Without a real tribe, people are boxing themselves off into faux ones. It's been building for a long time. People don't group themselves by religion because most people don't have one. Traditional fraternal organizations are dwindling. Ladies' groups are fading away.
So people have drawn these weird lines based on consumer goods. They identify themselves by Apple or Android or Linux. Xbox or PlayStation or Switch? Star Wars or Star Trek. Dodge or Chevy or Ford or... Oh, you have a Jeep? You've got to join the Jeep club and have the same stickers and the little hand signals on the road. What do you eat? Or, more importantly, what don't you eat? Join a forum and chat with a community of people who don't eat the same things you don't.
Do you homeschool? What type? There's a forum for every kind where you can isolate yourself. There are forums for people who own Suburbans. Forums for people who prefer Dewalt tools. Forums for people who shop at Aldi.
The closest we come to some actual local community is the NextDoor app and that's mostly people crying over "furbabies" and posting passive-aggressive missives against neighbors who probably aren't even on the app.
It's wearying.
I left Facebook. I joined MeWe. It's so quiet. You only see what people you follow actually post. Not their comments on other people's posts. Or suggested posts or recommended posts. Just little snippets. And it's nice. I was so tired of knowing what everyone thought about everything. Of feeling like I needed to stake a position on every topic.
I'm so disappointed in our Church leadership. I have to actively resist the oozing of those feeling into my faith in God. I feel like the chick from Perelandra when the possessed guy Just Won't Shut Up. Except it's the whole damned world that won't shut up.
I reread Fahrenheit 451 yesterday. I vaguely remember reading it some 20+ years ago in high school. I thought it was far- fetched.
I still think the book burning part is, but the utter loneliness and disconnection in the society is spot on. The superficiality and shallowness of the lives. There's one part when Montag confronts one of his wife's vacuous friends and attacks her three marriages that ended in divorce, suicide, and death in war, her twenty abortions, and her two children that she sends to school 9 out of 10 days so she can ignore them. What an indictment of today.
You’re absolutely right. My millennial daughter observed that the glue holding together my generation was the Cold War and the patriotism that came with it. No matter what, people could pretty much all agree that the USSR was bad. Even if you didn’t talk about it, we all seemed patriotic and on the right side of history (whatever that really means). Other countries benefit from this nationalism, because of their culture, native language, homogeneous food traditions. The USA, however, is mostly an IDEA. It thrived in the Cold War, but it’s hard to keep a nation together without commonalities. When your nation is based in the individual, it’s gonna fracture eventually. In any case, I totally agree, Steve. Really accurate assessment of the situation. Thanks.
Good article. People are bounded by their cognitive and environmental limitations and their decisions are restricted by those strictures but also by choosing the wrong type of thinking (type 1 or 2). It takes a calm rational mind not to look at the shadows in the cave and to apply a methodology and models (or development of new models) to view a phenomenon from multiple view points. However, as social mood becomes more negative and moves away from a positive pole, it becomes more difficult to have conversations that are not reduced to a simple dialectic.
I’m slightly late commenting on this, but I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that the internet creates a hostile environment for discussion of differing viewpoints. For over a year now nearly all political, moral and spiritual discussion has been conducted online - and it’s poisonous.
I think one of the other problems is that lockdowns are really only possible in the internet age. Had this same virus appeared in 1990, governments would have brought out the “keep calm and carry on” posters and pretended nothing was happening. You can only have lockdowns when a significant part of society is run using the internet. So you have governments behaving in a particular way because of the internet. People aren’t allowed to meet in person so interaction is increasingly over the internet, and the economy can run (to a certain point) relying on the internet. And by dint of the confrontational nature of discussion on the internet, everything has become “if you’re not with me you’re against me”.
Without a real tribe, people are boxing themselves off into faux ones. It's been building for a long time. People don't group themselves by religion because most people don't have one. Traditional fraternal organizations are dwindling. Ladies' groups are fading away.
So people have drawn these weird lines based on consumer goods. They identify themselves by Apple or Android or Linux. Xbox or PlayStation or Switch? Star Wars or Star Trek. Dodge or Chevy or Ford or... Oh, you have a Jeep? You've got to join the Jeep club and have the same stickers and the little hand signals on the road. What do you eat? Or, more importantly, what don't you eat? Join a forum and chat with a community of people who don't eat the same things you don't.
Do you homeschool? What type? There's a forum for every kind where you can isolate yourself. There are forums for people who own Suburbans. Forums for people who prefer Dewalt tools. Forums for people who shop at Aldi.
The closest we come to some actual local community is the NextDoor app and that's mostly people crying over "furbabies" and posting passive-aggressive missives against neighbors who probably aren't even on the app.
It's wearying.
I left Facebook. I joined MeWe. It's so quiet. You only see what people you follow actually post. Not their comments on other people's posts. Or suggested posts or recommended posts. Just little snippets. And it's nice. I was so tired of knowing what everyone thought about everything. Of feeling like I needed to stake a position on every topic.
I'm so disappointed in our Church leadership. I have to actively resist the oozing of those feeling into my faith in God. I feel like the chick from Perelandra when the possessed guy Just Won't Shut Up. Except it's the whole damned world that won't shut up.
I loved this whole comment, Michelle.
I reread Fahrenheit 451 yesterday. I vaguely remember reading it some 20+ years ago in high school. I thought it was far- fetched.
I still think the book burning part is, but the utter loneliness and disconnection in the society is spot on. The superficiality and shallowness of the lives. There's one part when Montag confronts one of his wife's vacuous friends and attacks her three marriages that ended in divorce, suicide, and death in war, her twenty abortions, and her two children that she sends to school 9 out of 10 days so she can ignore them. What an indictment of today.
You’re absolutely right. My millennial daughter observed that the glue holding together my generation was the Cold War and the patriotism that came with it. No matter what, people could pretty much all agree that the USSR was bad. Even if you didn’t talk about it, we all seemed patriotic and on the right side of history (whatever that really means). Other countries benefit from this nationalism, because of their culture, native language, homogeneous food traditions. The USA, however, is mostly an IDEA. It thrived in the Cold War, but it’s hard to keep a nation together without commonalities. When your nation is based in the individual, it’s gonna fracture eventually. In any case, I totally agree, Steve. Really accurate assessment of the situation. Thanks.
We really are living through a Tower of Babel epoch, as your comment perfectly captures.
Good article. People are bounded by their cognitive and environmental limitations and their decisions are restricted by those strictures but also by choosing the wrong type of thinking (type 1 or 2). It takes a calm rational mind not to look at the shadows in the cave and to apply a methodology and models (or development of new models) to view a phenomenon from multiple view points. However, as social mood becomes more negative and moves away from a positive pole, it becomes more difficult to have conversations that are not reduced to a simple dialectic.
I’m slightly late commenting on this, but I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that the internet creates a hostile environment for discussion of differing viewpoints. For over a year now nearly all political, moral and spiritual discussion has been conducted online - and it’s poisonous.
I think one of the other problems is that lockdowns are really only possible in the internet age. Had this same virus appeared in 1990, governments would have brought out the “keep calm and carry on” posters and pretended nothing was happening. You can only have lockdowns when a significant part of society is run using the internet. So you have governments behaving in a particular way because of the internet. People aren’t allowed to meet in person so interaction is increasingly over the internet, and the economy can run (to a certain point) relying on the internet. And by dint of the confrontational nature of discussion on the internet, everything has become “if you’re not with me you’re against me”.