The United States is currently locked in an information conflict that resembles civil war but is in no necessary way destined to become one. The field of battle is structural dissonance—egos colliding, proxies maneuvering, puppets performing. These forces can devolve into kinetic violence, yes, but they need not. The danger lies in leadership without wisdom: the inability to see that pressing toward confrontation is ruinous not just for adversaries but for the system itself. What’s missing is precisely the kind of wisdom that does not sell, the unmarketable quality that vanishes in a culture where greed, arrogance, and selfishness dominate the field. Their ascendance is loud but transient.
Conflict, left unchecked, tends to spread like fire. But the more subtle threat is systemic collapse under its own weight. Communications grow top-heavy, complexity accumulates, and the system purges itself by reverting to a primitive state—nativism, simplicity, blunt power. In that turn, all the hype about artificial intelligence and technological salvation reveals itself as self-replication: not emancipation, only endless rinse and repeat, a cycle that can never close. Closure itself is a flawed dream. Logic and mathematics are unbounded; no epistemic or technical system can secure itself against infinity.
We live in a time when the cosmos opens before us, when knowledge and complexity stretch beyond imagination. Yet the games we play remain tribal and brutish—property, wealth, theft, exploitation, bullying. The real innovation of artificial intelligence has not been intelligence at all, but the exposure of how easily stupidity becomes profitable, how ignorance masquerades as virtue because it sells faster, scales easier, produces more short-term gain. This is the existential problem: a planet bound to systems that blind as they bind, that accelerate fracture by turning our worst habits into value. The war America fights within itself is not an isolated crisis; it is the mirror in which all of us must confront what happens when civilization mistakes turbulence for strength and profit for wisdom.
Daedelus Kite 