#social atomization

[moniquill]

I think one of the disconnects between people learning about 4B for the first time since the election and people who recognize that as a movement it has problematic elements (transphobia, homophobia, authoritarianism, purity policing) is that we live in entirely different fucking universes.

I, a leftist living in a blue state, am vaguely appalled at the idea of pigeon-holing all men based on the actions of the kind of men who voted from Trump... because I never had those men in my life in the first place. I've never had one of those men be brave enough to say to my face that he's a trump voter. I cannot really comprehend the idea of a grown-ass adult who until this very moment has actually been living in the Shirley Jackson/Virginia Woolfe dystopia that was presented to me in Women's Studies in college 20 years ago. I do not know even one woman in my life under the age of 75 who doesn't have a job (unless it's for disability reasons) - I come from a social class where you start working under the table/on the side at elementary school age and you're expected to get a job that pays wages as soon as you turn 16.

In the universe I've lived my life in, OF COURSE I wouldn't sleep with a conservative guy! Discussions of politics and stances on key issues are things that happen BEFORE the first date. "I found out he held [a conservative view]" is a relationship-terminating dealbreaker every single time.

The men that I know, that I'm friends with, even the ones that I'm related to are comrades - lots of them are some flavor of queer, the majority of them are nonwhite, they are capable of being platonic friends with women.

I'm 41 years old and have had zero pregnancies, and no one CLOSE to me, whose opinions I actually respect and care about, has ever given me meaningful push-back about it. The 'Oh you'll change your mind' comments have always come from peripheral people like coworkers and teachers (and I dropped off sharply when I passed age 30)

I was never A Desirable Woman (tm) during the age of social media. I was 33 when Tiktok was created. I did not live in this panopticon, and cannot relate. All I can do is A: Believe the testimony of the women who have had these experiences and B: Advise them on ways that I have avoided those experiences.

"Don't be cruel or hateful to entire categories of human beings based on the way that they were born." does not translate in my head to "You are required to coddle and cater to those people." At all. I don't really understand how anyone makes that leap.

How the fuck have you been in the cage for so long?

[boof-chamber]

so, apparently the Veterans Crisis Line has not been responding to text msgs in weeks and this Rapid Response account is ASKING THIS PERSON TO GIVE THEIR NAME AND CONTACT INFO

i should not have to explain what is wrong with this - don’t make me do it

this is not surprising by the way. your previous crisis hotlines exist - not for ppl in crisis - but for everyone else who wants to perform as a caring compassionate person without actually having to give a shit. it’s disgusting.

hotlines are bad. ppl need your humanity. hotlines PREVENT them from getting that.

[morlock-holmes]

As basically as I can put it, the rationalist, rat-adj, and trad conservative positions on social life all essentially boil down to this:

"You see, once upon a time the country was governed by socially powerful but largely involuntary social bonds. These were very hard to break out of, and often even authoritarian, but they created social cohesion.

"As time went on, those involuntary, authoritarian bonds were dissolved, leaving room for the creation of more personalized bonds, which are often smaller and less legible than the old involuntary bonds, but also give the people more freedom.

"There's an inevitable trade-off between the one kind of bond and the other, so we must decide which is more important."

And the only argument is whether the replacement of one with the other is good or bad.

My position is that the best evidence I can find shows that no such tradeoff actually occurred and that there is no necessary correlation between the two kinds of bonds.

[arcticdementor]

Link.

[boof-chamber]

we happen upon a fellow human being, beat down, tormented, suffering in agony, and we think, “poor thing, hope someone helps them out,” then go on with our day as normal. it’s not our responsibility to help or even to care. the mere expectation that we should care for and about anyone we’re not legally obligated to is seen as exceedingly unfair. caring for and about others is a burden, thankless drudgery, a job someone else should get paid to do for us, someone who is qualified with the proper training and credentials.

those who find themselves in desperate need of others to care for and about them will eventually come to find out that it’s no one’s job to help them or care. so no one does. but everyone they encounter is fully confident that there’s someone, somewhere, whose job it is to do something to help. this unshakable faith that the markets provide an adequate substitute for human social connection allows them to go on with their day, free from any burdensome sense of responsibility toward their fellow human being.

[boof-chamber]

[boof-chamber]

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[morlock-holmes]

I'll try to say what I mean again because this is something that kind of really frustrates me in rat-adj circles.

"Atomized Individualism" is one of those pop philosophy terms of art which changes meaning depending on who uses it, but I feel like I do actually have a pretty good handle on what rat-adj people tend to mean, and it's something like this:

In ye olden times, survival depended on a series of informal but coercive relationships, with examples being things like churches, families, and perhaps clan or feudal lord or what have you.

These systems were informal in the sense that the people at the top of the hierarchy had a large degree of discretion in how they applied the rules, and coercive in the sense that individual members policed each other and often used force to prevent people from leaving or contradicting the understood leaders.

Examples that have survived into the modern day might be, say, churches; The church might, for example, offer volunteer babysitting services, or operate a homeless shelter, but they might also pressure you, overtly or covertly, to profess the proper religion or else they will stop offering you those services and turn you out on your own.

Atomized individualism is the process by which this coercive structure is replaced with a better one; rather than being forced to kowtow to cults of personality in order to fulfill his basic needs, the modern, Atomized man instead relies on a combination of bureaucratized systems and a sort of bustling market of voluntary, low-control personal connections.

The welfare office, the thought goes, will not ask you to prove you are Christian to get welfare; your boss doesn't care how you act as long as the work gets done. And what social needs can't be met by work or government will be met by a large, competitive marketplace of ideas, fostering the growth of voluntary, low-control groups as replacements for the high-control groups that older societies would have forced you into contact with.

I'm not saying that the people who profess this idea are pollyannas; they are fully capable of recognizing that, say, in practice your boss may subtly or openly discriminate against people of the "wrong" religion; but he is more heavily enjoined from employing such discrimination than he would have been in, say, the 17th century.

The thing is, if we use that model of "atomized individualism" then Putnam presents strong evidence that atomized individualist practices declined precipitously from 1970 to 2000.

In fact, rather then an increase in atomized individualism in the rat-adj sense, he documented something that is almost, but not quite, the opposite.

Basically, nearly all forms of what we might broadly call socializing declined in that period of time.

What's worse, family and church, which are used as the quintessential high control group which social atomization protects us from, weathered the slump Putnam documents better then lower-control competitors. Unions, Social Clubs and Card Clubs collapsed precipitously during that time, while church membership remained much more stable.

Like, Church attendance might have declined in that period, but Union membership declined even more, leaving the religious bloc, for example, more powerful as a political force than the unions.

Instead of a world where people meet their social needs through a series of voluntary, low-control groups, the story is more that, from 1970-2000, Americans became more isolated, but less Atomized (In the sense described above). Rather than a plethora of voluntary associations arising to meet the social needs once met by religion and family, we see a world where people sort of resign themselves to not having their social needs met, while low-control groups that could meet those needs decline precipitously in membership and the high-control groups hang on by the skin of their teeth.

So while those high-control groups may have, in many ways, been reduced in power over that time period, the later in that period you get the less competition family or church have when it comes to actually providing for social needs.

If we value atomization in the sense I outlined above, I think it's worth looking at that and having a vocabulary to talk about it!

The internet will have changed things, and if anybody is interested in reviving the social club as a force in communities, it's rats, but disappointingly I'm not aware of a 2020 follow-up to Bowling Alone so it's very hard to say what the actual trends are from 2000-2020.

I guess I get frustrated when people say, "Social Atomization is good and we shouldn't go backwards" because for the first fifteen years of my life, there's very strong evidence that we already went substantially backwards.