According to Bloomberg and other news outlets, the U.S. is in an economic expansion, and despite warnings of recession, some are saying it’s going to continue. No matter the mumurations of the “sayers of doom and nay”, there’s a chance we’ll continue in the current trend… and things may stay as they are, politically speaking.

I won’t get into taking sides, right here. What fascinates me about it is that, no matter who gets into office, all the divisions between Right and Left, Rich and Poor, One Side and The Other… well, it’s all been very good for business. And I believe it’s driven a ton of economic expansion over the past several years — maybe longer.

Yes, definitely longer. Ever since we got invested in proving how different we are from others, whether politically or economically or culturally or gender-wise (the heightened gender stuff has been ever more intensely marketed to us, ever since mass media showed up – more on that later).

Anyway, I’m going to take a contrarian attitude to whether this is a good or bad thing. It depends who you talk to, of course, but I can’t say it’s a terrible thing, all across the board.

Certainly, it’s common, these days, to stress over the separations we encounter on a daily basis. Political, cultural, economic… Strife in the land. Families torn apart. Communities at each others’ throats. Members of one party pitted against each other on Twitter, Facebook, and whatever medium you care to consider.

I’ve heard great wailing and gnashing of teeth, over the past years, as people have voiced concerns over the USA being a divided nation. And a city divided against itself can’t stand… or something like that.

And yet, all the divisions spawn a whole lot of activity. Defining identities. Giving people a sense of belonging. Boosting manufacture and sales of partisan swag. Boosting sales of partisan viewpoints. Driving the ascendancy of social outlets like  Facebook and Twitter (especially Twitter). And that’s been a huge boon for a lot of groups — pretty much everybody, if you think about it.

Looking back over the past 50 years (which seems to be the timeframe before which, according to some, everything in this country was so much better than it is now), there’s been a steady erosion of identity, a steady erosion of communities. We’re more mobile, now, which means we don’t put down roots in just one place. We spend an awful lot of time online, which has no location and displaces us from our present situation. Roles have changed. Economics have changed. Jobs have changed. Everything’s changed — especially the things that used to give us a sense of purpose and belonging.

How to restore that sense we’ve since lost? It’s not hard. Identify an Enemy (ideas or people or policies or whatever) and gather your like-minded tribe members in defiance of it. That’s how we’ve been doing it since time immemorial.

In giving individuals a new sense of belonging, the economy has taken off. I would even hazard to say that it’s taken off in certain sectors precisely because of the huge surge in adversarial tribalism.

Whole television networks continue to cash in, ushering in a new golden age of bias-laden monetization. It’s as true of the Left, as it is of the Right. And there are plenty of other Progressive or Ultra-Conservative media outlets that have benefited as well. Media in general has made out like bandits, as they’ve targeted specific segments of the population with their particular “narrative”. From one channel to the next, you’d never guess we were living in the same country. It’s like the media channels have spun up parallel universes, where they’ve cornered the market on that particular version of How Things Are, and everybody can go off and do their thing, as long as they don’t encroach on their narrative.

And we’ve eaten it up.

Absolutely, positively. The human system thrives on separation. Our tribes gather new life and purpose, when we know who we aren’t, we intensify the threat from outsiders, and we pit ourselves collectively against that common enemy.

Our own personal understanding of how and where we fit in the world benefit, as well. After all, we now have a tribe that supports and reinforces our perspectives in self-fulfilling promises of, “You’re okay, but they’re not, and that makes you better than them”.

This is not to diminish the importance of that point of view. We absolutely, positively crave a sense of who we are, and that sense is driven to a considerable extent by who we aren’t. It’s just how we’re built, and passing judgment on it doesn’t help us understand how it works. Still, I’d bet $50 you’re arguing with me in your head, right now, because a part of you needs to believe I’m wrong – and you’re right.

Bottom line, we need our separations, and that’s exactly what we’ve got, these days. In abundance. And all the while, the news and media outlets that serve our own individual version of reality and reinforce our rightness… well, they’re going quite well for themselves. Numbers are up. They’ve cracked the code to staying afloat in a world of disruptive technologies and information sources. And as they continue to do well, our own separate versions of reality give us a continued sense of stability and safety. Because they’re telling us we’re right. And others are wrong. And we can rest assured that we’re not the only ones who think what we think.

As problematic as all the schisms and conflict in our current American society may be, they’re part and parcel of who we are and where we are at this point in time. Fighting them and judging them as “bad for humanity” won’t offer us any insight into their true nature. And that certainly won’t let us work constructively with them.

Yeah, it would be nice to be able to just talk to each other as human beings. But there’s a whole lot more to be gained personally and socially (and there’s a lot more money to be made) from keeping us separate and at each others’ throats.