Ben Sasse - Them - Why We Hate Each Other

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To the Fremont Area Community Foundation, Fremont Rotary Club, and Fremont Kiwanis Club, whichalong with groups just like them in hometowns across our nationdaily demonstrate how to love a neighbor. And to my parents for raising me to appreciate community, and to Melissa, who is doing the same for our three rowdies.

Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations.

They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies... , but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association...

As soon as several of the inhabitants of the United States have taken up an opinion or a feeling which they wish to promote in the world... , they combine. From that moment they are no longer isolated men, but a power seen from afar...

If men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve.

Alexis de Tocqueville , Democracy in America

If they ever figure out time travel, I have my list ready.

There are certain moments in history I would love to see and hear. Socrates teaching in the marketplace in Athens. Luther nailing his ninety-five theses to the door at Wittenberg. General Cornwallis surrendering to the upstart American rebels at Yorktown. Harriet Tubman whispering across the fence to a soon-to-be-freed slave for the first time. There are certain moments that changed history forever.

Im not supposed to say that, as a historian. The job of the historian is usually to be a spoilsport. It says so right there on the back of our Professional Historian identification card. Im supposed to point out that these moments are few and far between, that most of human history has been pretty ho-hum, that the odds that the times we happened to be born into are genuinely world-changing are... slim, and that the only reason we think our times are special is because were narcissists, every last one of us. Lots of historians are now even certain the great moments werent all that great: Socrates was just another wise guy trying to scrape together a buck, et cetera. Its a profession of party-poopers.

But here, in this book, Id like to propose that we really do, in fact, live during one of the most extraordinary moments in human history. Were living through a revolution that is going to utterly transform the ways we live and work. Were living through an upheaval that will arguably dwarf the disruption our nation experienced a century and a half ago, when we morphed from an agricultural society into an industrial one. Were living through an unprecedented explosion of innovation.

Just take a quick inventory of whats in your pocket: namely, a supercomputer.

At this moment, youre connected to 2 billion people worldwide through Facebookover one-fourth of the population of the planet. Have a question for someone in Argentina? Four hundred years ago, a message from the king of Spain to his royal governors in the Americas took months to arrive. Today, it takes seconds. (In fact, the king of Spain is on Twitter: @CasaReal.)

Do you need turn-by-turn directions through Timbuktu? No problem. (And youll need themIve been there, and the sand is constantly in your eyesamong other places.) You can even have those directions read to you in Morgan Freemans glorious voice. But if driving is too much of a hassle, you can just order a ride from your phone (Phil is arriving now!), and use real-time satellite imagery to give him tips on dodging police on your journey.

Are the in-laws driving you crazy? You can catch the seventh inning from Wrigley under the table. (Just nod politely every now and then.)

Its all there, and more, in your hand.

At the height of the Cold War, MIT had big contracts from the Department of Defense to help manage our targeting exercises to prepare for a nuclear exchange with the Soviets. The computers they createdat the time, the most sophisticated machines ever inventedwere the size of a gymnasium. And they were 2 percent as useful as the average iPhone or Android. (Additional fun fact: theres more computing power in the average digital washing machine today than was used to put the first man on the moon in 1969.)

Weve become accustomed to instantaneous answers and moment-to-moment connectedness. But the digital revolution that is making it possible was unthinkable just fifty years ago.

Were the richest, most comfortable, most connected people in human history.

And yet...

In the midst of extraordinary prosperity, were also living through a crisis. Our communities are collapsing, and people are feeling more isolated, adrift, and purposeless than ever before.

Were not talking much about this crisis. Nonetheless, we all have a sense that somethings not right. Our marriages arent satisfying, our kids seem hypnotized. We quietly feel that adulthood has been a disappointment. We sense that somewhere along the way, everything went off the rails.

***

We have a crisis in this nation, and it has nothing to do with regulatory reform or marginal tax rates. This book is not going to be about politics. (Sorry to disappoint.) Its about something deeper and more meaningful. Something a little harder to quantify but a lot more personal.

Despite the astonishing medical advances and technological leaps of recent years, average life span is in decline in America for the third year in a row. This is the first time our nation has had even a two-year drop in life expectancy since 1962when the cause was an influenza epidemic. Normally, declines in life expectancy are due to something big like thata war, or the return of a dormant disease.

But whats the big thing going on in America now? Whats killing all these people?

The 2016 data point to three culprits: Alzheimers, suicides, and unintentional injuriesa category that includes drug and alcohol related deaths. Two years ago, 63,632 people died of overdoses. Thats 11,000 more than the previous year, and its more than the number of Americans killed during the entire twenty-year Vietnam War. Its almost twice the number killed in automobile accidents annually, which had been the leading American killer for decades. In 2016, there were 45,000 suicides, a thirty-year highand the sobering climb shows no signs of abating: the percentage of young people hospitalized for suicidal thoughts and actions has doubled over the past decade.