I grew up with a divorced mother that could provide only a small social safety net through family and an unstable financial situation. Although my financial situation is very stable since I've graduated - with small gaps - I'm extremely careful about my spendings and earnings, and instabilities worry me a lot.
Societal fabric isn’t going to be solved through anything other than effort on the part of individuals.
You’ve really made me think.
Very much indeed. We largely get the world we collectively bargain for.
(They want to be they; we can only oblige.)
...or we can collect taxes and provide goods and services to those that need it the most, even when they are not lucky enough to be in the "sphere of influence" of somebody that is (a) well-off and (b) willing to share their wealth with them.
Through both ideas and actions, you scale a compassionate society. A better tomorrow will hopefully arrive, but do what you can today with what you have.
Right, but this seems pretty defeatist, or even like it 's advocating against government support.
As a left-leaning person in the UK, I would look to the government before looking for financial support from friends and family, because I see that as one of the functions of government, whereas it may put more strain on my friends and family if they needed to give me significant financial support.
It seems like lot's of people have the moral position that the government should only be looked to for support as a last resort, and i would like to challenge that viewpoint. Kind of how it's much better to catch an illness early, it's much better to intervene early with difficult financial situations to prevent them snowballing into something much worse. And people shouldn't be made to feel bad for accepting that support.
Social connections require work, they also are slow and unreliable.
Before the information age, to get to know something, talking was the main way.
But now with books, panels, displays, packaging, signs, internet, GPS, etc., we have access to a huge quantity of information without having to talk to each others.
And we choose to do so because on average it's faster, more accurate, and avoid to deal with annoying people. After all, human relations also include a part of risk.
I lived 2 years in Africa, and there, you don't have that much information immediately available. You are back to talking, creating a social network and playing the game. People are way more friendly there, there is greater solidarity. But things are also way slower, unreliable, and you are a lot more at the mercy of popularity games even in the most simple activities.
This century we have been mutating our lives in deep ways, very fast. And it's not all bad. But we will need some time to reconcile the efficiency of our new life styles with the social needs we have at the primitive level. A few decades is way too short for that to have happened already, especially since we are not done with technical progress.
You life literally depends on what others think about you.
It still true for us, but an order of magnitude less after high school.
Your credit score does. In some places and situations, more directly than others.
I agree with your conclusion though.
I can now travel into a city I’ve never been to, find directions to and make reservations at a popular restaurant, follow it up with directions to a nice scenic spot, and finally find a last minute nice hotel to stay in all without ever interacting with another person.
None of that was possible with radio/tv.
Very true. And not only information but 'stuff' as well: we buy (and now order) all sort of specialised tools that we will only need once, because they are now cheap and widely and quickly available, instead of borrowing them or asking a neighbour to come over with one.
But yeah, information availability is the main change: instead of asking a neighbour/friend where to get something, how to do something, how to choose something and so on, we browse the web alone for those pieces of information.
All this quickly brings more individualism since we become pseudo-self-reliant, do not need interactions any more, and since those 'forced', interested interactions are absent, the other interactions are lost too.
In urban societies relations become more money based and suddenly people tend to accumulate wealth and there is never enough.
Personally I have been inspired by 2nd hand source - I had been reading historical book on Afganistan (very good book but I can't find it at the moment). At the same time I had been living in provincial Sumatra and experiencing myself something similar (It is something that makes living in Indonesia a joy despite other shortcomings).
Of course it's easy for me to 'judge' (I mean, I'm not really - to each their own) from my position as a software developer with a working spouse and a traditional family in a Western European country, but still - when you're already not in a very stable position, why take huge risks like adopting three special needs children?
Uh, says you. If people can't afford something, maybe they shouldn't get it - children included.
Conservatives understand this very well, BTW; strong social capital is key to the conservative worldview, whereas a "liberal" is often more inclined to see the world in terms of material relations of production and an inherently-unstable balance of power, and even the very notion of social atomization might be entirely foreign to them.
And when you think you have an invisible being in the sky that will take care of all of your needs, a government provided social safety net isn’t that important to some people.