America's Weakness

America's military might is almost insurmountable. We have the most technologically advanced military on the planet. Our armed forces are better trained than almost any other military force. We have installations and bases in almost every major strategic point on the globe that serve our interests by protecting trade routes and being a stabilizing force in volatile regions that have a history of instability; instability that threatens our economic and political interests. Our country's fostering of innovation and laws that protect private and intellectual property as well as allowing the free flow of capital to research initiatives that further the development of new technology and new social initiatives that have the potential to act as stabilizing developments has allowed our country to surpass our rivals in our innovative capacities and technological superiority. This is not a strategic problem for our supremacy as the leading power in the World. The United States also is the Worlds largest economy, with a Gross domestic product of around 18.5 trillion dollars and one of the highest quality of life rates in the world. This isn't a problem for our security either. The biggest threat to U.S. supremacy, stability, and security is not necessarily an outside power, although they do play a part in the situations I am about to discuss, but the growing division in our country along ideological, racial, and economic grounds. This division is fostered by the great flaw of the freedom of speech, deception. You can't regulate the truth, especially if the truth is rendered solely to be in the perspective of individuals who view their opinions, no matter how misguided, as absolute truth in their reality. When the truth is lost in a muddied cesspool of ignorance, misinformation, and outright lies, people begin to act out on their ignorance and cause disorder within their communities. The problem is you often can't force someone to believe the truth, and you can't stop someone who lies from lying, especially when you can't entirely invalidate their rhetoric. In today's information age, and with the confusion and often unsubstantiated state of the internet, modern media, including social media, people can find almost anything that fits their worldview and reinforces it, even if their worldview is completely based on fiction and "opinion." The fact that we guarantee freedom of expression also guarantees the free flow of deception. Deception that gets people to believe that there is a "bogyman" behind every action of a particular group, agency, or system and that there is an enemy that needs to be eliminated leads people to commit crimes, to persecute and attack certain groups of people. This often leads to the kind of instability that if left to fester and grow over time can lead to civil unrest, political collapse, civil conflict, and in the worst case scenario, even genocide. I want to make it clear, freedom of speech and expression is a good thing. It allows for creativity and also the respectful vocalization of dissent against the actions of the government (at least it was supposed to). The problem, just like any well intended thing, is that it is the most easily corrupted and abused of any freedom we are guaranteed, to the point that the very freedom becomes counterproductive to the security and stability of the nation because of its allowance of the free flow of deception, hate speech, delusional ideas and the propaganda of particular ideologies that destabilize society by putting a wedge between the people that is fed by the us-or-them mentality that breaks down a social system into multiple factions, which proceed to act out with hostile intent toward one another, whether in rhetoric or in violence, or both. The problem comes about with the freedom of speech is when the discontent and rhetoric gets escalated to a point where violence against an opposing group can be justified by the propagators of the opposing viewpoints and what once was civil disagreement and a matter of different perspectives on an issue become open hostility between the groups that form out of the disagreement. The problem that we have in America is that no one knows the truth anymore. No one knows the reality of their own world. People would rather believe in entertaining conspiracy theories and misguided but politically appealing views on the world than the facts of their own existence. There is absolute truth. There is a particular way the world works that is an inescapable fact of life. The problem is that when a country comes to the pinnacle of decadence, where the majority of the population's basic needs are met in excess, beyond what they actually need, and the population has access to a motherload of information, ideas, theories, and perspectives, where there are hundreds, if not thousands, of sources on every particular major and minor issue facing the nation, people get complacent and easily led astray. With this information overload, the truth is fogged and muddled in opinion, and opinion is fogged and muddled in deception. The best way to maintain control of a group of people is to keep them fighting amongst themselves, and the best way to conquer a nation is to use its own principles against itself to get it's populace to tear itself apart over issues that if they formed a united effort, they almost always can come to a peaceful resolution to. A divided group is less of a threat than a united front, and the people who hold the power in this world know this. They also know that it is easy to divide an uneducated and misinformed population.