The more divided we become, the more absurd it all starts to look.
Not because the problems aren’t real — they are — but because the patterns are. The outrage cycles. The villains rotate. The language escalates. And yet the outcomes remain stubbornly the same: more anger, less trust, and very little that resembles progress.
This isn’t a new problem. It’s an old one we’ve dressed up with better technology.
Gene Roddenberry understood this more than half a century ago. In the 1968 “Star Trek” episode “Day of the Dove,” the Federation and the Klingons find themselves trapped in a relentless conflict aboard the Enterprise. Each side is convinced the other is irredeemably hostile. Every insult escalates. Every clash justifies the next. Cooperation feels not only impossible, but immoral.
Then comes the reveal: an alien entity is feeding on their hatred. The fighting isn’t the point — it’s the fuel. As long as anger flows, the creature thrives.
The moment the crews stop fighting, it weakens. When they refuse to escalate, it dies.
Roddenberry wasn’t writing about aliens. He was writing about us.
Modern America doesn’t suffer from a shortage of disagreement. We suffer from a surplus of amplification — much of it built into the incentives of modern media, politics, and online life, regardless of ideology. Our divisions are constantly nudged, magnified, monetized, and weaponized by systems that profit from keeping us emotionally engaged and perpetually agitated. Politics has become performance. The media has become incentive engineering. Social platforms reward outrage with visibility and punish restraint with obscurity.
The result is a population that feels constantly under threat — yet oddly unable to name who actually benefits from the chaos.
Most people don’t wake up wanting conflict. They want stability, dignity, and a sense that the rules still matter. But outrage is contagious. Once it becomes habitual, it starts to feel like principle. We mistake emotional intensity for moral clarity. We confuse tribal loyalty with conviction.
And so we fight each other — over symbols, language, and exaggerated caricatures — while the underlying structures that profit from dysfunction remain largely untouched.
Like the crews in “Day of the Dove,” we are encouraged to believe that standing down is weakness. Refusing to escalate is surrender. That restraint is betrayal. The system depends on that belief. It cannot function if too many people pause long enough to ask a simple question: Who benefits from this never-ending fight?
Roddenberry’s answer wasn’t forced unity or naïve consensus. It was something far more unsettling: withdrawal.
The refusal to be endlessly provoked.
The refusal to let every disagreement become an existential crisis.
The refusal to confuse outrage with agency.
When the characters aboard the Enterprise stop feeding the conflict, the parasite starves. No speeches. No grand reforms. Just the quiet realization that rage, once denied reinforcement, loses its power.
That lesson hasn’t aged a day.
We don’t need fewer opinions. We need fewer systems that profit from turning disagreement into identity warfare. Until then, we will keep mistaking noise for truth and combat for courage—convinced we’re fighting each other, while something else quietly feeds.
Roddenberry warned us.
We just forgot the episode.
Joe Palaggi is a writer and historian whose work sits at the crossroads of theology, politics, and American civic culture. He writes about the moral and historical forces that shape our national identity and the challenges of a polarized age. He wrote this colum for The Fulcrum, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news platform covering efforts to fix our governing systems.
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