Recently a certain thing has been on my mind, particularly in how people now relate to each other in our age and I could write about this for days but I should present this thought to you in a simple and digestible way.

If you are familiar with myself you know that I am a critic of the current “Neoliberal global order” if you will, I detest it for its erosion of native cultures of all people and of course it’s oppressive material economic policies that cripple us all into black holes of misery. (a sandwich of double trouble, given by McDonalds) my latest thought is the effect this has had on basic human interactions, say; Community, Sexual Intimacy and Violence. These three things in my mind are a core triad of the Human experience and this of course weaves with many other facets of the complex web that is ‘man’.

Let’s start with Community.

Community has become incredibly impersonal and almost abstract for a lot of modern people, this is not clearer in the west and especially the United Kingdom, the erosion of community in the UK has a lot of causes and variables, mostly it was one of a economic factor , a good place to look for this would be the Neoliberial policies of then Prime Minister Margert Thatcher… So in our example we see that the splintering of communities, it’s near dissolvement from the Working Class now able to move to middle class, creating a split and detachment from centuries old culture to the increased immigration to the UK causing more splintering (In many ways the splintering was the creation of new Communities from the corpses of the old communities) then with the dawn of the Internet this process was only quickened it’s divisions only deeper, this is where we get to the key point.

The impersonal of community.. Now most people’s access to community (A core human need & expression) is satisfied by an impersonal illusion, now the individual is still “experiencing” community but in a degraded and sick way.

It is not real.

it is only a poor reflection of the real thing and only serves to validate and strengthen the growing problem of loneliness in large swathes of the population, this moves us unto the next subject; The Impersonaliztation of Sex.

Sex is a very important part of the human experience, It of course is how we create more people and express our deep loves or lusts for another individual, it serves a social interaction etc and so on..
But as we have seen with community it too has become impersonal in possibly the most degraded and offensive way, and this is two fold:
Firstly
Pornography
Secondly
Sexual Interactions over a communication device (Phone, Computer etc.)

Pornography serves as the ultimate impersonal act of sex because the viewer is not actually involved with Sexual Intimacy (This is the same phenomena as violence in Film or Video games, more on that later)
they are still gaining sexual enjoyment from viewing but they have not actually engaged the sexual operation so thus it is at a point of unnaturalness because the mechanical nature of the body is geared by the sexual arousal of having sex but in fact the Individual is not having sex a demented paradox if you will. This is not a healthy position to be in, and onto my second point the use of the internet to conduct sexual intimacy with another individual is really an extension of the first point, but now it is with more then one individual but at the same time the sexual intent is between two people, so it still does serve the social operatus of Sex, again in a unnatural way thus driving us deeper into the impersonal and despair.
Ironically in my view it was the recent movement of sexual positivity that caused it, It killed the Erotica of sex which is a core component of the Sexual Act, it doesn’t take a genius to see this , humanity likes to create taboos only to break them because it’s a natural high and in an ordered world it ultimately serves the right reason, Eg. Two young people who shouldn’t be together due to familial ties or country etc etc, these blocks to their love/lust only strengthens the attraction and sometimes would lead to copulation and the creation of a child which is an ultimate good (It should be anyway, best case scenario) but by making sex non-taboo, making it “open” indirectly makes it clinical and cold, there is not passion or “naughty-ness” it makes it boring so why pursue it? Why pursue it when you can get the sexual rush by watching porn?
This is not good ultimately.

And finally I point to Violence. Violence and war are no longer personal and intimate it is distant and far away. The perfect example of this is the Military Drone, you have yourself a young man in the military, he has grown up with video games, the conclusion is simple and it is to give him control of this drone with a game console controller, it is then no different from a war game it is not “real” it’s impersonal and thus he will easily commit genocide.
War became distant during the 20th century, gone was the skirmish of knights, the rush of bayonets and so on, it was hiding in a trench knowing you could die any moment, nothing to defend yourself with..
It is not surprising that in the 21st century the evolution of this is that not only is war distant but it is no abstract, non-real to the combatant.