Loneliness and trauma, is what I see. Loneliness: the first task of a society is to figure out what to do with its pain. If you cannot share pain–and a common solution is sharing it be inflicting it–then you lose the capacity to interact with others on a deep level. S and M is just one way of replacing this function in an unhealthy way.
Trauma: I think we need to understand prolonging failure to connect with other people on a deep, spiritual level not just as a symptom of trauma, but constitutive of it. In itself, it can build a self perpetuating of pain, withdrawal, pain, and withdrawal. This is the great merit and critical social weakness of computers and video games, and media in general: it dulls aches of this sort, without providing any real solution.
As is obvious to anyone who knows me well, I have so many ideas on so many topics, it is quite literally impossible to chase them all down all the time. I have to prioritize, and even then I do not get as much done as I would like. In theory, I have been working on a book on our financial system, but my treatise is as far as I have gotten. In recent months, I have been trying to work down to the core of what has been my mental illness. I feel it may be a widely shared mental illness, but want to see. I am making progress.
That all is by way of prologue to setting an idea out in the public space that occurred to me some time ago. That of creating groups of ten people, who in effect as as small tribes, as extended social groups. The concept is similar to a support group, but you vow to support one another, and you do much more than support groups do. You learn as a group. You cope as a group.
This group would be the fundamental unit of what I have been calling the Church of Goodness. Since my creed is very non-specific–my only core principles are rejection of self pity, perseverance, and perceptual movement/breathing–then endless specific, local iterations are possible.
This group I propose to call a Bohannon, after Heinlein’s term. Bohannon’s, of course, can congregate in what would look more like a church, to sing, drink, run, dance, sing some more, discuss abstract philosophy, paint, sun themselves by the pool: whatever appears suited to the task of pursuing qualitative joy.
Edit: that term I remember from long ago as being used in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land to describe an organic, real, “Family”, which needed not be a physical family at all. I may be misremembering–as the term is not popping up on Google–and don’t have time to look it up right now.
As far as that goes, if I invented a word, no harm in that. I just wanted to borrow the word Heinlein used.