We Are Each Other’s Future

We must learn to live together as brothers, or perish together as fools

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect

Chief Seattle

Community is the only heaven we can reasonably look forward to, the only real and substantial salvation.

Harry Howells Horton

As the reality of the Unwanted Rematch sinks in, it is tempting for those who style themselves liberals to put everything else on the back burner, in order to march to battle against the Mango Mussolini. After all, we must save the US from the howling gales of fascism once again, all other priorities be damned (for now).

But as obvious as this seems, our fight is not actually with Trump himself, or even with Trumpists in general. As mentioned in an earlier post, it is a mistake to view supporters of the former President as cultists, a popular liberal trope. Rather, we’re talking about a much deeper issue, one of identity formation and community maintenance through dualistic antagonism. We are in a situation where tens of millions of Americans now view reality completely through the lens of conflict only, with all aspects of life (political, economic, cultural, moral) slotted into that framework.

Now, conflict with ‘out-groups’ is an ancient and powerful way to form identity and solidify community bonds. Our social primate and tribal heritages have baked small-scale insularity and suspicion of outsiders into our brains and DNA. It is the easy, natural, short-cut way to be a human being existing in a group. But like many things (sugar, fat, substantial leisure-time), what was once functional in low-density, forager-hunter settings becomes toxic in modern civilization. In giant industrial nation-states, where people are intimately linked in sprawling, far-flung economic relationships with strangers by design and necessity, our primordial distrust of others can easily become unmoored from practical utility, and then leveraged by the powerful to their own benefit. Liberalism has been dragged into this conflict motif, with the resulting weirdness of an intolerance for those not seen as tolerant as you are.

As capitalism has fractured American society, polarization has reconstituted community into quasi-real, mostly virtual formats, where people intensely engage their new enemies in largely symbolic arenas (social media, elections, strategic protests and counter-protests at select, high-profile events). We are living in this bizarre kabuki playing field of national culture, where we let polarization and conflict drive and filter everything that happens: wars, inflation, politics, education, immigration, bathroom signs. How can we combat this drift towards antagonistic dualism? What is driving it?

Alone

The average household size in the United States is now 2.5. Around 30% of households are just single individuals. Typical job turnover rate is roughly four years. While most Americans still live relatively near to where they grew up, around 2.5% of the population moves out of state each year. The average person moves 12 times in their lifetime, and the mover rate is 9% a year.

The typical American does not have a lot of close friends. Around 8% report having no close friends at all, while 53% have between one and four. In a Surgeon General report in 2023, only 16% of Americans reported feeling very attached to their local community. That same report found that lack of social connection increases the risk of premature death as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. In general, loneliness and social isolation increase the risk of premature death by 26–29%. Only 39% of American adults feel very connected to others, and 50% experience loneliness on a regular basis.

This kind of loneliness and isolation is not sustainable. Something must fill the void. And what fills it? First, consumerism itself, where people engage in therapeutic buying to make themselves feel better. This is a kind of arsonist-firefighter phenomenon, where capitalism itself has wrecked local community institutions, and then heroically rides in with its baubles and distractions to ease the pain. Second, the virtual communities of social media and partisan information sources fill the vacuum. These quasi-communities are really subsets of consumer capitalism, what I have described in earlier posts as the products of the Polarization Industrial Complex. Pundits and journalists call these ‘echo chambers,’ but that is a weak description. The polarized virtual communities that are manufactured for us are highly sophisticated, meticulously curated, and psychologically potent. And they have very specific purposes, none of which help us see the true challenges ahead.

What’s On Offer?

These things that we consume to fill the void created by isolation and loneliness do not ultimately work, because they are not satisfying the actual need, which is the social primate desire for close physical intimacy with a much larger group of people. Our energies are thus co-opted, shunted off to serve other masters. Consumption feeds capitalism. Polarization fuels the electioneering business, which keeps the overall economic system in service to the desires of the plutocrats. Careerism keeps us blind to the changing nature of work, technology, and the relentless decline of labor value. And most important of all, everything in our current setup keeps us forever kicking the ecological can down the road, thinking that some miracle will swoop in to save the day: a Green New Deal, some infinite energy source, a moral reawakening of pure Christian values, electric cars.

The easy but destructive identity formation and community maintenance that come via dualistic conflict keep us devoted to utterly unrealistic visions of the future. Conservatives are going full-out for an all-white, all-straight, all-Christian society, where the evils of coastal and urban liberalism somehow disappear. It’s not exactly clear how that happens, considering that 83% of the American population lives in urban areas. It seems as if conservatives would prefer that exiting illegal immigrants take all of their liberal friends along with them as they leave the country, a kind of Rapture that occurs completely on the temporal plane, leaving the coasts and cities to be reconstituted along the lines of Branson or Dollywood.

For their part, liberals are hoping for a Green Lake Wobegon, where the battles for civil rights, women’s rights, and LGBTQ rights somehow fuse with a Green New Deal, creating a world where everyone has an awesome education and a ‘job of the future,’ which then magically saves the planet. In this scenario, as a mirror image of the conservative dream, it’s not exactly certain what happens to rural, conservative folks. I assume they would all be converted to liberalism via more enlightened information and education, or they could remain as boutique conservatives to be viewed at farmers markets and autumn festivals.

Instead: Embodied Utopias

As mentioned in my last post, there can really be no “victory” in this conflict-centric scheme, as the full disappearance of the Other just cannot happen in the actual world. The futures on offer from each side, as described above, are delusional at best, and accelerants for collapse at worst. So once again, the seemingly “utopian” vision of creating Bigger Home Bases, as a completely new household format and social form, turns out to be the only realistic answer to our predicament.

I won’t belabor the mechanics of how I think BHBs could be jumpstarted through a model community pilot, Universal Basic Income, and Modern Money Theory. You can poke through many earlier posts to get that detail. But what I will do here is to briefly touch on what having a larger home-base household format (from 50–150 people, preferably on the high end of that) could do for us:

• Cure the epidemic of loneliness, obviously through intense interaction with a large group of intimates
• Rapidly and substantially reduce consumption and the need for transportation, which would then sharply reduce overall impact on the environment
• Provide financial stability for people, while shrinking participation in the outside workforce (which is necessary to shrink the economy, itself a prerequisite for rescuing the planet)
• Re-connect the generations, as child and elder-care are brought in-house, with all age groups living together
• Expand people’s practical skills, as previously-purchased products and services are brought in-house as much as possible (plumbing, electrical work, general building and maintenance)
• BHBs could serve as small business incubators, with much more freedom to experiment, due to the robust backstop of UBI and collective financial consolidation
• Provide a workable setting for the important work of reducing population, as communities could engage in collective child rearing without having to maximize reproduction for everyone
• Improved physical health, as more food could be produced in-house, reducing consumption of fast food and other processed junk
• More active lifestyles, with more opportunities for exciting engagement with others
• Reduced social media consumption, as people spend their time with flesh and blood people (improved mental health would result with reduced social media consumption, as all studies suggest)
• Increased tolerance and appreciation of diversity, coming not from ideology but from actual physical interaction with different types of people

What we’re talking about here is replacing the toxic identity formation that is coming out of the Polarization Industrial Complex, and replacing it with a creative, pro-active, and concrete tactic for social bonding and community building, something based on actual interpersonal cooperation, mutual support, and physical closeness and intimacy.

In short, we have forgotten how to be primates, and are now imprisoned in iron cages of ideology and conflict. There is a reason why every conflict-based method of identity formation has to make efforts to segregate people physically, whether it’s keeping men and women away from each other, or not allowing “races” to mix, or separating out the holy ones from the unclean. The physical separation makes dehumanization and demonization easier, and feeds the divisive, delusional dreams of states, religions, and ideologies.

We must literally reconnect with other, physically, in order to break the stranglehold that these poisonous systems have on us, if we are have any hope of avoiding the catastrophic collapse of our entire edifice of existence. Our detachment from each other is paired with our separation from nature itself, and it is these twin disunions that fuel the destructive unsustainability of consumer industrial civilization.

Reconnecting ourselves to each other (literally) is a prerequisite for doing the massive work of halting the damage we’re doing to the planet, fixing and healing the damage already done, and crafting our next way of living on Earth.

Cover image: “TI’ets’ats’in” (Working Together), by Lianne Marie Leda Charlie

Originally published at http://entropolitanblog.com on March 16, 2024.