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Social Relations and Social Cults, or how being sociable and making friends feels impossible
  I am a self-proclaimed shut-in, self-diagnosed introvert. You could call it antisocial and it might not entirely be wrong (although certainly not antisocial personality disorder, simply socially adverse). But truly, isn't everyone these days? Growing up attached to the hip to technology, it became one of my best friends; I got lucky to break that habit and grow outside of it, letting it complement me, whereas the trend in humanity is becoming one with it and letting it make them, letting the wires and plastics meld with their skin to become Internet stars, jumping from this feed to that, Twitter to Facebook to Instagram to TikTok, never learning, never growing, only consuming. It seems to have developed in-groups, all of society seems to have developed in-groups, wherein they become impregnable, invulnerable to outside interference. Society has become a cult mindset, and there are perhaps billions of little cults across the world.

  This is not to say they don't leave the cults, but those who refuse to join one become alienated, just as I have. When I say these social cults become "impregnable", I mean truly impregnable - the 'outsider', the alienated person trying to make their way in the world without losing their sanity, cannot join a social cult. One cannot join this ecosystem of cults without already belonging to an in-group, and some social cults cannot interact with other portions of the ecosystem without themselves becoming alienated. In an era of globalisation and constant Internet feeds, groups become too desensitised to what happens outside of their domain to care for it or accept it. This could simply mean that a social cult interested in one celebrity has no care for another, but it can have far more real consequences when the social cult begins caring more about the Internet than reality. In embracing the digital realm, it alienates those attached to the earth.

  I, then, am attached to the earth. I never got 'in' the group, and therefore never will. This has consequentally given me very few people I can interact with, and I simply cannot consider those people 'friends' as that would be disingenuous. The only in-group I have had is those related by blood, and I am alienated still from their social in-groups. This issue grows when one is trying to improve conditions; how does one help people improve on themselves, guide them to betterment when you see them struggling, when you cannot reach them for this help? It becomes impossible to care for others because it becomes impossible to heal others. The community disintegrates in part because social relations have disintegrated into social cults, which do not necessarily (and rarely ever) align with real-world communities. The only path forward for movements of betterment, then, become 'bursting the bubble' that social cults have created.

  Some believe this comes through violence, that only terroristic action can 'cure' the world of social cults, people such as Theodore Kaczynski or various extreme conservatives. Those people are fools, their terror only causing the cults to shrink inwards in defense, causing people to stop trusting each-other. The only way I see forwards is simply doing. People who are not in the in-group of class consciousness, for instance, will not bother with learning of the organisation that is interested in class consciousness. Action, however, may burst that bubble. When a group holds a protest, they are violating social cults' bubbles, intruding upon them with a sharp blade. The liberatory action is one which destroys social cults entirely, and restores a real-world community, united under liberation. It is very likely impractical any other way.