Atomized

The Washington Post has reported that social isolation is on the rise in the United States.

A quarter of Americans say they have no one with whom they can discuss personal troubles, more than double the number who were similarly isolated in 1985. Overall, the number of people Americans have in their closest circle of confidants has dropped from around three to about two.

This figure includes spouses and other family members. That’s right, one person in does not have a single relationship with sufficient depth and warmth, not a wife or husband, a brother, sister, parent, or friend. The average person only has two, yes, two people in whom they can confide.

Whereas nearly three-quarters of people in 1985 reported they had a friend in whom they could confide, only half in 2004 said they could count on such support. The number of people who said they counted a neighbor as a confidant dropped by more than half, from about 19 percent to about 8 percent.

Those are sad statistics. Only half of people can even count a single friend and fewer than one in twelve has a close neighbor they can count as a confidant.

What is to blame for this collapse our social network? Television? The erosion of the extended family? Is it the proliferation of numerous but shallow online relationships? Video games and ipods? Suburbia? A culture of consumption? The mobility made possible by the modern world? Most likely, the answer is all of the above, plus other, more abstract reasons.

Read the rest: http://theopinionator.com/selfsufficiency/atomized1.html

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
Ah, look at all the lonely people...

Some the best of Sir Paul

A friend of mine said that when he got home after working a double shift and saw the weeds in
his yard in the dark that he cried. We don't spend enough time there to establish connections.

That's one reason we don't have political parties controlled by people but by money.

And this atomization has been conditioned into us, over generations.

The paradox of privacy
by Underground Panther in the Sky
Why do we desire to have separate houses, separate rooms? Separate tables when we go to restaurants, separate cars?

This desire for a wall of separation between other people is a recent innovation. It is a thing created to manage people and discourage solidarity...

Our culture's need for privacy is manufactured. A social control experiment gone awry. It is the result of a long trend of state sponsored social conditioning.

Private institutions and courts in the late nineteenth century and federal agencies in the twentieth took a particular form of family autonomy and privacy, present only in a minority of the population, and worked to spread it among the rest of the population — even if it meant violating families that violated the prim "norms" these agencies set as examples for society to conform to. These agencies were unwilling to accept diversity in family or community life. Maintaining a particular "norm" the "nuclear " family is at the heart of a lot of social control in this country and a cause of inequality.

Early proponents of properness, privacy and domesticity turned to state power to create public and private coercion to induce family and community conformity. They intruded upon people's home life and privacy to enforce their own vision of what 'proper' home life and social divisions must be. And this intrusion into privacy, in the name of privacy, went beyond obvious examples like the enforced segregation of blacks and whites in the south. Families were torn apart literally, if they were poor, different, or had children that were not properly submissive to authority, or prim enough in their manners.

http://www.unknownnews.net/a0509.html#upits505

is it's too damn hot here to socialize w/the neighbors much, coupled w/that expression 'good fences make good neighbors'.

I want a fence in part of my yard because I am pagan,
and I would like privacy for outdoor rituals..
But..The front yard I want open and accessible.I don't mind neighbor kids running across the yard, to get to their friends house,neighbors running by,kids playing basketball next door and the ball goes in my yard,I don't care..(I consider challenging them to a game of horse but I know they'd kick my ass and I would NEVER hear the end of it).. And my backyard would be accessible except for certain pagan events. And I don't have an issue if I see a neighbor outside sniffing my BBQ and inviting him over for some and offering him a cold glass of ice tea..

protect my garden, to dissuade from any lawsuits as a result of someone drowning in our moderate pool, and yes, for privacy.
My neighbors are quite friendly, but up to a point. Otherwise, everyone is a bit guarded with their privacy.
We've lived here for 11 years, not a lifetime. Not many of the neighbors have, and those that have are getting up there.

Does anyone else have memories of a community of open backyards? We used to play across backyards in our block and since we knew all of our neighbors there were only a couple of properties that were off-limits.

Of course, in those days kids didn't make "play dates" they just showed up at their friends' houses on bikes and kids tooled around all day with little or no supervision. Everyone knew all the neighbors.

Nowadays, if my kids go out without supervision (and god forbid without a bike helmet) someone would probably call the cops.

all 5 of us kids were free to roam. Not anymore in most places, sadly.

and this isolation will just drive it further and faster along. Isolated people are much easier to dominate.

How do we reverse this trend? It's not like human nature has changed or that people don't still crave close personal relationships. The first thing that comes to my mind is to build more livable communities instead of the modern development, which is strip malls and subdivisions as far as the eye can see.