AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
What is the United States, considered as a group agent, doing right now? What is its goal, its purpose?
Perhaps that is the wrong question to ask. The country is not really very well modeled by taking it as a single agent, especially at a time of unprecedented and deep polarization. It's not doing anything; instead, two broad political/cultural coaltions are fighting it out among many fronts.
It's like asking "what was the goal of WWII?". It didn't have one, it was instead a process of conflicting goals figuring out which would dominate.
Not to spend too much time describing a political situation that everyone is familiar with: it can't be denied that the country is being destroying, at least, in the form we are used to. Destroying or subverting its major instutitions (from Columbia to the CDC), fucking up its economy, destroying its ability to do scientific research or mangage disasters... sorry, of course I could go on. Today Trump addressed the UN and destroyed what little remained of our international reputation by babbling like a senile drunk.
So – all these invaluable and irreplaceable things are being destroyed. What will be left? The people and economies of the US aren't going to just vanish of course. Something will remain and it may be called by the same name, but it will be different. It may be an authoritarian hellhole, or it may throw off the current disease and recover, but it will never regain its full strength. The nation that won WWII, went to the moon, and on occasion promoted democracy and human rights, that dominated the world for a good century – gone and dead.
It's easier to think that Trump is destroying the country, or the fascist movement that has solidified around him. That's true enough, but the fact remains is that the US is a democracy of sorts. A flawed and imperfect one, yet we still in some sense get to choose our leaders. We chose badly and are paying the price. We are responsible. The fact that Trump was re-elected to a second term makes this point stronger – we choose with full knowledge of what we were getting.
If you saw a human behaving like the US – destroying its capabilities, stumbling around from one self-destructive act to another – you'd think they were drunk, depressed or under the spell of some form of insanity.
The question is why, what motivates a country to off itself like that? None of it was remotely necessary – the old US had plenty of problems, but also plenty of problem-solving ability.
Also on the road to self-destruction: my alternate country
As a Jew I have the extra grim spectacle of my other country (Israel) also driving itself off a cliff. Maybe it was always going there but I used to have some illusions about it, some attachments. Stupid I guess, should have listened to my anarchist side and not gotten comfortable with any state.
It wasn't suicide, it was...murder
There's the theory that Trump is controlled by Putin and doing his best to pursue his goal of weakening and destabilizing the US. That would make it closer to murder than suicide I guess. Still, it wouldn't be so easy if the country wasn't so eager to do it.