One thing missing from our society is community
People dop not want to get involved with thier neighbors.We live in seperate houses in seperated lives.We go to work and when we get home we isolate.
I wrote something about this
I wrote the article myself so I'm posting it..
The paradox of privacy
by Underground Panther in the Sky May 5, 2003
Why do we desire to have separate houses, separate rooms? Separate tables when we go to restaurants, separate cars?
This desire for a wall of separation between other people is a recent innovation. It is a thing created to manage people and discourage solidarity...
Our culture's need for privacy is manufactured. A social control experiment gone awry. It is the result of a long trend of state sponsored social conditioning.
Private institutions and courts in the late nineteenth century and federal agencies in the twentieth took a particular form of family autonomy and privacy, present only in a minority of the population, and worked to spread it among the rest of the population — even if it meant violating families that violated the prim "norms" these agencies set as examples for society to conform to. These agencies were unwilling to accept diversity in family or community life. Maintaining a particular "norm" the "nuclear " family is at the heart of a lot of social control in this country and a cause of inequality.
Early proponents of properness, privacy and domesticity turned to state power to create public and private coercion to induce family and community conformity. They intruded upon people's home life and privacy to enforce their own vision of what 'proper' home life and social divisions must be. And this intrusion into privacy, in the name of privacy, went beyond obvious examples like the enforced segregation of blacks and whites in the south. Families were torn apart literally, if they were poor, different, or had children that were not properly submissive to authority, or prim enough in their manners. The more courts and officials institutionalized their 'ideal' of childhood and parental responsibility, the more inclined they were to literally institutionalize people and stigmatize functions that did not fit into their idealized nuclear family models.
If a family failed to create 'adequate' personal privacy between each other, failed to achieve economic independence, or didn't obey 'proper' gender roles, state institutions took over the household.. Children were sent to "reform schools" or foster care if their mother didn't look "normal" enough for the state's extreme puritanical definitions of a "fit" mother.
Around the Civil War era, these proponents of "privacy" and Victorian mores had two main goals of social policy. They were to "free the nuclear family from it's formal entanglements with kin and neighbors" (The Way We Never Were, pp. 128) and to make diverse communities uniform. This was disrespectful to the humanity of the people it affected. This was a program designed to slowly undo the trusted kin and friendship connections of people to others in their own communities and to end communal childrearing.
The subjugation of families to public authority did not stem from a collectivist or socialist agenda but from an attempt to build individualistic definitions of private responsibility. State Institutions fostered a form of personal responsibility that was geared to a competitive and structurally unequal economic order. For example, schools taught children that "helping your friends is cheating." This had the effect of making people struggle harder to hold their own, and to glorify and mystify notions of independence. And it introduced more stress, isolation, exhaustion, and loneliness. This kind of manipulation served the business people and church crowd that ran the state back then very well.
This grand design for social separation was the brainchild of tweaking Victorian churchmen and greedy insecure businessmen who found close-knit communities and solidarity of people who were less than wealthy or not too prim, who were socializing in urban tenements or the street, upsetting and threatening. To the upper crusties the people out on the street, particularly the poor and immigrants talking to each other, were too much for their paranoid constitutions to bear. They grew hysterical and referred to simple socializing of the wrong classes of people as an addiction — much like crack cocaine today.
The Victorian marms and control freaks set about making laws to isolate people and turn them into symbols of social deviance. Even the US Commissioner of Labor, Charles Neill, declared in 1905: "There must be a separate house and as far as possible separate rooms, so that in an early period of life... (marketers say get kids conditioned before age 7 and they'll be brand loyal). So the ideas of rights to property, the right to things, to privacy may be instilled. " (The Way We Never Were, pp. 136)
Soon after that came the loitering laws, limits on where people could gather, limits on how many people could gather, and what they could or could not do together. Zoning laws and building codes arose to reinforce people's separation from kin and community. Stores, churches and institutions gobbled up living space, suburban sprawl came to be a formidable force to exploit close habitation of different kinds of people by economic and distance segregation into individual living spaces that separated people from contact with each other and communal social spaces even further. Soon the demands of time, housekeeping, and hobbies began to segregate people's lives into compartments just like the suburban landscape and the commute to go anywhere reflected many lonely rooms in their homes...
We turned into a nation of strangers communicating to each other via church- or state-created identities in the media.
When the state butts in to separate us, divide us, to manipulate us with divisive labels, it creates more reaction and hostility between people. When the media, politicians, and community leaders use divisive labels and divisive issues to undermine solidarity and community cooperation, people seek identification and group loyalty to fill the empty hole left by the systematic erosion of our natural human solidarity and sense of relatedness to diversity that is part of every community. The identities offered in the social sphere, often tend to separate us from each other and ourselves all the more.
And the intervention of the state to enforce religious legislation, or to pass overly restrictive or unnecessary laws, becomes a poor intrusive substitute for better solutions that truly can correct the damage done by previous state, church, or corporate intrusion into our privacy.
Also, consider the ambiguity towards privacy within the religious right, today. In the past, Victorians enforced separation, isolation, and the undermining of community and solidarity especially among the lower classes and immigrants. They violated privacy to enforce their view of privacy. In comparison, Modern religious conservatives are concerned about the state intervening to stop them from beating their kids.
James Dobson, and Jerry Regier, Jeb Bush's appointee to the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF), for example, are suspicious of any state regulation against child abuse. They want the right to beat their children or spank them. Regier wrote back in 1988, "The Bible is not at all uncertain about the value of discipline, 'Although you smite him with the rod, he will not die. Smite him with the rod… save the soul. '" At that time Regier was a member of the Christian Fundamentalist group Coalition on Revival. That group endorsed spanking children even if it caused bruises and welts. They wanted to make premarital sex and masturbation illegal. They believed that Christians shouldn't marry non-Christians and that married women should not have careers. Regier previously worked for George Bush, Sr., as head of the National Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
Dobson, Regier, and others imply some notion of privacy within the home to allow them to potentially harm children, masked under the banner of religious freedom. Yet they both are very much opposed to the right to privacy as defined by the Supreme Court.
The right to privacy was used in the Griswold decision, to overturn a Connecticut law against married couples obtaining contraceptives in 1965. The right was extended to protect a woman's expectation of privacy with regard to her own body and decision with her doctor to have an abortion in the first trimester, and then throughout the pregnancy. The right to privacy may also be invoked to overturn the current Texas Sodomy law, which was used recently to prosecute two gay men who were having consensual sex in the privacy of their own home.
Such conservative Christians would support their right to privacy within the home to provide cover for potential child abuse, but would throw away any principle of a right to privacy that would prevent state intrusion into the private bedrooms of consenting adults.
Compare that to the common sense view that the right privacy does not grant immunity from reasonable search and seizure, or hinder due process and investigation to enforce legitimate laws against child abuse, incest, abuse of power, fair contracts, etc., but prevents the state from being over-intrusive in private affairs, for example, where no one is beaten, threatened, coerced, conned, etc. Reactionaries want the state in our bedrooms, and everyone else wants to prevent the state from intruding needlessly and dominating our private lives.
We all love the idea of the state butting out of our private lives... But when private life becomes a danger to life and limb for those living within those walls, we wish for state, family, or neighborly intervention. A tyrant in the home requires those whom he tyrannizes to maintain an illusion that the brutality that goes on in private isn't really happening. Families become enablers and secret keepers.
Because of a household tyrant's need for suppression and for privacy to abuse people, privacy and securing it is of overblown importance to him. A privacy abuser's reactions to a symbol is similar to the symbolic over-reactions of gun owners to any regulations of guns. Privacy abused in this sort of situation enables privacy abuse by the state.
Domestic abuse is a dire problem in our country, when those who report child abuse are as follows: Professionals (including teachers), law enforcement officers, social services workers, and physicians, make more than half (56%) of the screened-in reports. Others, including family members, neighbors, and other members of the community, made the remaining 44 percent of screened-in referrals regarding abuse.
It's tragic when only 44% of our own kin and home communities dare to get involved in confronting domestic abuse, and prefer instead to let the state handle it. And 56% of those reports only happened because the state was stepping in where kin and neighbors failed to. Where was the community's concern and empathy? Where were friends and neighbors? Were they all inside their private homes, too oblivious to notice, in their own rooms, sitting alone with the TV on or a video game going on to drown out the sounds of real violence with fake violence?
Which would you rather have? Some kin, neighbor, or friend we know or are aquatinted with step in to chill out an abuser that's abusing a kid, and then alert the whole neighborhood to watch out for the kid's safety, ready to provide a place for the kids to go when the shit hits the fan as the cops are called? Or would you rather have some state-regulated over-worked social worker with a huge caseload to tell him to stop hurting people, on the way to the police station before he's released on bail to keep on abusing people? All while no-one else outside admits they might know about it, or when they do know they still refuse to help?
Kids die this way, folks, even at the hands of their own parents. This inspires a public outcry from the bothered for church and state to step in as parents. People die at the hands of normal looking, quiet, all-too-private sociopaths who nobody interfered with or even suspected was a problem individual. Assuming the best, ignoring the suspicions, keeping to themselves until the stench of dead bodies under the crawlspace is unbearable and the state is called to fix it.
I myself would trust myself and my own neighbors to investigate violence they overhear in our neighborhood. This simple act of human concern for a fellow human being may save many lives in abusive homes, because it ruins the secrecy games enablers enact to protect themselves from harm. It destroys any delusions of lordship through privacy that a household tyrant craves so he can keep abusing people.
People are less likely to intervene in domestic violence nowadays because we do not socialize as freely with each other any more, in the streets and neighborhoods of America. And because we move from place to place chasing jobs, we never get to stay in a neighborhood long enough to put down roots and participate in neighborhood or civic life.
So if I don't know my neighbors, the state and its impersonal intervention looks safer to me because it's regulated by others, somewhat (usually by citizen-elected "officials" or citizen-created advocacy groups.
Isn't this ironic? We want state intervention when other's privacy is abused, and we want that state power for intervention supervised by people who are citizens to keep it respectful of our privacy rights, but these are uninvolved people who have no clue who we are, personally. We hate having our own privacy violated, yet we are eager to invade others' privacy through the apparatus of the state, to make sure there isn't any consensual homosexual sex or gay adoptions going on.
The state has taken the place of familiar human community supports. It is impersonal, the way the state controls social interactions and puts an end to solidarity in community. TV, computers, video games are usurping our free time, and the media's constant harping on tragedies and crimes of the unknown person in the neighborhood has helped this social isolative process along psychologically. The loitering laws, chronic suburban sprawl, the necessity of cars to get anywhere, air conditioning, and other various actions and inventions of business and the passivity or unawareness of unions all contributes to this malaise.
Look, if neighbors all across this country knew each other and didn't fear neighborly diversity, because we knew our diverse neighbors personally, it might make people less stuck on believing bigoted rhetoric, less gullible to manipulation, and less prone to get reactionary over other people's ways of life. We would not need the state to intervene to tell us to get along, if we didn't forget how to relate and get along together.
When it's someone you know well and respect who's in trouble, it feels different because there is a relation there. The impersonal state and other institutions of this society have no authority to lord their self-serving social models and agendas over you, when they appeal to things like empathy, ethics, and other values that are inherent in living beings. When the state does this type of appeal to the better parts of humanity, it is coercive, intrusive, or impersonal. When the state appeals to empathy or the needs for ethical behavior from someone, it calls in another intrusive profession or social institution, like psychiatry or the church to tell you how.
In isolation we feel more vulnerable to symbols and we feel more powerless when we think we have no allies that understand us socially.. So when the state gets ugly or a company screws us to the wall we are more likely submit to it because we fear abandonment, homelessness.
Homelessness is a life without privacy or things. Homelessness goes directly against our social conditioning. Homeless people have networks of people who know them and they do support one another. But because it involves poverty, people fear the homeless more than they ought to, allowing the state and businessmen to make the homeless into a scary symbol... something one best keep out of one's community.
Because humans loathe the unknown, and unknown people, and are wary of differences they don't understand, and we love our privacy to the extremes even more than we care about each other, we can remain uninvolved in neighborhood and community relationships on a personal level.
When privacy is abused and we can't ignore it or shut it out, we have no choice but to ask the state to fix it when nothing else can fulfill that role. The state won't fix it really, because the state has its own agendas, which dovetails nicely with our very scripted planned reactions, all fueled by certain unquestioned beliefs about people, by our fear, ignorance, isolation, and imagination, and by those worse-case scenarios dancing in our heads along with the TV news.
We behave today, to some extent, as we were planned to behave by state lawmakers in the nineteen hundreds. We often act like the wealthy hysterical Victorian legislators and churchmen living in the late nineteen hundreds, as we fret over "those undesirable strangers entering our antiseptic segregated suburban "paradise." We gossip so arrogantly and ignorantly about those "other people," those "criminals on the street corners," those "rowdy youth," those "bums." We admonish people that are not like us, people we don't relate to. Because we have overvalued our own privacy, we think we don't have to learn how to get along with others. We can go on endlessly about "those other people" doing nasty unChristian things in private, or doing things we wouldn't ourselves do in public as we do the same damn thing in the sanctity of our home.
This kind of blazing bullshit hypocrisy is only possible where people refuse to relate to one another on human terms beyond their familiar cliques, and instead choose to abbreviate real people into symbols and have nightmares about "them." It's much easier to dehumanize someone you've never talked to.
How vivid the human imagination becomes when it is isolated from human-to-human community relationships. How malleable and controllable we all get when we're atomized into our separate houses, separate rooms, separate cars, in a town full of strangers shut up in their own domiciles lording over it, possessing all these things ... but are secretly suffering for want of a true friend and somewhere to go on a Saturday night besides getting drunk out of your skull.
A community relationship is the only way to dull the loneliness and boredom of your life. You cannot have your privacy cake and eat your neighbor's privacy in this human situation.
But we have become so timid, over-polite, passive, and socially awkward. We can't just walk up to a guy on the street and ask him to coffee; we are all too busy, too awkward. We assume they don't want to be bothered with friendship, and so our social conditioning is never challenged.
How convenient this is, to those who fear community and solidarity. How tyrannical we become when we think we are powerless, because we are by all observable evidence alone... abandoned by everyone, to fend for ourselves, alone against the whims of a dog-eat-dog world. How vulnerable we feel when we have painful pasts where no one heard us or stepped in to help.
Fearful privacy and misuse of personal power becomes a refuge from fear of the "other," and a refuge from corporate/state control and time management. Privacy, while it feels safe, is also a haven for creating even more fear and reaction of the "other," who is dehumanized into a symbol. This kind of privacy invites more state intervention and control.
We need community relationships to temper our tendency to react or to be tempted by extremism. Absolute privacy and state intervention as a substitute for a neighborhood... it is a tragic and profitable paradox of symbols in this modern civilized life.
" Day after day, They send my friends away
To mansions cold and gray,
To the far side of town,
Where thin men stalk the streets,
While the sane stay underground...
... "Cause I'd rather stay here with all the madmen,
Than perish with the sadmen roaming free,
And I'd rather play here With all the madmen,
For I'm quite content they're all as sane as me."
—David Bowie,
excerpted from "All the Madmen,"
on the album "The Man who Sold the World"
~ : ~
Excerpts in the article are from The Way We Never Were, by Stephanie Coontz.
For the other stuff I've written visit:
http://www.unknownnews.net/archives.html#U
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