acre farms. Without tax revenue to support the infrastructure cities started to deteriorate. The politicians were happy because they were left with political subdivisions that could be bought with bread and circus.

When politics doesn't start at the community level where people know and work with each other the whole concept of the brotherhood of man becomes dystopian. The rich and powerful have to suffer the consequences of their policies by being part of the community at a personal level.

Civilization is a kind of artificial eusociality. Imagine what would happen if the queen ant decided to live independent of the workers. First the workers would die off and then the queen would starve. As humans the results are not as dramatic. We can adapt to a dystopian environment for generations. The "queens" always have the resources to avoid the decay of civilization. Right now they have decided to even encourage it ostensibly due to environmental concerns caused only by population size. From their perspective Malthus was right there are a lot of useless clingers, deplorables and irredeemables. The other classes turn to socialism without understanding the underlying causes.

The problem with socialism is that complex, chaotic systems such as advanced civilizations are irreducible. They are resistant to top down management because of unintended consequences. I have nothing against the idea of socialism. The problem is that it is destructive to community based on hierarchies of competence. The end result is the same as capitalism. A society of rich and poor every time it is tried. The administrators do not suffer from the consequences of their policies.