When you wander into politics you lose credibility with me, it’s called Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Respectfully, I am not sure this is a fair characterization. It’s gotten to the point, I think, where “TDS” is becoming a reflexive response to be used against anyone who criticizes Trump’s moral, intellectual, and leadership failings, though I’m sure that is not what is happening here. But just to belabor the point:
People still talk about Nixon’s crimes, do they have “Nixon Derangement Syndrome”? If Twitter existed 90 years ago, would supporters of the Weimar Republic be accused of having “HDS”?
I think we need to acknowledge the fact that, every once in awhile, modern societies become susceptible to various personality cults and political strongmen who have the potential to lead those societies into very dark and regressive times. And when we have a recent President who, among other faults, deliberately stoked the first non-peaceful transfer of power in history, I think it’s critical that we actually take a careful look at how we got here, what kind of damage was inflicted, and how to move forward as a society.
(Plus, I always thought “Trump Derangement Syndrome” was always a bit of a odd deflection, and is much more descriptive of the derangement we saw on January 6th when Trump’s personality cult showed up to storm the capitol because they uncritically believed Trump’s unfounded lies about a stolen election, despite repeatedly failing to make the case in the courts.)
Way back in the late 90s, Ken wrote a book called Boomeritis, and it is unbelievable how prescient it was. Not only in its spot-on description of pathological Green, much of which has thoroughly infected the left (I am sure you would agree with me here) — but also in its prediction that, as soon as Green became the status quo, Red and Amber would quickly win the game. As Ken wrote it back then, it was due to the sorts of flatland relativism coming out of postmodernism academia, which essentially means that Green would get completely trapped in the “paradox of tolerance” that would make it impossible for the modern world to regulate pre-modern impulses.
What Ken didn’t see at the time, however, was that the “aperspetival madness” he described would actually come from our media technologies themselves. In the mid-2010s we fully made the transition into the postmodern age, and suddenly the majority of our discourse was taking place on postmodern platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. Platforms where the loudest and most repeated narratives would become accepted as “truth”, with no way to ascertain the “truthfulness” of the narrator, and very few people caring as long as it fits their preexisting biases. Which makes these platforms exceptionally vulnerable to social engineering, disinformation, gaslighting, trolling, etc. These are all platforms that are built upon both broken Green principles (especially radical decentralization) as well as broken Orange principles (especially the emphasis on chasing quarterly profit at all costs) — and the broken Orange further exacerbates the broken Green.
And while we were making this transition from modern media platforms into postmodern media platforms in the mid 2010’s, there were a great many who had a very difficult time fending off these rising tides of disinformation and propaganda that were beginning to flood the system (which, let’s remember, was Steve Bannon’s explicitly-stated strategy.) In other words, a great many people were trying to figure out how to get out of the “paradox of tolerance” trap — how to enforce basic epistemic boundaries in this increasingly aperspectivally-mad world. And no one has really ever figured that out. Because when we are on postmodern platforms, everything slides frictionlessly — which is how these efforts to not tolerate intolerance quickly grew into accusations of censorship, authoritarianism, first amendment violations, etc. It was an effort to deal with the rising popularity of things like Qanon, Alex Jones, Plandemic, stolen elections, etc., which then became a narrative of “bullying half the population”. That narrative got repeated very loudly and very frequently, and it seems the Overton window shifted once again. Banning bullies becomes an act of bullying. Paradox of tolerance.
All of this, by the way, is why I have always so adamantly refused to characterize Twitter as anything resembling a “public commons”. It is nothing like a public commons, which by definition belongs to the people. It is a privately-owned, for-profit, algorithmically-driven, postmodern media platform that has proven to be easily disrupted by the whims of bored billionaire personas.
Which is why I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with Twitter banning Trump, considering he used that very same platform to radicalize people and erode their trust in our democratic processes, resulting in the violence of January 6th.
The internet, on the other hand, is the public commons, which is why I continue to see net neutrality as such a critical issue. I don’t think someone like Alex Jones (or Donald Trump for that matter) are in any way entitled to a platform like Twitter, and banning them from the platform is in no way a violation of their first amendment rights (I’d kick Alex Jones off of this forum too, if he was here).
However, they are entitled to having a presence somewhere on the internet, where people can seek them out if they want to.
When Green becomes the status quo, Red and Amber wins, because the discernment required to identify and contain them gets lost in the shattered mirror of aperspectival madness.
Which means that we, as integralists, have to be very careful. We need to remain rightfully critical of the sorts of green excesses that create problems like these in the first place, but also keeping an eye on our own allergies that would cause us to be overly permissive of destructive and accelerating Red and Amber excesses. Because again, they will win this game. In many ways they already are.
Which brings me to the part of your comment I very much agree with — we are absolutely ripe for these sorts of “x superhero” projections. We are now living in some weird postmodern Ayn Rand nightmare where people place their faith in billionaires and industrialists and real estate moguls to lead their grassroots populist revolution, while convincing themselves they are somehow being “anti-establishment”. But billionaires are definitionally not anti-establishment — they are the ones who are corrupting and undermining our trust in our institutions in the first place, while trying to capitalize on the very same mistrust they created.
Which is another thing we have to be careful about as integralists. As I like to say, one of the cool things about being integral, is you get to be pro-establishment and punk rock at the same time 
And I definitely agree that perceptions (and a great many mis-perceptions) of power are driving the culture wars on both the left and the right. But I don’t think this is the sole cause of our current dystopia. I think these social media platforms are themselves the primary source — information now moves in a very different way, which irrevocably changes our perception of the world (and each other) as pockets of reality begin to splinter away from each other, and we lose any semblance of a shared epistemology among us. Which makes me pretty thoroughly aligned with Jonathan Haidt’s observations, actually.
Also, we’ve been priming ourselves culturally for this. As someone who loves comic books, and comic book movies, I have to admit that my favorite comic book writer (who himself hates comic books), Alan Moore, makes a damn good point that there is a fairly straight line leading from superhero fantasies to fascism.
I actually think the rise of these superhero movies was itself due to the rampant insecurities and anxieties of the post-9/11 world, an era where increasingly complex “wicked problems” began to present themselves that ordinary people can barely understand let alone begin to solve. It is very similar to the way Superman originally came into popularity: we dropped nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, unleashing a new kind of terror into human consciousness, and the reaction of our collective unconscious was to lionize a character who could literally walk on the sun (while simultaneously reinforcing the “all-American values that would assuage us of any residual guilt we may be feeling about those mushroom clouds).
So in many ways, the rise of the 21st century superhero was a natural response to the existential threats of our time, just as it was in the mid 20th-century. However, Moore’s point is that the result of this newly dominant cultural gestalt is that we are essentially being programmed to accept this feeling of powerlessness, and therefore constantly looking for the next Tony Stark to come along and solve our problems (Stark, funny enough, was himself modeled on Ayn Rand’s beliefs, and was created by Stan Lee as a challenge to get his audience to love a character they would normally feel repulsed by.) And as it happens, this “Tony Stark” archetype is precisely what is now being projected onto Elon Musk.
So I 100% agree that we feel “trapped”, as you say, and powerless. And so much of our cultural output these days almost seems designed to reinforce those feelings. Which is a very dangerous place for a population to be, as it opens the door for all sorts of narcissists, con men, and snake oil charlatans to win over the masses and leave a trail of carnage in their wake.
Sorry for all the paragraphs — if you can’t tell, I love talking about this stuff! And it’s always a challenge, simultaneously holding an integral political “center”, and then seeing how far away from that center our actual lived politics are, and how integral centrism is quite different than “halfway between two parties, whatever they may be”. These threads get my brain all fired up 
Happy thanksgiving guys! I am grateful for all of you.