by lo_zamoyski | 2025-06-20 14:34:02+00:00
"Loneliness" and "invisibility" focus on effects rather than causes.

Liberal hyperindividualism understands human beings as atomized units that enter into transactional relationships only. (Collectivism commits the opposite error of atomism by dissolving the person into a tyrannical amorphous social soup, likewise rendering persons disposable, but for the "greater good of society" instead of the "greater good of the self".) But the problem is that human beings are social animals, and our humanity is realized and actualized in our relations with other persons. Atomism dehumanizes us.

This liberalism is what we sleepily embraced a couple of centuries ago in parts of the West, but the consequences of such choices can take decades if not centuries to fully materialize. So as liberalism has wound through the traditional social fabric and institutions of the world — like family and community life — it has, over time, eroded those institutions and brought the world more in line with what was always there in liberalism. The famous "neutrality" of liberalism is anything but, and this presumption of its neutrality and thus what's taken to be its obvious correctness is the source of its power to erode. When something enters into a disagreement with liberal postulates, then by definition, that something must give way to those liberal postulates. They quietly determine and police what is taken to be normal, and what's more, from this position of presumed neutrality, as contradictions emerge, it automatically "wins" and thus penetrates every more deeply into traditional institutions until those institutions have effectively withered away.

W.r.t. the first example given in the article, notice the delivery guy's desire for a personal connection with the person he's delivering to. What's that all about? Sure, in small towns where everyone knows everyone, we might know the mailman who's been making the same rounds for 30 years and he might know us, but in any polity of macroscopic size combined with the churn among delivery people and the residents moving in and out of neighborhoods, this is never going to happen. It's a weird expectation on those grounds alone. The world is too much in flux, too transitional.

Of course, some people may lack basic civility (the usual "hello, thank you, have a nice day", things I reflexively say when addressing those serving me in these kinds of jobs). What is the cause of this boorish lack of basic incivility? Either bad manners, or a lack of humanity on the person lacking them. But we're not talking about bad manners.

Boorish behavior and misplaced small village mentality aside, the reason it might bother the delivery person this much might just be that he lacks a social base himself and is looking for substitutes in all the wrong places. And that would make sense: why would this person be any different than the people he delivers to? The difference might be that people in relatively stable corporate jobs, for example, might find some kind of weak surrogate for social stability and community in their workplace.

Community needs a reason for its existence. There must be a reason for people to be together. A family has in this sense the strongest justified bonds of community, surviving all sorts of life events and changes. It is no mistake that it has been the basis for all the other forms of community we enter into, voluntary and intentional, or involuntary. That is why liberal hyperindividualism's final battle is with the family. It is the last remaining obstacle to the fully "liberated" atomic self. But liberalism's notions of what constitutes authentic freedom are flawed, and so we pursue with zeal our own misery. The answer to collectivist tyranny is not atomistic sterility.