| It's not lost, just no longer necessary for survival. Also, bad communities fail. They should be allowed to fail. Until recently, individuals needed to be part of some sort of kinship group to get their needs met and to survive. To communicate with anyone in near real time you had to be close by. We have managed to engineer a society where individuals can survive "on their own" - basically outside their kinship groups. This is possible thanks to globe-spanning networks of communication and trade. Kinship groups are great, but many of them have painful costs. Some 60 percent of Americans, for example, suffered an adverse childhood experience in kinship groups. Some of these could not be avoided - like a loved one's untimely death. Most of these negative experiences were intent or neglect by kinship group members. If your early experiences of kinship groups are negative, you are less likely to seek out other human connection. You have learned that your kinship group is not reliable. If people genetically close to you cannot be relied on, then why should it be different for strangers? The connections you do find tend to be focused on your interests, and those people don't need to be nearby for you to have a strong connection. But you still have your prior experiences keeping you skeptical of human reliability. Personally, I sympathize with everyone who is sad about communities becoming fragmented. I think, though, that if these communities were as supportive, inclusive, or beneficial as they imagine themselves to be this would not be a problem. Bad communities should be allowed to fail. That is probably what is happening here. |
The psychological argument is that it is necessary for survival — that a society that has long taken underlying healthy behaviours for granted is discovering that it's losing what defines society itself.
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