Paul Edwards
Dysbiosis is a scientific term that connotes disruption of bacterial balance in the digestive system. Normally, the amazing variety of bacteria in the gut work in rough equity, a majority of them being benign, which counteract the pathogenic. A normal mix insures good digestion and the stability and health of the individual.
The results of dysbiosis range from discomfort to critically severe system malfunction that, if not quickly corrected, can be fatal.
Like the human gut, nations may fall into an imbalance that can destroy them. There is a direct parallel to gut affliction manifest in our body politic now that has become existentially dangerous.
Setting aside the terrible vulnerability built into democratic systems, in which voting is easily and eternally corruptible, the original theoretical purpose of governance was to achieve a widely acceptable balance of interests among all civil elements, to enable a society to function in a reliably effective manner.
This societal ideal was never perfectly achieved, and was often ignored by those in control of early societies’ processes. No system, until quite recently, has ever made more than a feeble pretense of governance in the interests of its entire citizenry.
Greece and Rome set a pattern in openly ruling for moneyed elites that has been rigorously followed through the whole of European history to the collapse of its empires, and the American Constitution was crafted to insure its continuance.
There were always shams and shows used to some effect by the late royal and imperial absolutisms, to promote the illusion on the part of hoodwinked hoi polloi that the ruling grandees took some generous, humane interest in their people. They didn’t.
Those tactics were observed by incipient democracies and, when empires broke in war, under the enormous accumulated weight of their insanities, the new elites adopted and improved them.
Our history, based on genocide and slavery, is one of cynical manipulation of an ignorant population through refinement of formulas long used to insure the authority of ruling classes.
The purpose was, as ever, to deflect and detoxify grievances born of peoples’ awareness of the unconscionable inequity of the system. Our ruling Capitalist Class contrived to defuse the animosity natural in our exploited citizenry by containing it with a meticulously engineered social and political equilibrium.
This is directly analogous to the body’s function in establishing and maintaining order in the microbial mix of our gut. Its health depends on an ever adjusted balance of good and bad bacteria; in our nation, the same goal is sought by the same means, with our rulers working with positive and negative human convictions.
For nearly all of our national existence, our Capitalist Class has managed to maintain a fragile homeostasis, and avoid open conflict between the minuscule clique of phenomenally wealthy and the gigantic, exploited mass of workers that enriches them.
The devices it utilized worked directly on both the hopes and aspirations, and the fears and entrenched prejudices, of our gullible people, and adjustment of those forces is now severely out of balance, escaped from the control of our splintered elite.
The positive forces used are of three main categories: economic adequacy, personal safety, and national pride. People must be made to believe they can make it financially, that they are safe in their homes, neighborhoods, and a dangerous world, and that their nation is powerful, extraordinary, and admirable.
The negative forces are far more numerous and varied, but can be grouped under a few headings: race hate, religious animosity, sexual dogma, status envy, and xenophobia.
By exerting influence to promote positive, or inflame negative, forces, elites can maintain sociopolitical balance and their system is safe. When their management fails, it is not. Our national dysfunction is now so acute that it menaces the life of the nation.
Economic life is hard for Americans and government has done nothing to improve it for generations. Crime, under murderous, racist policing, is trivial beside the enormous risks provoked by our rabid, imbecile “leadership” that continues to make wars it has repeatedly lost. Critically, America’s role as dominant world power is gone, and its rank in world esteem has tanked with its many gross and humiliating failures. So much for the positive.
Through many Presidents’ terms, negative forces in our mix have been cultivated and actually exacerbated by doing nothing to offset or eliminate their causes, and most often by disguising them behind coded deceit and masking euphemism.
With Trump, a festering human carbuncle of malevolence and resentment, all emollients and poultices that covered the ugliness always pulsing beneath our unstable political surface have been dissolved. What remains is naked reality: we are a nation so hostile and divided, so shot through with small, narrow, bitter hatreds and antagonisms, that we can never be reconciled.
Bereft of the manufactured illusions of positive forces—always fantasies to control us—and at the mercy of our internecine alienation, we move inexorably in our own fatal imperial dysbiosis toward the end of the extravagant experiment that was neither honorably designed nor ethically evolved.
The real America was never the hope of the world.
