I love it, Jessica, another one of your simply brilliant pieces. The best part is that you provide a glimpse of yourself and make the rest of us look at ourselves and our thinking, allowing us to see more of the bigger picture.

As you know, political systems is my default subject matter, and reading your article made me think about my coming to the United States in the mid nineties, where reality as I knew it was definitively not the same.

Climate change was already acknowledged in public as a scientific fact in the 1980s in Europe - at least in the public realm where I was able to absorb this information. The nut cases were not mainstream and therefore not talked about much. I remember from the 70s how there was talk about the climate being out of whack, but the fear was then that earth was moving toward cooling and a new ice age. I am talking main stream scientific understanding and this presenting a very honest view on things. No (bi)polarization.

So, I was extremely surprised to arrive in the US in the nineties where climate change was not considered a fact. Flabbergasted is the word.

This is just one of the reasons I see the United States as an entity in the world that is proactively keeping the world at a lower level of progress than possible (and why I was thinking about it reading your article). US culture is off, and then particularly about itself. Bi-polar.

Here comes my political-system reasoning to explain this: the empowering voting system is not based on the truth but on successfully tipping the balance. Spin is masterly played in the US, so one of the two poles wins out.

The larger structural reality is that a generic game of divide-and-conquer is played out. First, have an opponent to compete with (this is already a cultural aspect that is not necessary and many cultures do not do this). Then, make sure that people have doubts about that other side any which way you can. Throw sand in that opponent's machine. Don’t work together collectively unless there is a common enemy. But do work for your boss or go it alone. Distrust your government.

I never heard about the race to space. I just looked at the facts, and the Russians were first in space and the Statelings were first on the moon. I was not part of US culture when those facts happened, so I never received a (dis)colored picture about it. Perhaps to make their point, the Russians never even put a person on the moon. Even for them, or so it seems from my perspective, there was no race, just an accomplishment.

The point of this example is to show another example how US culture is based on competition, and not on the truth per se. Instead of solid grounds, the basic floor of the USA is a swimming pool. You swim or you drown. That is of course not the natural state of the world, because the truth is the natural state of the world and not competition of what should be considered the truth.

We do not have a political system in which the truth is discussed; we have a political system in which the others are put down in name of the win. Does one political party do that more than the other? Yes, I think so. But we can find that behavior drenched throughout society. There is no floor here, just a swimming pool.

Thank you for your excellent article. Keep doing what you are doing.