Geoff Boucher, an associate professor of literary studies at Deakin University in Australia who has studied hundreds of works of dystopian fiction, said that such dark-themed art “doesn’t just reflect the mood; it helps to create the mood, too.”

Then again, maybe earbuds are to blame.

“Everybody has their own separate media, and they can sit in the living room with headphones on and not talk to each other,” said Dowell Myers, a professor emeritus of policy, planning and demography at the University of Southern California who has studied the social compact. “That’s as atomized as it can get, I think.”

Still, there is a precedent for our current moment — and a comeback, Putnam said. The last Gilded Age, in the late 1800s, also had enormous concentrations of wealth, technological advancements and a self-centered sense of social Darwinism.

But he argued that those Americans found their way back to a more unified country, in part by solving issues at a local level, where citizens have more trust in their leaders. And they relied on younger people to find solutions.

Americans led their country to “an upswing,” as he described it in a 2020 book.

“They,” he said, “fixed it.”

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