When people say the United States is an atomized society, what does that mean?
And what's an example of a non-atomized society?
It means you, alone, are expected to deal with all of your problems yourself, and there is not a community of people for you to fall back on in times of need. This atomization is socially and economically enforced. Unions busted, land trusts dissolved, public transport dismantled, public health denied again and again despite popular support. It means when you run out of money you get thrown onto the street with all the other non-persons.
and there is not a community of people for you to fall back on in times of need.
Doesn't family fit this role for many people?
If they're lucky. If they haven't been disowned for being LGBT or if they didn't get stuck with shitty parents.
One can imagine a family being larger than parents and siblings. Parents friends being like "uncles" or something is like a shitty version of this, but one could imagine a community being a hundred or so people, taking care of each other's kids, talking and updating each other daily, lending sugar etc...
Most people do not have this, even with a big modern family.
Atomized refers to being individual, alone, responsible for your own needs. Not a member of a community etc. Sometimes we say siloed off. It's not just about needs but also about loneliness and feeling shut out.
A non-atomized society are places like Vietnam and Cuba. In Vietnam during Covid lockdowns, they brought you fresh food to eat day to day. You can rely on your neighbours for needs. People are looking out for each other. Contrast this with the American response(s) to covid - Lockdowns but you don't get anything provisioned to you or fuck it everyone for themselves no response at all.
There's definitely communities within places like America that aren't as atomized, mutual aid societies, unions etc. But the dominant character of society in general of the United States is one of deep loneliness and atomization.
Sociology profs are more likely to be Marxists than just about any other field and Marx did some absolutely fundamental sociological work in his economic, political and philosophical works. A lot of Sociological studies under capitalism is to try to undermine the Marxism, but Sociology without Marx is like biology without Darwin.
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I think the problem the prior user is highlighting is that sociology itself is a liberal science. It functions to reinforce liberalism rather than challenge it.
We have several struggle sessions about various aspects of psychology having the same problem, existing to find solutions to the problems that liberal society creates in people rather than to change the conditions that are causing those problems. Lonely and depressed from atomisation? Liberal psychology says take some pills to solve it whereas Marxists say we need to fundamentally change how we live and stop atomising society in order to improve people's mental health. That kind of thing is present as an issue in sociology as much as it is in psychology. Treating the problems of society rather than truly challenging the fact that the society that capital has created is responsible for them and needs to change instead.
Medicine and psychology are related fields? Liberal psychology is the identification for how institutions of psychology under liberalism will focus towards solutions that can make one feel better individually but falls short of creating solutions that address the root of an issue systemically. For example, under liberalism one may endure extreme stress due to their economic precarity; and a psychologist would reccomend solutions and help out in a way that helps one cope with the stress, but is unable to help address the economic precarity at the root of this stress.
I literally do not know any of my neighbors, and that is pretty normal here. That's a simple way to put atomization, I think.
Yup. Knowing none of your neighbors; knowing none of your coworkers; making no friends through hobbies
Seeing widespread problems and injustice but having no time or energy to organize, ... Or instead, having an inability to see any problem as shared. I think Mark Fisher had something about "anti-solidarity" in one of his books that sounds like the latter 
My left neighbor is a tweaker and the one on the right is fucking batshit. Guy two doors over steals Door dash orders and land lady is across the street, it's in my best interest to not be seen by my neighbors.
I think about the ethnic enclaves that immigrant communities made in the US as the opposite of atomization. People brought together due to circumstance who develop a system of support to watch each other's kids, cook for another during illness, help each other get jobs. Really just the basic concept of community. America is designed to dismantle that stuff. Some of those immigrants' kids acculturate and assimilate and "move up" in society to be lonely suburb dwellers with more material wealth than their parents, but none of the community.
When I worked/lived in the East Bay in a very working class, diverse neighborhood, the Abuelas would check in on everyone constantly. At least once a week, they'd knock on my door to make sure I'd eaten that day.
It means I don't have any friends, don't talk to or know my neighbors, anyone I know well has gone far away to live their own life, and the only people I really home into contact with are my coworkers and cashiers at the grocery store. There is little to no connection between myself and any other person. All beings reduced to individual particles not interacting in the overall system
i cant speak for the us, but in my country, if you are from certain places (namely big cities and apartment buildings) you will most likely live on your own apartment and not even really know your own neighbours. you are likely to hate them for trivial reasons. each on their own concrete box, with their own problems and toys.
there are other ways in which we isolate but i think this is a great example of how the individualism manifests itself, great way to illustrate the physical and emotional distance of it.
about non atomized societies: tribal, indigenous soceties of a couple of hundred of people, small town neighbourhoods are tighter knit too and generally know a lot about and comiscerate with eachother. this type of thing. even then small towns are still capitalist so theres kind of a limit to this
As someone living in an apartment in a US city: I don't know a single other person in my building, and this is not abnormal. The only times I've ever interacted with someone else is if there's some sort of issue (noise, typically) or to hold a door for someone.
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Americans do not generally have a third place where they spend time in common. Sometimes they go to a coffee shop or something. But there's no such thing as the town square or the neighborhood market where the old people hang out or the weekly potluck. You don't know your neighbors or, even if you do, you spend no time with them. You do basically nothing as a community.
There are exceptions but they're very limited and are usually somehow tied to the chamber of commerce or a tourism board or something.
Culturally, when faced with a problem, you're supposed to just deal with it as best you can, not bring it up as a problem to the community (the community does not exist). Sometimes people try to get together to help others but it inevitably turns into a charity that becomes part of the NGO industrial complex, a way to make money for the "leadership" team and give the people responsible (bourgeois) a nice tax break and a spot on that leadership team for their progeny.
Folks can barely even socialize with each other most of the time. When forced into proximity under amicable terms and with a shared interest, some will eventually get along, at first being surprised at the people around them and discovering that they can talk to them for more than 10 minutes without getting frustrated or needing to pay them for the time. Most of the time they cannot talk about anything without getting heated pretty quickly. No capacity for cooling a situation down, it's always time to fight.
Also getting Americans to form a union is like pulling teeth. It's possible but really fucking hard because a critical number of people will have a series of false consciousnesses that are about their own superiority or an ideology that makes all things individualistic.
Sometimes they go to a coffee shop or something.
There's not even anything good like that where I live. It's so pathetic having 0 places to go besides the gym (almost nobody socially interacting there) and places where you buy stuff.
So I'm gonna start with the science definition it came from and go from there:
Atomization refers to breaking bonds in some substance to obtain its constituent atoms in gas phase. By extension, it also means separating something into fine particles, for example: process of breaking bulk liquids into small droplets.
So politically it refers to essentially the same but with people. It's a breakdown of social and communal bonds that previously existed. It's the how we refer to the alienation from others that increases under our current structure which casts society as the sum of its individuals and the emphasis on the individual rather than individuals as a product of society and an emphasis on a larger more connected and communal application of policy.
"I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.
… [It] is, I think, one of the tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many of the benefits which were meant to help people who were unfortunate … [t]hat was the objective, but somehow there are some people who have been manipulating the system … when people come and say: ‘But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!’
Thatcher, Margaret. 1987. ‘Interview for “Woman’s Own” (“No Such Thing as Society”).’ in Margaret Thatcher Foundation: Speeches, Interviews and Other" - this is essentially the core of atomization phrased as a good thing by one of its architects.
I don't think there's really a non atomized society. I think various societies are going through this process of atomization and are at different stages, which reflects capitalism's global reach.
I assume from reading the modlog that this person isn't genuinely interested in learning our perspective on the problems facing human civilization. It's a shame because I wanted to attempt to give an honest answer but. On the other hand, my responses tend to read like logorrhea. Nevertheless.
I guess I can say to liberals: The only thing they have left to appeal to people, after shearing themselves of all their progressive features in a desperate attempt to protect the status quo of capitalism, is this atomizing individualism that makes any kind of political organizing impossible to do. We do indeed live in the future of Margaret Thatcher, where only individuals competing in markets against one another exist. This even applies to technologies that are supposedly made to promote socializing (ie the ubiquitous "social" media), where the pursuit of status amongst peers prevents any meaningful collaboration on political projects meant to build a just society. There are plenty of factors related to technology that I guess could be lumped into a broader category of changing material conditions, with most of it being linked back to a capitalist drive for greater efficiency for the pursuit of profit.
This atomization is to our detriment, as such a perilous time in human history requires international cooperation to prevent the sort of suffering we are seeing unfold over the course of this 21st century polycrisis, with anthropogenic climate change being the chiefest of those concerns.
My concern for the future is that in this atomized society, as conditions of this polycrisis spread, with the most vulnerable parts of society being jettisoned as "unnecessary" by those who manage capital. Those on the left who criticize these actions will be stigmatized as "fascists" and "terrorists" by the liberal and far right defenders of capitalism. In some ways we see this with the current attacks on those protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which is one of the places where the West develops the technology used in controlling its own restive vulnerable populations near the heart of empire.
More or less how structures such as suburbia have destroyed functional communities and replaced them with synergistic hellscapes meant to serve capital alongside petty fascism/assholism (HOA's are the devil), society functions at the benefit of a specific subset of society (i.e. capitalists) while doing nothing or actively harming every other subset of society (i.e. workers/everyone else).
I notice little mentions of non-atomized societies. Modernity suffers all over to some degrees, but for an example of a typically non-atomized society, think of a stereotypical old timey (maybe up to early or pre medieval) village, or tribe, or any such small community of 10-200 people.
Though they will do some travelling and back and a forth, all the people in those small societies will know each other by name, face, attitude, family, general background. Every person will know who they can rely on for help, who to turn to for every need, who they can speak to, who they can be alone with, and so forth. You knew ~100% of the people in your area.
This kind of society was the "default" because it just happens if all of you spend 90% of your life, outside, in the same two square miles. Though you might get the occasional pariah, basically every person in that village will have help to turn to, places to crash and people to speak with all hours of the day. This engenders strong community, cooperation, friendships, coparenting, tolerance, you know, normal natural human behaviours.
Then contrast with today's society, where I know my family and friends, but for work reasons they're scattered around the country. And I only know very few people in my area to small degrees. So although there will no doubt be cool, friendly people just on my road, I have no normal or effective way to meet them, know them, and work out who I can trust and/or spend time with. I know ~0-1% of the people in my area, and there are practically no means for me alone to address that.
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