Now, difference has happened everywhere, I am sure. Within Native American tribes boys would become convinced they were girls. I am sure there was homosexuality. I am sure there were schizophrenics, and perhaps even manic-depressives, although that may be a disease of modern society. Garden variety neuroses were likely uncommon, but as a tribe, I’m sure they worked out ways of integrating, to varying degrees, all manners of difference which did not threaten violence to the tribe itself. If you simply have to accept a person, and not a principle–which is the core problem with mass society–then that is much easier. You just adjust your perceptual frame to include them, and figure out how they can be made to belong.
The thing with mass society is there are no tribes any more. Look at your neighborhood. View every dwelling in there as a cave. The people who live there–if you live in a city, in any event–leave in the morning, work somewhere, come home, and lock the door. They lock the door because they don’t trust the people around them. They don’t know who may just happen along. There are far, far too many people to keep track of, and all but the friendliest of them don’t even know their neighbors. After all, the neighbors will likely only be there until their property value swells and they cash out to move to the next step up. They are not committed to you or that place. Not in America, in any event.
And the value of big cities for “fuck ups”–I am not judging them, but I think this is a reasonable approximation of how they think society views them–is not that they belong, per se, so much as that their differences can be made to disappear. They vanish. Everything that made them stick out no longer matters.
But to the point, they have not integrated into a culture. They have not come to belong anywhere. The culture, therefore, becomes “culture without culture”. It becomes belonging with no standards. But, as I have pointed out before, if there are no standards, the sense of belonging, itself, must become suspect. And people sense this. They sense questionably personal loyalty.
All in all, I continue to believe that the best solution to our cultural problems is to make everything much smaller, to find ways to create small tribes which truly value loyalty and sincerity. I have proposed ways of doing this. It makes me dizzy thinking of the challenge, but I still think of it anyway.