There is a line in Pepper by the Butthole Surfers that lands almost casually: you never know just how you look through other people’s eyes. The song drifts through arbitrary violence, strange lives, and unresolved fragments, people moving through events that feel coherent from within but unsettling from outside. That line shifts the frame. It is not really about violence at all, but about perspective, about the distance between self-image and external appearance.
America has long lived inside powerful internal mythologies. Freedom, reinvention, self-determination. These ideas have produced extraordinary cultural and technological influence, yet from elsewhere the same system has often appeared harsher, more transactional, and less generous than its narrative suggests. The contrast has become more visible as political conflict begins to resemble institutional self-erosion, weakening the very structures that generate stability, prosperity, and freedom.
Political identity makes this easier. It compresses complexity into belonging and converts uncertainty into anger. Racism is simpler still, providing immediate cohesion through opposition. These are efficient mechanisms. Once activated, people experience alignment as autonomy, and the technological environment amplifies this, rewarding outrage, reinforcing division, and stabilising identities through repetition.
The result is a strange inversion. What feels like strength locally can look like fragility from elsewhere. Cohesion formed through conflict corrodes the conditions that sustain it. And so the line in Pepper lingers: you never know just how you look through other people’s eyes. Nations, like people, rarely see themselves clearly.
Daedelus Kite 