If you’re an American living in a modern urban or high-suburban atomized environment, then the closest thing you’ll ever experience to an actual tightly-knit chthonic community is probably…high school. That’s what things look like, when you have a bunch of randomly-selected people bound to each other for years on end. You have a world completely dominated by small-scale social politics.
Do you want that? Are you sure?
Hint: if you feel sad and alone and low-status, think about what it would be like for a lot of people who knew you personally to be invested in keeping you that way. Say what you want about the atomized hordes on the other side of the computer screen, it’s not that hard to blow them off. Finding sympathetic souls is a genuine trial, I wish to God that it were easier, but…things could be so much worse.
(In fairness, some of high school’s weirdness comes from the fact that there are no real stakes to anything, apart from academic success, for anyone. Obviously, in a more “normal” tight-knit chthonic society, lots of things have real stakes. In some ways that’s a real improvement. In other ways it’s pure horror fuel.)
So I think a better parallel to what people are imagining is university? Modestly selected people bound together for some purpose with high exit costs and substantial autonomy, but still significant default community.
But if your counterexample to people saying they want tighter knit communities is to say, you have no idea what you want, remember that part of your life where you sure you had to deal with a bunch of random bullshit, but you hung out with a bunch of close life long friends, among other more casual but friendly acquaintances, every day without having to put any effort into coordination, imagine something like that.
Well, give me some exit rights, meaningful work instead of busy work, and then yeah I’d like to see my best friends casually every day without trying.
University communities are great. The best communities I’ve ever seen came out of university settings, one way or another. (There were also a whole lot of terrible ones, but, well, Sturgeon’s Law.)
And seeing your best friends a lot is incredibly great. Far too few people make that a priority, at least in my approximate demographic / culture / whatever, and it causes a lot of misery.
But selection matters, and the availability of exit matters too. And the people bemoaning atomization aren’t saying “choose your friends wisely and bond to them closely” – they’re pushing for a return to the days of villages and powerful families, the days when you were born into an obligate network of relationships.
Which can seem tempting, I imagine, when finding good connections seems really hard (which it often is!) and the myths are telling you that you could just have those things handed to you.
So I’m saying – if you liked high school, if the tradeoffs there actually seemed worth it to you while you were experiencing them, then maybe the standard anti-atomization position actually makes sense. Otherwise you’d be wise to keep looking.
The point of the One Thousand Villages series of posts was actually to create cities that consist of tiling university campuses.
Notably, if you lived in one of them and didn’t like it, you could just move to another one. So if you were counting me under hardcore anti-atomization or something, you might want to recalibrate.
(On the other and, I’m MitigatedChaos, so I may not be highly representative of the broader group.)
Your positions, as I understand them, are not even close to the concept cluster at which I’m trying to gesture.