I listened to a lecture a couple days ago and a wonderful observation about walled cities was made. The lecturer’s point was that Walled cities kept like-minded people segregated and safe from those who were different mind and that with the removal of walled cities what increasingly happened is that individuals have built their own psyscho-emotional walls that works to keep the stranger and the alien out. So, walls are an inescapable category and it is never a matter of walls or no walls unto the end of segregation but it is only a matter of how walls are built. They can be built in a community context where like-minded people can gather or they can be built psycho-emotively by each and every individual against every other individual in communities that are characterized by manufactured and unnatural diversity. I was reminded of Robert Putnam’s work “Bowling Alone” where similar observations are made.
Sociologist Robert Putnam brought out in his book “Bowling Alone” that radically diverse societies, such as America is becoming, lose their sense of Weltanschauung and communitarian continuity. Putnam insisted that the more diverse communities become the more individuals in those societies become islands unto themselves. Massive communal heterogeneity is not conducive to the creation of healthy individuals. This societal manufacturing of the socio / psycho path personalty is accelerated even more with the grinding breakdown of the family as a cohesive cultural sub-unit. With the breakdown of the family and within this macro atomized, disintegrated milieu, sociopaths and psychopaths — individuals who have no sense of belonging or responsibility to others — are created and thrive. They thrive not only because of the interpersonal isolation that is created by heterogeneous social orders, but also by the lack of communitarian brakes on the behavior of the socio-path / psycho-paths. Oddly enough, a point is arrived at where scoio-pathic behavior is rewarded and valued in the hyper heterogeneous social order. Such order normalizes the socio-path and begins to view the person who has larger family and community ties as the “other,” and the “strange.”
Such an inverted view where the familial and community connected are seen as the “odd” is what is to be expected where “good” has become “evil” and “light” has become “darkness.” In an upside down inside out world only the right-side up in-side in are considered upside down and inside out.
We should add here that the creation of such hyper diverse cultures where the socio / psycho path is created is in the interest of those who desire centralized Government. Once a social order can be atomized enough the only thing that can hold the unrelated parts together is force and force is what Government is. As such, heterogeneity and balkanization is desired by Centralized states because such atomization is job security for the tyrant class. The Criminal Government has a interest in creating a criminal people.
Friedrich Hayek in his book, “Road To Serfdom” has a chapter that interfaces with all this. Hayek has a chapter on how sociopaths are drawn like moths to a light to Tyrannical Governments. Hayek contends that in Tyrannical Governments you’ll always find some of the most egregious socio-paths. When you combine our hyper heterogeneous social order with the insights of Putnam and Hayek the prospects for our culture are not particularly promising.
Returning to the lecture referenced at the beginning the lecturer said that this removal of walled cities has been translated anew into gated communities where segregation can work again in a pseudo walled context and where community can at least potentially be rediscovered. At some level, man desires to live among those who are like him — who share a common Worldview, heritage, and culture. Community that refuses to be homogeneous is the community of the sociopath.
Hat Tip —
Sociopathy Is Increasing In America
And disturbingly, the prevalence of sociopathy in the United States seems to be increasing. The 1991 Epidemiologic Catchment Area study, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, reported that in the fifteen years preceding the study, the prevalence of antisocial personality disorder had nearly doubled among the young in America, It would be difficult, closing in on impossible, to explain such a dramatically rapid shift in terms of genetics or neurobiology.