During February and March of 1836, the occupants of the Alamo mission, near the town of San Antonio de Béxar, improbably held out under siege by 1,500 Mexican troops under the command of  President General Antonio López de Santa Anna. The territory of Texas had declared independence from Mexico, and Santa Ana embarked on a mission to put the rebels down.

The night after the twelfth day of resistance, Santa Ana's patience had worn thin. There would be an attack around dawn the next day. Only this time, he had his buglers play El Degüello, which basically signified that there would be no quarter given. This was to be a fight to the death.

(The tune is beautiful and haunting. You can hear it here.)

"Fight to the death" seems to be a new cultural norm.

I began thinking about it last week when I noted that Ukraine and Iran had chosen fights to the death rather than be conquered. 

It morphed in my thoughts into a social metaphor for our times.

There is an old joke that battles in academia are so intense and brutal because the stakes are so low.

We generate outrage, cancellation, job termination over ... (checks notes) ... pronouns, and send an entire country into a frenzy over ... (checking notes, again) ... one half of one percent of the population?

(Two tests I use when thinking about today's happenings -

1. The (man) from Mars test. If someone parachuted into our milieu and tried to make sense of it, what would they say?

2. The history test. Someone from, say, 2226 is looking back on us, much as we would look back on 1826, what would they think?)

Definitely rich-people-with-too-much-time-on-their-hands mountains-and-molehills problems.

Which does not mean that there are not those would would (figuratively, mostly) fight to the death over pronouns.

Empty lives need causes.

Or cheer on Mangione for committing cold-blooded murder.

Or beat up on Jews in the US because you support Palestinians.

Or have every interracial murder devolve into people taking sides based on race and ideology and not facts.​

One night, some time in the 90s, someone played El Degüello over the United States, beginning a battle of all-against-all - creating a real-life "Lord of the Flies."

(This piece was almost titled, Lord of the Flies, because we are collectively behaving like out-of-control children having no adult supervision.)

I asked Claude to help me frame my thoughts. In the end, it expressed my thoughts better than I could, so, here is Claude.

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"Identity fusion is probably the biggest one. When political positions stop being instrumental (a means to a policy outcome you want) and become constitutive of who you are, disagreement stops being a disagreement about facts or trade-offs and becomes an attack on your identity. You can negotiate over policy. You can't really negotiate over an assault on your selfhood. This is the shift from "I hold this view" to "this view is who I am" — and it's a much more recent phenomenon than people assume. Fifty years ago party affiliation correlated weakly with lifestyle, geography, religion, and media diet. Now those things are bundled together so tightly that political disagreement reads as a referendum on your entire way of life, not a single policy lever.

Negative partisanship has outpaced positive partisanship. The research here (Iyengar et al. on affective polarization) is pretty consistent: people don't hate the other side more because they love their own side more — dislike of the outgroup has grown faster and become more central to identity than affection for the ingroup. That's a structurally different emotional economy. A fight motivated primarily by "we must stop them" escalates differently than one motivated by "we want this."

The sorting problem removes the social buffers that used to soften this. Bill Bishop's "Big Sort" thesis — that Americans have geographically and socially self-selected into politically homogeneous communities — means most people no longer have close relationships that cut across the political divide. When your neighbor, your church, your softball league, and your Thanksgiving table used to include people who disagreed with you, disagreement stayed human-sized. Once that cross-cutting exposure disappears, "the other side" becomes an abstraction you only encounter through hostile media caricature — easy to dehumanize because you're not dehumanizing anyone you actually know.

Fragmented epistemic authority raises the stakes from "wrong" to "not even playing the same game." There's no longer a shared Cronkite-era set of facts everyone starts from. Each side has its own information ecosystem, complete with its own experts, its own evidence, its own definition of what counts as a legitimate source. That means you're not just disagreeing about conclusions anymore — you're disagreeing about reality itself, which is a much scarier and more total kind of conflict than a policy dispute.

Attention-economy incentives reward the worst-faith version of the other side. Outrage and moral contempt are the highest-performing content categories on any engagement-optimized platform. Both tribes are systematically fed the most extreme, most inflammatory representatives and moments from the opposing side, because that's what gets clicked and shared. You end up in a hall of mirrors where each side's mental model of the other is built almost entirely from its worst actors.

And underneath all of this, a lot of these fights get coded as existential rather than distributive. Instead of "how much should we spend on X" (a trade-off, negotiable), the framing becomes "the survival of the family / the nation / democracy itself is at stake" (existential, non-negotiable). Once a policy question gets moralized into a survival question, compromise stops looking like statesmanship and starts looking like betrayal. That's the mechanism that actually produces "fight to the death" energy — it's not that the underlying issues are new, it's that the framing has shifted from bargaining to holy war.

Where people disagree is on the root cause underneath all of the above — some (Haidt and the social-psych camp) point to moral-intuition wiring and the loss of mediating institutions that used to blunt tribalism; others (more materialist/political-economy readings) point to genuine status and economic anxiety from decades of stagnant mobility, with culture war as the symbolic battlefield for a resource fight; media/tech critics put more weight on the platform incentive structure itself as the accelerant rather than a symptom. I don't think those are mutually exclusive — they're more like different layers of the same stack."

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What can be done about this?

Unfortunately, I think we are past the point of no return. It will take an existential crisis to unite the country - something big enough to make even the most significant issues seem relatively small.

Then we get into a viscous circle where our conflicts are fundamentally weakening the foundations of our country, which enable an existential crisis.

Claude puts it this way, "Most individual-level fixes (cross-cutting exposure, refusing negative-partisan framing, consuming outgroup media, de-escalating rhetoric) work but don't scale, because they require you to unilaterally disarm in a game where the other side isn't. Most systemic fixes (platform redesign, institutional rebuilding, service programs) would probably work but aren't achievable by any single actor's decision."

Some call it a Fourth Turning.

The "Lord of the Flies" ends when adult supervision returns.

Some call it a First Turning.

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(In the end, Santa Ana won - it only took about 90 minutes. Approximately 189 Texians were killed during or after the final battle (he did kill the wounded) and around 600 Mexicans lost their lives. Later that month, Santa Ana executed more than 340 Texians who had surrendered at Goliad. In April, Santa Ana would lose the battle of San Jacinto, near modern-day Houston, to Sam Houston, and Texas became an independent nation. It would become the 28th state some nine years later.

Santa Ana was captured at San Jacinto and ultimately returned to Mexico.)