I have enjoyed WaitButWhy articles in the past but with this new series the author seems to have spent a huge amount of time, energy and words coming up with ideas that aren't that new. I keep skimming through them waiting to find the big point.
The best parts I could find that addresses this are in the conclusion...
> Maybe instead of focusing on how politically active the most extreme people are, we should be asking ourselves why those who hold “more complex views” have become so inactive.
This seems like a very good question. To me, the article pointed out plenty of reasons for serious concern about the way the winds are currently blowing, yet in my experience the typical response to this perspective is a collective yawn. Perhaps the author takes it too much for for granted that readers will intuitively recognize the risks that come along with this sort of climate, or maybe he's still just laying ground for something to come later.
> When I told people I was planning to write a post about society, and the way people are acting, and the way the media is acting, and the way the government is acting, and the way everyone else is acting, people kept saying the same thing to me: Don’t do it. Don’t touch it. Write about something else. Anything else. It’s just not worth it. It hit me that what I really needed to write about was that—about why it’s perilous to write about society.
This also seems interesting, and seems consistent with my observations. People of all political stripes seem to absolutely love anything that gives reasons to hate on their respective out-group, but any suggestion that there's plenty of guilt to go around seems to get a much chillier reception. Of course, "everyone knows this" - but how many of those who "know this" also have the ability to detect this behavior in themselves, in real-time, when the topic is not the abstract nature of this human behavior (as in this thread), but rather an object level discussion about a specific culture-war matter? Next time you encounter such a thread on HN, pay attention for the behaviors described by the author, and judge for yourself.
> It hit me that what I really needed to write about was that—about why it’s perilous to write about society. I ended up going with some combination of both of these things: society’s current situation and why it’s an especially bad idea for me to write about it—and how those two things are related. This chapter focused on the first item: society’s current situation. But the second item—about how incredibly ill-advised it currently is to write about that situation—is the item we need to look hardest at. That’s where we’ll go in the penultimate chapter of The Story of Us.
It sounds like he has more to say on the matter, hopefully future installments get more into ideas of what people can do at the individual level.