‘Feral American’
‘I make you cover your face like MF Doom. Sean Price. I’m a MF Goon. What the fuck you looking at?'
A domesticated cat can survive in the wild.
Remove comfort. Remove routine. Remove protection. Instinct carries it forward. It hunts. It defends. It reacts without reflection.
Instinct is enough for animals.
Human societies are supposed to operate on something higher. Not because we are morally superior creatures, but because complexity demands restraint. Law. Shared standards. Long-term thinking. The ability to subordinate impulse to principle.
When a population begins operating primarily on instinct, it does not become strong.
It becomes feral.
Feral does not mean chaotic. It means reflexive.
It means loyalty before law.
Reaction before restraint.
Territory before truth.
The first sign of feral drift is selective standards.
Corruption in an opposing faction is proof of decay. Corruption in a favored faction is minimized, reframed, justified. The behavior does not change. The standard does.
That shift is instinct.
Instinct protects its own.
Principle disciplines its own.
We are conditioned toward instinct daily. The modern media environment compresses complexity into binary conflict. Every issue is framed as two sides locked in existential combat. With us or against us. Moral or immoral. Savior or villain.
Two visible forces.
But when attention is locked horizontally, it rarely looks vertically.
Divide and conquer is not a slogan. It is a structural strategy. Keep factions focused on each other and they will not examine the system that benefits from the fight.
This does not require secret meetings or hidden councils. It requires predictable human psychology.
Media systems profit from outrage. Outrage sustains engagement. Engagement sustains revenue.
Political fundraising thrives on threat perception. Fear drives donation.
Corporate interests adapt to whichever faction governs. Profit insulates itself from ideology.
Institutional continuity survives electoral cycles because systems outlast personalities.
While citizens fight sideways, incentives operate upward.
The more tribal the population becomes, the easier it is to manage.
Predictable anger is steerable.
When loyalty fuses with identity, scrutiny weakens. When scrutiny weakens, accountability weakens. When accountability weakens, corruption stabilizes.
American exceptionalism complicates this drift.
At its healthiest, it meant aspiring to higher standards. At its most distorted, it becomes moral exemption — the belief that our actions are justified because we are us.
But no nation is exempt from consequence.
Selective enforcement erodes trust. Weak trust weakens institutions. Weak institutions increase instability.
That instability is intensified by economic pressure.
Poverty is not just a statistic. It is a psychological force.
When economic strain increases, stress increases. Cognitive bandwidth narrows. Long-term thinking declines. Risk tolerance rises. Crime increases across societies not because populations become evil, but because survival calculus shifts.
Scarcity amplifies instinct.
Under economic pressure, tribal identity strengthens. People cluster for security. Loyalty hardens. Standards bend in the name of protection.
This is how a new archetype forms.
The Feral American.
Not uneducated. Not irrational.
Hardened.
Distrustful.
Reactive.
Willing to excuse excess if it shields their tribe.
More concerned with dominance than discipline.
This shift is not theoretical. It is adaptive.
When institutions lose credibility and economic security weakens, instinct fills the vacuum.
Divide and conquer thrives in that vacuum.
The more pressure applied — economic, cultural, informational — the more instinct dominates. The more instinct dominates, the less principle restrains behavior.
Crime rises under poverty because desperation shortens perspective. Desperation increases volatility. Volatility destabilizes communities.
Instability then becomes justification for stronger rhetoric, stronger division, stronger tribal alignment.
The loop tightens.
It is not necessary to name factions.
The principle is enough.
When a population cannot apply shared standards evenly — especially to its own — regression has begun.
This regression does not look dramatic at first.
It looks like fatigue.
Like cynicism.
Like quiet rationalizations.
Like selective outrage.
Like the inability to say, “My side is wrong.”
Once that sentence becomes unspeakable, instinct has overtaken restraint.
Civilizations do not collapse because they disagree.
They erode because they abandon shared discipline.
Animals survive by instinct.
Complex societies require something more.
If economic pressure continues, if tribal conditioning deepens, if vertical incentives continue to profit from horizontal conflict, a new type of American will solidify.
Not through ideology.
Through adaptation.
The Feral American is not a caricature. It is a pressure response.
And pressure is increasing.
This is not a call to panic.
It is an observation.
It is what it is.
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(written with the assistance of ChatGPT)
