Perhaps it is that single mindedness is best when it’s also capable of seeing things from both sides. What’s more: I’d say we live in a society where people most often achieve singlemindedness by rendering themselves incapable of understanding what the other side is even saying.

It is as John Stuart Mill commented in ON LIBERTY: He who knows only his own side of an argument knows little of that.

This, to my mind, has been the prevailing Zeitgeist, profoundly accelerated during the years of Trump. Mark: not *because* of Trump, but because of an encompassing elite and media culture of universal deceit. Rendering people incapable of understanding one another is, as the story of the Tower of Babel demonstrates, a surefire way to prevent them from making common cause and storming Heaven. What’s more, we are happy to play along, pursuing our own singleminded illiteracy as if it makes us better people.

Consider the algorithms as God, consigning us all to different nations and languages, each subject to our subordinate deity, as if this lesser god were God. While the militant faction of each of these nations means to elevate their local deity to the Absolute, claiming for themselves the mantle of Historical Vanguard. The Strong Horse. The People.

It would be fittingly ironic if the machines took over just as humanity descended into an endless argument about who, really, speaks for “We, the People”.