[Previous in sequence: Clique, Guild, Cult]

We whose names are underwritten... do by these Presents... covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick... - Mayflower Compact, 1620

There's no such thing as society. - Margaret Thatcher, 1987

You know we're living in a society! - George Costanza, 1992

Meant for someone else but not for me

Learning about Arrow's Impossibility Theorem really kicked my edgy teenager phase into full gear. The theorem establishes (with mathematical certainty!) that "social utility" is an incoherent concept. That is, there is no way of combining the preferences of a group of people which adheres to the usual axioms defining rational behavior (transitivity and independence of irrelevant alternatives) without also simply being a dictatorship that ignores everyone's preferences except the dictator's. Therefore, whenever someone comes hat-in-hand appealing to "the good of society," you know they must be lying, or trying to control you.

The thing is, edgy-teenage-me wasn't entirely off base. We are everywhere surrounded by charlatans (politicians, activists, etc.) using all sorts of verbal trickery to get us to do what they want. I couldn't help but notice all the times these types would invoke "society," always gesturing at some group of people other than myself. (Formative experience: "Yes, you're going to have to pay into Social Security throughout your working life. No, there's not going to be any left when you retire, so you'll need to save up as well. 'Social' doesn't mean you, silly!") And the 20th century is the story of millions of people being sent to their deaths under the comforting reassurance that it was all being done in the name of "the people" (but not you!).

I only wish there had been someone to tell me: "Yes, it's okay to notice this. You're at an age now where you're beginning to form your own values and desires, distinct from those of the people around you. That is all the justification you need. You don't need to hold up some abstract theoretical principle to defend your independence, like Arrow's Theorem or Rothbardian libertarianism. You don't need to box yourself in with an ideology that denies even the possibility of union with other human beings, just so you can be your own person."

I find this hangup all too common in people like me. Even the staunchest libertarians affirm the value of voluntary cooperation - the literature is replete with arguments of the form "We don't need the government to do X, because voluntary associations will..." Yet in practice, getting anyone to cooperate on anything more complicated than planning an outing with friends feels like pulling teeth. Subtextually, "voluntary associations" in libertarianism are an afterthought, a quick knock-down refutation of statism coupled with an escape-hatch which was the real desideratum all along: "...and I voluntarily choose not to associate with anyone, and you can't make me. So there!" Society, again, is always other people, never me.

lmao cringe af

Well, so much for me and mine. Seventeen years ago when Why our kind can't cooperate was written, the general impression was that this was merely an "our kind" (i.e. "nerd") problem, and that just down the street there was some paradise of socially-well-adjusted "normies" who between their Sportsball™ and their Magic Sky Fairies and their ReTHUGlican/DemonRat parties were doing just fine. But now a full generation has passed, and things aren't looking great on the normie front either. Social isolation has become a widespread problem affecting all sorts of people. Can this too be laid at the feet of Arrow and Rothbard? I think not.

If the formative experience for Millennials like me (to speak in gross generalities) was pushing back against a notion of "society" which our elders seemed to sincerely believe in but which we plainly saw did not include us, what about Gen Z / Alpha? To generalize even more grossly - since here my experience is only secondhand - it's more like: The idea of "society" has already been emptied of all meaning, and anyone who doesn't realize this needs to get with the times, or else be taken for a chump. The edgy teenagers (and twenty-somethings) of today express themselves not in contrarianism, but in nihilism; not by resistance, but by derision. "wow, look at all those losers trying to actually do a thing. cringe af. imagine caring so much about anything. lol, lmao even."

(Yes, imagine that. Imagine living in a society!)

Unfortunately it'll be harder for me to do a steelman-and-sympathy for this position than for that in the previous section, simply because I never lived through it myself. Maybe some of you who did can do better. The best I've come up with so far is: "Yes it sucks, and no it's not your fault. If everyone around you is being insincere, it makes no sense to pretend otherwise. And if you therefore start off with an instinctive distrust of people like me who come along telling you to believe in something, then that's your prerogative. But you can at least believe in yourself. Surely there must be something you care about, even if you don't want to tell me what it is."

How did it get like this?

You've probably heard this story before, but I'll recapitulate it here. Since the dawn of time we've lived in tribes where we'd form assemblies to get stuff done, et cetera et cetera. This culture was thriving in the 1830s USA when Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote:

Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types - religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. [...] In every case, at the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association. (Democracy in America, vol. 2 pt. 2 ch. 5)

Americans might have lacked the strongly-rooted Gemeinschaft that the later Romantics would fondly portray of the ancien régime, but they made up for it with a rich fabric of voluntary associations ("guilds" in the previous sense) that kept everyone connected to everyone else. And because they were voluntary, there was constant innovation and dynamism, and the social fabric did not stifle individual initiative, but rather facilitated it.

But then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked when the Singularity was canceled when people quit their bowling leagues. In that book Robert Putnam catalogued a large amount of data (up to the year 2000) showing the marked decline in association membership starting around the 1960s/1970s and proceeding apace ever since.

We of my generation, therefore, may dimly remember hearing stories in our childhoods about "living in a society", but we never experienced it ourselves. And those of the next generation had not even the stories.

De Tocqueville was one of many to claim that the association-forming culture is the sine qua non of democratic civilization itself. The only thing keeping tyranny at bay, in a country lacking an entrenched feudal structure, is the civic society that stands between the individual and the state. "Despotism, by its very nature suspicious, sees the isolation of men as the best guarantee of its own permanence" (DiA vol. 2 pt. 2 ch. 4). Putnam reiterates de Tocqueville's warning with even greater urgency (Bowling Alone, chapter 21):

[W]ithout social capital we are more likely to have politics of a certain type. American democracy evolved historically in an environment unusually rich in social capital. [...] How might the American polity function in a setting of much lower social capital and civic engagement? [...]

At the other pole are "uncivic" regions, like Calabria and Sicily, aptly characterized by the French term incivisme. The very concept of citizenship is stunted there. Engagement in social and cultural associations is meager. From the point of view of the inhabitants, public affairs is somebody else's business - that of i notabili, "the bosses," "the politicians" - but not theirs. Laws, almost everyone agrees, are made to be broken, but fearing others' lawlessness, everyone demands sterner discipline. Trapped in these interlocking vicious circles, nearly everyone feels powerless, exploited, and unhappy. It is hardly surprising that representative government here is less effective than in more civic communities.

(Putnam goes on to quote John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, and several others to similar effect. You can go read the book if you want more.)

These people would be thoroughly unsurprised at the current state of things, although perhaps I would add that the causality runs both ways in a self-reinforcing loop. Nobody cares enough to contribute to "society", because there is no "society" that cares anything about them. All told, isn't this a sad equilibrium to be stuck in? Isn't it such a waste of human potential?

What can we do?

Understand that society is a social construct, pace Arrow (next article). Yes, there are certain compromises with perfect rationality that must be made, but we can still derive benefit from it, as from any imperfectly rational being.

Be prepared to rederive via painstaking scholarship and experimentation a certain set of ideas and norms that makes a functioning society possible. By all rights we should have been inculturated into this organically, but failing that, the next best thing we can do is to build something worth passing on to the next generation. Read history and sociology. Believe that something more is possible.

Cringe is in the mind. It ceases to exist when you forget about it.

And lastly, if you come across a flickering ember of Society in this cold dark wasteland, cherish and nurture it with all your might. That includes your local rationality meetups!