The disintegration of social mind

Abstract

Trumpism in the United States, like other populist eruptions around the world, demonstrates that fundamental values bequeathed by the Enlightenment are far less secure in the West than has been assumed. Esteem for rationality and objective knowledge and respect for individual liberty has been weakened by the dissolution of society into intransigent factions. The forsaking of core principles that have for many generations served as a common ground for Western civilization has fragmented Western society into seemingly irreconcilable camps, no longer subject to a shared communal mind. How can it happen that a society governed by a long-established shared social mind, summarily splinters into very unlike-minded camps clearly under the sway of discrepant principles? Is the disintegration of ideas and the dissolution of mind an inevitable consequence of proliferating mental content, perhaps even built-in intellectual entropy? Guided by Peirce’s semiotics and philosophy of mind, and using the Trump-provoked shake-up in US social and political life as an illustrative example of a profound cultural schism, I will consider some possible structural causes of increasing sectarianism and will explore the semiotic conditions that would account for the disintegration of a social mind.