Jack,
A brave outlook, but there are some deeper causes to the effects of the social atomization permeating our whole culture, not just those on the outside and fringes.
Very basically, we are nodes in a network and what connects the nodes is a medium. In our world, the primary medium is money. As such, it functions as a contract, with one side an asset and the other a debt, but we experience it as quantified hope and try saving and storing it, thus treating it as a commodity, to mine from society.
As a contract, it makes a very effective and necessary medium of exchange, in a mass society, but as a store, it is destructive of social health, as every asset eventually has to be backed by a debt. Necessitating the creation of ever greater mountains of debt, to back this illusion of abstract wealth.
In the body, blood is the medium and fat is the store. Would a docter confuse the two, like economists trying telling us that money is both medium of exchange and store of value?
This medium is then run as private enterprise, with a serious profit motive, yet it is a necessary public utility, like that other medium of roads.
As the executive and regulatory system of society, government functions as the central nervous system, while finance functions as the circulation system.
Once upon a time, government originated as private enterprise, first as chieftains and elders, then formalized as kings and courts. When it eventually proved ineffective, as monarchs lost sight of the fact it is a two way street, that they served a function to society, in order to be served by it, they were usurped. Now finance is having their, ‘Let them eat cake’ moment. It’s like the heart telling the hands and feet they don’t need so much blood and should work harder for what they do get.
So when the network of the community is denigrated, as we are taught to be individuals, allowing banking to mediate most relationships, it is like the movie, The Matrix, with people as batteries, to power a control system and the society becomes emaciated. Then there is even less incentive to network outside our closest groups.
If society functioned as a coherent and healthy whole, with value being stored in the community and environment, not individually saved in the banking system, there would be far more communication. Not that it would all be love and kisses, but there wouldn’t be so much pain and isolation to project onto those who are simply different from us.
