Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Diversity is a real thing, and this country, even this world, by embracing diversity we have become irrevocably divided, which will inevitably lead to some kind of civil war; but modern technology means it doesn’t have to be the shooting kind across physical borders. Instead, what seems to come out of an old Star Trek episode; the concept of a virtual civil war is possible; where people stay where they are but live separately. If we’re not going to have a heterogeneous society like we had in the past, then we can have virtual homogeneous societies ignoring each other. We already watch different news, attend different sports, eat at different restaurants, drink different coffee, listen to different music, etc. We live as multiple different peoples on the same piece of ground, and our phones know the difference so the infrastructure exists to tell us what stores we can go into: Democrat, Republican, whatever? We could extend the separation even further to have our own elected officials and laws. It doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be a war going on, just that nobody would get hurt.

It would still technically be a civil war because people would be bickering online, and there would be constant conflict on how shared resources should be divided. The biggest problem with the idea isn’t the technology, but ideology; those who embrace liberty would have no problem, but egalitarians attach mystical guarantees & obligations to people just for being alive, so they would demand that the citizens from another virtual society take care of everyone, regardless of who’s responsible, just like they insist now; and force would be required to stop them. It’s ironic that the major problem with a virtual civil war is that it takes violence to sort things out.