busyI am disgusted with America's headlong plummet into fragmentation. While politicians are shredding the social safety net as fast as they can, the family safety net is also dissolving. The problem is, nobody stays healthy and rich all the time. People get injured and sick. They have babies who need care. The fewer people are tightly connected, the less fault tolerance there is when something goes wrong, the less opportunity there is for someone else to take up the slack for a little while to make it possible to get back on one's feet. When people spread out, they also require far more in the way of resources than when they share, which is more wasteful and more expensive. Nor is it good for subtler quality-of-life aspects such as happiness and continuity.
You know how, before the invention of armies, battles were just a bunch of one-on-one fights? We're heading for a point where we don't have a society anymore, just a mass of individuals who don't give a flip if the person next to them dies. I'm unpleasantly reminded of Eloi.
March 16 2012, 18:25:07 UTC 9 years ago