Disconnected From Society Quotes

this is what’s so dangerous about a society that coddles itself more and more from the inevitable discomforts of life: we lose the benefits of experiencing healthy doses of pain, a loss that disconnects us from the reality of the world around us.

No settled family or community has ever called its home place an “environment.” None has ever called its feeling for its home place “biocentric” or “anthropocentric.” None has ever thought of its connection to its home place as “ecological,” deep or shallow. The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of “ecology” and “ecosystems.” But the terms themselves are culturally sterile. They come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities which was invented to disconnect, displace, and disembody the mind. The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands, lanes roads, creatures, and people. And the real name of our connection to this everywhere different and differently named earth is “work.” We are connected by work even to the places where we don’t work, for all places are connected; it is clear by now that we cannot exempt one place from our ruin of another. The name of our proper connection to the earth is “good work,” for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is done; it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing. Good work is always modestly scaled, for it cannot ignore either the nature of individual places or the differences between places, and it always involves a sort of religious humility, for not everything is known. Good work can be defined only in particularity, for it must be defined a little differently for every one of the places and every one of the workers on the earth. The name of our present society’s connection to the earth is “bad work” – work that is only generally and crudely defined, that enacts a dependence that is ill understood, that enacts no affection and gives no honor. Every one of us is to some extent guilty of this bad work. This guilt does not mean that we must indulge in a lot of breast-beating and confession; it means only that there is much good work to be done by every one of us and that we must begin to do it.

Wrestling through her introspection has coloured  her views of life, people and relationships. And working it out, with all the excitement, pain and fear that went with it, has given her a strong sense of herself. She knows who she is because of it. Not only that: it has given her a strong bond to those who are also, in different ways and for different reasons, disconnected from society. ironically, she is connected to the Aaron's and Kyra's of this world by the fact that they are each of them disconnected.

Overthinking arises when you are disconnected - disconnected from the body, mind, soul, society and the nature.

You feel sexual excitement in genitals, horror in stomach, sadness and happiness in heart, physical pain in various parts of the body. What if you start feeling all of this at just one place: In your forehead. Then nothing can hurt you or control you. Even if somebody burns your body, you will feel nothing but a sweet sensation in forehead. It's possible even in 21st century. Disconnect from this crappy society and seek.

Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it's a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. "Atheistic humanism" became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumanism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction.

A society that fails to value communality — our need to belong, to care for one another, and to feel caring energy flowing toward us — is a society facing away from the essence of what it means to be human. Pathology cannot but ensue. To say so is not a moral assertion but an objective assessment. "When people start to lose a sense of meaning and get disconnected, that's where disease comes from, that's where breakdown in our health — mental, physical, social health — occurs," the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Bruce Perry told me. If a gene or virus were found that caused the same impacts on the population's well-being as disconnection does, news of it would bellow from front-page headlines. Because it transpires on so many levels and so pervasively, we almost take it for granted; it is the water we swim in. We are steeped in the normalized myth that we are, each of us, mere individuals striving to attain private goals. The more we define ourselves that way, the more estranged we become from vital aspects of who we are and what we need to be healthy. Among psychologists there is a wide-ranging consensus about what our core needs consist of. These have been variously listed as: - belonging, relatedness, or connectedness; - autonomy: a sense of control in one's life; - mastery or competence; - genuine self-esteem, not dependent on achievement, attainment, acquisition, or valuation by others; - trust: a sense of having the personal and social resources needed to sustain one through life; - purpose, meaning, transcendence: knowing oneself as part of something larger than isolated, self-centered concerns, whether that something is overtly spiritual or simply universal/humanistic, or, given our evolutionary origins, Nature. "The statement that the physical and mental life of man, and nature, are interdependent means simply that nature is interdependent with itself, for man is a part of nature." So wrote a twenty-six-year-old Karl Marx in 1844. None of this tells you anything you don't already know or intuit. You can check your own experience: What's it like when each of the above needs is met? What happens in your mind and body when it's lacking, denied, or withdrawn?

Disconnect from society’s pressure to conform. Do things your own way.

Jeanette once told me that video games and mainstream entertainment were like marketing tools for the confused and disconnected youth of America. She believed society and its moral center, its sense of propriety and right and wrong, black and white, had become so corrupted on a basic level that one day all decent people would become overwhelmed and disconnect from society in Howard Hughes fashion. You had to worry when someone as smart and inherently decent as Jeanette Miller began talking like that.

And this is what’s so dangerous about a society that coddles itself more and more from the inevitable discomforts of life: we lose the benefits of experiencing healthy doses of pain, a loss that disconnects us from the reality of the world around us. You

consumer societies are stealing children away from their kith, their family of nature, in a steady alienation. This is not about some luxury, a hobby, a bit of playtime in the garden. This is about the longest, deepest necessity of the human spirit to know itself in nature, and about the homesickness children feel, whose genesis is so obvious but so little examined. Writer on Native American spirituality Linda Hogan describes the term susto as a sickness of soul caused by disconnection from nature and cured by 'the great without.

Many of the people who regularly feed and cultivate relationships with pigeons are themselves on the fringes of society. They are disconnected from other people due to poverty, limited language skills, or mental illness, but they form deep emotional connections with the birds.

There was a rush of expectation with the vast transformation of our society by social media and by the internet itself. To be sure, we have greater access to each other now, we can find each other more easily, but we can also annoy each other more incessantly, intrude more abruptly, and use and abuse each other more profoundly by bombarding folks with unwanted commercial, religious, political, sentimentalized, and trivial chaff. (Wherever the human imprint advances, the Shadow follows apace.) For all the connectivity the modern electronic world offers, and I do appreciate that gift, I also perceive that we are more atomized, more disconnected from each other than ever before.

The lack of wisdom in our present society poses a critical threat to the quality of our lives. A substantial disconnect exists in our world today which results in a massive division between generations. The division does not interrupt economic, social, or even political channels. It’s a divide that separates one generation from the wisdom of an earlier

She felt weak and utterly forlorn. She wished some help would come from outside. But in the whole world there was no help. Society was terrible because it was insane. Civilized society is insane. Money and so-called love are its two great manias; money a long way first. The individual asserts himself in his disconnected insanity in these two modes: money and love.

We find the same situation in the economy. On the one hand, the battered remnants of production and the real economy; on the other, the circulation of gigantic amounts of virtual capital. But the two are so disconnected that the misfortunes which beset that capital – stock market crashes and other financial debacles – do not bring about the collapse of real economies any more. It is the same in the political sphere: scandals, corruption and the general decline in standards have no decisive effects in a split society, where responsibility (the possibility that the two parties may respond to each other) is no longer part of the game. This paradoxical situation is in a sense beneficial: it protects civil society (what remains of it) from the vicissitudes of the political sphere, just as it protects the economy (what remains of it) from the random fluctuations of the Stock Exchange and international finance. The immunity of the one creates a reciprocal immunity in the other – a mirror indifference. Better: real society is losing interest in the political class, while nonetheless availing itself of the spectacle. At last, then, the media have some use, and the ‘society of the spectacle’ assumes its full meaning in this fierce irony: the masses availing themselves of the spectacle of the dysfunctionings of representation through the random twists in the story of the political class’s corruption. All that remains now to the politicians is the obligation to sacrifice themselves to provide the requisite spectacle for the entertainment of the people.

The modern urban-industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth. At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and expert sets up a profit-making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation. Together, these disconnections add up to a condition of critical ill health, which we suffer in common—not just with each other, but with all other creatures. Our economy is based upon this disease. Its aim is to separate us as far as possible from the sources of life (material, social, and spiritual), to put these sources under the control of corporations and specialized professionals, and to sell them to us at the highest profit.

Anson laid bare his ulterior motives for favoring the removal of Japanese farmers, but like all strategic racists, he also at least partially subscribed to the racial antipathies he endeavored to exploit. From here, motives become more attenuated as persons adopt particular ideas depending not on their material interests but on how these notions protect their self-image and, for the privileged, confirm society’s basic fairness. For instance, the dominance of colorblindness today surely ties back to motives, not on the fully conscious level, but in many whites being drawn to conceptions of race that affirm their sense of being moral persons neither responsible for nor benefited by racial inequality. Colorblindness offers whites racial expiation: they cannot be racist if they lack malice; nor can they be responsible for inequality, since this reflects differences in group mores. Colorblindness also compliments whites on a superior culture that explains their social position. In addition it empathizes with whites as racism’s real victims when government favors minorities through affirmative action or welfare payments. Finally, colorblindness affirms that whites are moral when they oppose measures to promote integration because it’s allegedly their principled objection to any use of race that drives them, not bias. Colorblindness has not gained adherents because of its analytic insight (that race is completely disconnected from social practices blinks reality); rather, it thrives because it comforts whites regarding their innocence, reassures them that their privilege is legitimate, commiserates with their victimization, and hides from them their hostility toward racial equality.

Sexual taboos are man’s invention. Sexual repression and misogyny are the result of a paternalistic society with a fundamental disconnect from its own basic nature. From angry, gynophobic mullahs hell-bent on covering women up to their eyeballs, to the denizens of Vatican City, who look and dress like a bunch of drag queens, some truly perverted individuals have been allowed to make the sex rules for everyone else. Marriage

My attitude toward woman’s wretched position in society and my ideas about all the changes necessary there, were interesting to you, weren’t they, in so far as they made for literature? That my particular emotional orientation, in wrenching myself free from patterned standardized feminine feelings, enabled me to do some passably good work with poetry—all that was fine, wasn’t it—something for you to sit up and take notice of! And you saw in one of my first letters to you (the one you had wanted to make use of, then, in the Introduction to your Paterson) an indication that my thoughts were to be taken seriously, because that too could be turned by you into literature, as something disconnected from life. But when my actual personal life crept in, stamped all over with the very same attitudes and sensibilities and preoccupations that you found quite admirable as literature—that was an entirely different matter, wasn’t it? No longer admirable, but, on the contrary, deplorable, annoying, stupid, or in some other way unpardonable; because those very ideas and feelings which make one a writer with some kind of new vision, are often the very same ones which, in living itself, make one clumsy, awkward, absurd, ungrateful, confidential where most people are reticent, and reticent where one should be confidential, and which cause one, all too often, to step on the toes of other people’s sensitive egos as a result of one’s stumbling earnestness or honesty carried too far.

A deep disconnect exists between the feminists in the Western countries and the feminists in the Muslim-majority countries. Growing up as a first-generation Canadian in a fundamentalist Muslim family, I spent a lot of time being caught between those two worlds. At home I was taught that from the time I was nine years old, I needed to wear a hijab to protect myself from men who wanted to molest me. From my society, I learned that this is called victim blaming. At home I was taught that good, pure, clean girls wore hijab, and filthy, loose, despicable girls did not. From my society, I learned that was called slut shaming.

Sociologically speaking, American democracy is the perfect specimen of a dysfunctional democracy. When a supremacist president incites racist hate and terrorist violence, out of bigotry and boneheadedness, his stoneage supporters consider it a matter of pride, but when an egalitarian president so much as mispronounces a few words due to his medical stammer, he is deemed incompetent by those people. Which only goes to show, no matter how much a nation tries to right the wrongs of its inhuman origin, there will always be some people who'd consider those inhumanities as their proud heritage, and would go to any length to maintain those customs and beliefs as such. And this is not an American phenomenon, it's a worldwide phenomenon - and everywhere it manifests under the same banner of tradition, heritage and nationalism. That is why I say to you - until we oust every last trace of nationalism from every corner of this world, we shall never in a million years have a genuinely integrated and upward-moving society. Either nationalism or humanity, you cannot have both - either borders or peace, you cannot have both - either guns or children, you cannot have both - either heritage or history, you cannot have both. If history comes as a blow to your heritage, then by all means, live in your bubble - but do so as a prehistoric ape disconnected from the civilizing world. You cannot call yourself a civilized human and at the same time refuse to acknowledge human suffering. Your uncivilization may be your prerogative, but before you turn that uncivilization into the norm, you shall find a hundred MLKs, Baldwins, Mayas and Naskars standing as obstacle to your insanity.

Innovation comes, in science, by the people who are able to pull something apart with such insight and knowledge that they can then innovate, and they can create new — it’s how we make progress. And I think the same is true in the justice sector, that we cannot make progress in creating a more just society, healthier communities, if we allow ourselves to be disconnected from the people who are most vulnerable — from the poor, the neglected, the incarcerated, the condemned. If you’re trying to make policies in the criminal justice space but have never met someone who’s in a jail or prison, you haven’t been to a jail or prison, you’re going to fail. I think sometimes, when you’re trying to do justice work, when you’re trying to make a difference, when you’re trying to change the world, the thing you need to do is get close enough to people who are falling down, get close enough to people who are suffering, close enough to people who are in pain, who’ve been discarded and disfavored — to get close enough to wrap your arms around them and affirm their humanity and their dignity.

It’s a gorgeous oddity of our existence – our loneliness is not caused by being on our own. Indeed, loneliness is best cured with aloneness, which is to say, a meaningful connection to ourselves. Moral loneliness is when the supply cord to connection, caring and doing the right thing by each other and the planet has been severed. We can’t tap into the point of life, to what matters. When you don’t know your true north, the disorientation is terrifying. You are suspended in a vague and directionless vastness. The Greeks argued that this kind of moral loneliness led to acedia – a state of spiritual apathy or listless sloth. The 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas described it as “the sorrow of the world”, this moral “asleepness.” As I ventured into the early stages of this journey, I quickly realized it was at the root of our disconnect from this one wild and precious life we’d been granted. And that we’d be revisiting it many times over. It’s an evolutionary response to shut down and go numb like this. When we can’t fight or flee from a horrible threat, we lie down and play dead – we freeze. Of course, freezing or numbing out can work as a survival trick for a while, but if we remain asleep, particularly as a society, we face our collective demise.

Where people are striving, busy and stressed, emotions are denied or derided. The head and heart then separate, and this allows people and governments to act with great cruelty, resulting in violence, abuse and war. Today, in striving discontent, we move the world forward with science and technology, but rape the Earth of minerals and oil and are careless of pollution. Where there is no reverence for nature, there is a feeling of separation from it, which makes people feel they have the right to change it, genetically modify it, clone it or damage it by chopping down its forests and polluting its rivers. Disconnection from the heart, and its consequences of cruelty, slavery and injustice, also took place when Atlantis devolved, but even in their most dire times they rejected the idea of using fossil fuel because of the damage it would cause to the planet. However, in the darkest days they did clone, genetically modify, and implant people and plants. Right-brain societies are inevitably child centred, for children are considered to be a gift to the community. In Atlantis, the little ones were loved, honoured and included, even in elementary decision making. It was considered to be a collective responsibility to pass on the traditions and wisdom to the next generation, for they had no individual wealth to leave as a legacy. EXERCISE:

With global advances in technology, our society is becoming more engrossed in personal gadgets than in the world around them. We hold our phones more than we hold real conversations, and each other. We’re so busy looking down at screens and engaging in digital interactions that we forget about the environment around us. It seems people would rather experience an event through a camera than use their eyes to enjoy what’s in front of them. Concert audiences are lit up by the shimmering of phone screens. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t capture mementos of these precious times. But living through a screen prevents us from being present in the moment. As we continue to distract ourselves from the present moment, we become more anxious, fearful and stressed. Worries overwhelm us in our everyday lives because we’re now conditioned to live elsewhere, rather than right here. What’s more, we ignore the people around us and our personal relationships pay the price. This is often why we feel distressed, disconnected and lost. Our vibration is lowered because we feel like we’re in some imagined situation that doesn’t match up with our lived reality. We relive moments of the past, fear the future and create obstacles in our minds. We devote creative energy to destructive ideas – and this invites turmoil into our lives. Now is the only time you have. Once your past is gone, it doesn’t exist, no matter how many times you recreate it mentally. The future hasn’t even arrived; but again, you keep taking yourself there mentally. Tomorrow comes disguised as today and some of us don’t even notice. Nothing is more valuable than the present moment because you can never get it back.

What pushed me back to technology wasn’t the communication or logistical inefficiencies, though they certainly added to the speed of my reunion, but rather the malignant sense of missing out on the world. Without social media, I’d become erased and uninvited, defriended and devalued, ostracized from an insistently mobile society; I was the guy everyone avoided, for fear he discover that he hadn’t been asked to the party, and this constant disconnection felt like an unreachable itch in the middle of my back.

Look - what society sells us is that you need self-esteem, motivation and the right self-image to even get started with achieving your goals and being happy. Now here’s the joke - you gain your self-esteem and self-confidence thanks to your effective action and the result it brings, not the other way around. You can actually start with ZERO or almost NEGATIVE self-confidence and a totally wrecked self-image (that’s what I did). That’s a result - not the cause. Do you lack self-worth, motivation and blah-blah-blah or what-not? Disconnect your behavior from your emotional life.

We must remember that the Old Testament prophets were guided by the Law of God, the Bible. They did not call Israel to new ways, but to old ways. They reminded their leaders of who God had always been, and what he had always said. In the same way, activism disconnected from Scripture is not prophetic. The true prophet, like the true Christian activist, calls people back to the God of the Bible. Unless our vision for society is grounded in God’s Word, we aren’t prophets. We’re just political agitators.

Identity politics thus engenders its own dynamic, by which societies divide themselves into smaller and smaller groups by virtue of their particular “lived experience” of victimization. Confusion over identity arises as a condition of living in the modern world. Modernization means constant change and disruption, and the opening up of choices that did not exist before. It is mobile, fluid, and complex. This fluidity is by and large a good thing: over generations, millions of people have been fleeing villages and traditional societies that do not offer them choices, in favor of ones that do. But the freedom and degree of choice that exist in a modern liberal society can also leave people unhappy and disconnected from their fellow human beings. They find themselves nostalgic for the community and structured life they think they have lost, or that their ancestors supposedly once possessed. The authentic identities they are seeking

First, creativity thrives on isolation and disconnection. Studies of creativity for two decades have found a consistent pattern: Those facing adversity often suffer from social exclusion, a sense of being ostracized from society, and a feeling of being out of sync or out of touch with those around them. These attitudes, in turn, give these individuals more freedom to take risks, to experiment, to explore means of expression outside the social mainstream.

A classless society is the direction history has taken. We have the convulsions of the communist horizon always before us. No one can escape from one system without being immediately obliged to adopt another system that is just as closed, or more so. If the East is post-communist and the West is post-capitalist then what is the world?

The modern urban-industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth. At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and expert sets up a profit-making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation. Together, these disconnections add up to a condition of critical ill health, which we suffer in common -- not just with each other, but with all other creatures. Our economy is based upon this disease. Its aim is to separate us as far as possible from the sources of life (material, social, and spiritual), to put these sources under the control of corporations and specialized professionals, and to see them to us at the highest profit. It fragments the Creation and sets the fragments into conflict with one another. For the relief of the suffering that comes of this fragmentation and conflict, our economy proposes, not health, but vast "cures" that further centralize power and increase profits... Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health -- and create profitable diseases and dependencies -- by failing to see the direction connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight. And such a solution, unlike the typical industrial solution, does not cause new problems.

These days the natural world is something foreign. We’ve built a human society that is almost completely separate from nature, an artificial world designed to insulate and protect us from it. We’ve created our own isolated sphere of hurry and stress. One of the paradoxical and yet deeply connected results of that separation is that we’ve also become increasingly disconnected from our own inner lives.

Knowledge without heart disconnects the soul from society.

The real wrench in the works: we are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years. Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat, or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near-miraculous technical advances. But who is going, willingly, to engineer the former while we are still lacking any convincing, practical, affordable global strategy and technical means to pursue the latter? What will actually happen? The gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast, but in a democratic society no contest of ideas and proposals can proceed in rational ways without all sides sharing at least a modicum of relevant information about the real world, rather than trotting out their biases and advancing claims disconnected from physical possibilities.

In other words, addiction is a direct or indirect outgrowth of society; humans are becoming increasingly addicted not because some mutant addict gene is flooding the pool or because alcohol or addictive chemicals and behaviors are increasingly available, but because we are becoming more disconnected from our purpose, nature, culture, and each other.

if nowadays many people feel so unhappy, this is likely a result of their profound disconnection from themselves. The frenetic, overstimulated nature of this human-made society has overwhelmed and entranced their senses to such an extent that they have overlooked the needs and ambitions of their inner selves

She didn’t mention the one thing that made this almost impossible: the Rules. How was a witch to find a community of witches and non-witches who would embrace her when she was supposed to stay away from other witches, keep her life completely disconnected from theirs, and only see those other witches a few times a year?

They’d both been disconnected from society for their own personal reasons, and together they were breaking down each other’s walls. It was a beautiful beginning.

There is one problem, however, at least for alternative experiments of the American variety (and possibly some European as well), namely that we have no clear litmus test to determine which models are truly steady-state (non-expansionist) and which are business as usual hiding under “green wigs.” This latter trend is known as “greenwashing,” in which the language is hip and the bottom line remains profit. Thomas Friedman and Al Gore are major (and wealthy) players in this category, perpetuating the notion of “green corporations.” Other examples include a 2012 conference on “Sustainable Investing,” sponsored by Deepak Chopra, among others, which had as its slogans “Make Money and Make a Difference” and “Capitalism for a Democratic Society.” All of this is the attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too (or simply eat someone else’s cake); there is no real interest in disconnecting from growth, and it is growth that is the core of the problem. As Professor Magnuson tells us, while traveling around the U.S. to interview varous alternative businesses and experiments, he discovered that many of them were shams—capitalist wolves in green clothing.

school. In the late 1890s John Dewey warned of this emerging disconnect in School and Society and sought in his own educational approach to recover the relationship between formal learning and community life that had been disrupted in most schools: From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school. That is the isolation of the school—its isolation from life. When the child gets into the schoolroom he has to put out of his mind a large part of the ideas, interests, and activities that predominate in his home and

The inmates at CSP were different from our population of law-abiding citizens, but to place them on a different planet would be a mistake. There was no absolute disconnect between these men and the rest of society. Every one of us harbors a streak of dishonesty, of amorality, of suppressed violence. Given the right circumstances we all are capable of atrocious actions.

Disconnecting from one’s community is a personal choice, of course, but it ends up having social implications ["The Basement,” The Awl, Feb 5, 2015].

Barthes announced, “I am not lovingly gazing toward an Oriental essence—to me the Orient is a matter of indifference, merely providing a reserve of features whose manipulation—whose invented interplay— allows me to ‘entertain’ the idea of an unheard-of symbolic system, one altogether detached from our own.” The lesson of Japan for Barthes was “the possibility of difference, of a mutation, of a revolution in the propriety of symbolic systems.” Like Wilde, Barthes does not locate Japaneseness in a place called Japan. But if for Wilde Japaneseness offered a new way of seeing, for Barthes, more complexly, Japan offered a new way of seeing himself being seen, which resulted in a new relationship to language. About himself, Barthes wrote, “The author has never, in any sense, photographed Japan. Rather, he has done the opposite: Japan has starred him with any number of ‘flashes’; or better still, Japan has afforded him a situation of writing.” Japan allowed Barthes to “descend into the untranslatable . . . until everything Occidental in us totters and the rights of the ‘father tongue’ vacillate—that tongue which comes to us from our fathers and which makes us, in our turn, fathers and proprietors of a culture which, precisely, history transforms into ‘nature.’”3 Barthes’s growing sense of the “repressive value” of text as the “level” at which “the morality and ideology of a society are above all invested” animated his delight in a Japanese “situation” that allowed freedoms he associated with images to trump the authority of text in the West.4 Reflecting later on this book about the “system of signs I call Japan,” Barthes emphasized that it “occupied a moment in my life when I felt the necessity of entering completely into the signifier, i.e., of disconnecting myself from the ideological instance as signified, as the risk of the return of the signified, of theology, monologism, of law.

What are you?” “A secret society of the deranged, with anger issues and disconnect from the cruel world we live in,” one of the men answered on cue. “Here, we get revenge,” Peter announced. “We take the law into our own hands.” “Join us in bloodshed,” they all said in unison. “Unknown. Unspoken. Unseen.

The Humanitarian Nerd (Sonnet 1538) Machines have a tendency of disconnecting mind from society. Unless you're driven by a humane dream, silicon dreams only facilitate inhumanity. Worse than silicosis is silicon psychosis, Worse than septicemia es la indiferencia. Worse than writer's block is fighter's block, to settle in ice-age is insult of la conciencia. Before you master raspberry and arduino, learn to master common everyday humanity. If you're not burning with the fire to do good, there's no point to your gray's anatomy.

As I observe the passage of time, I find an increasing appreciation for the concept of departure from this realm, not from a place of sorrow, but rather from an evolving sense of disconnection from a civilization that appears to be loosening its hold on intellect and decorum. The vernacular and idioms humans employ are shifting, less focused on the conveyance of ideas and more on the provocation of reaction or disdain. It is perplexing to witness linguistic constructs, across various tongues like Spanish, being repurposed not for their original intent but as subtle derogations. My aversion has always been towards the trivialization of language through vulgarity or derision masquerading as cleverness, particularly when it belittles or scoffs. Once, I entertained notions of altering the societal fabric, aspiring to refine the dialogue, yet now I grasp the insight in transforming one's own essence instead. Perhaps the ultimate retreat lies not in relocating to another dimension but in transcending to a higher state of consciousness, where the cacophony of this world becomes merely a faint murmur.

The therapist says, “We need to bear in mind that in the context of ambiguous loss, ‘closure’ is a myth. It’s easy to succumb to intense societal pressure to ‘find closure,’ and this message is drummed home by the media, reinforced in movies and in novels. It’s echoed in comments from friends and family. We live in a society that places high value on resolving problems, on finding solutions, on ‘getting over’ things quickly. But when society is faced with people who are missing, there’s a disconnect, a discomfort. They don’t know how to cope with people who are missing loved ones, or with situations that actually have no answers or resolutions. We should not be forced to chase closure,” she warns. “What we need to find are ways to coexist with our complex feelings, and to always remember that our reactions are completely normal.” She glances at Jane. “They’re not a sign of personal weakness.

Integrity is distinct from authenticity. Integrity doesn’t require us to act out every private thought and feeling. Sometimes, counterintuitively, integrity requires a disconnect between our inner feelings and our outer conduct. But this disconnect exists to serve others. Integrity expresses itself in action based on deeply held core values—for example, the value of friendship and respecting those around us—rather than temporary feelings or selfish desire. When we find ourselves in a disagreement with a friend, spouse, or sibling, we will often bite our tongues instead of saying exactly how we feel. This is inauthentic. But it’s not hypocritical.

An enabling force of the Internet is hyperconnectivity in the global community. The unintended consequence is that we are allowing tech to govern who we are; leading to society which is disconnected from our local communities. - Tom Golway 2020

Beginning yo pay attention to my own inner ebb and flow has made me more sensitive to imbalances. It reveals the high cost of being always active in a society that fosters a toxic relationship with time, demanding a constant push toward an always out-of-reach fixed point or outcome on the horizon. Today's society puts a high price on productivity. It values consistency and stasis, not fluctuations of ebb and flow. To do nothing is shameful. So is bleeding. We're not just disconnected from each other and our environment, but from our own bodies. The equally important need for stillness and reflection gets lost.

In his account of postmodernity, Fredric Jameson describes the widespread failure of interpretation symptomatic of the society of enjoyment, a failure he links to the contemporary collapse of distance. This means, first of all, that we lack the ability not only to interpret events but even to locate ourselves in the world. According to Jameson, “this latest mutation in space—postmodern hyperspace—has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.” Unable to discover how our spatial world is organized—to perform what Jameson calls cognitive mapping—we experience events as random and disconnected. Cognitive mapping relies on the universalizing, seeing the necessity at work within the seeming randomness of events. But the ability to universalize is precisely what the society of enjoyment militates against. As a result, interpretation appears only in disguised forms. Jameson sees conspiracy theory as one of these forms. The conspiracy theorist attempts to interpret events, to plot their connection to the whole, and this act involves universalizing. Jameson says, “conspiracy theory (and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as a degraded attempt—through the figuration of advanced technology—to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system.” 2 Grasping the totality is impossible today because, paradoxically, global capitalism is authentically total: we can’t access the point beyond it that would allow us to see it as a totality. However, conspiracy theory makes an effort at universalizing, even if this effort involves a fallacious belief in its own transcendence. That is, the conspiracy theorist believes that she/he can attain the (impossible) perspective of an outsider, one looking at the contemporary world system from a point beyond it. But despite this fundamental error, the very prevalence of conspiracy theory indicates the extent to which the society of enjoyment resists the act of interpretation. Today, interpretation finds itself denigrated to such an extent that it appears only in the form of paranoia.

Interpretation operates by relating the particular to the universal, by taking a seemingly isolated event and seeing its larger importance. The universal provides the framework of meaning through which the particular acquires whatever sense it will acquire. Without the possibility of a reference to the universal, particular events lose their connection to the whole and thus take on the appearance of contingency. We can see this phenomenon at its most egregious in the contemporary attitude toward crime. People fear crime today in large part because it always threatens to take them by surprise. Rather than being the product of definite sociohistorical conditions, the criminal seems to emerge out of nowhere, strike, and then return to anonymity. As the victim (or potential victim) of the crime, I experience it as a wholly random act, disconnected with the functioning of the social order as a whole. What I experience most forcefully is the fact that the crime could have happened to anyone—that it could have happened to someone else just as easily as it happened to me. Certainly it is never anything that I did that triggered the crime—or at least such is my experience. Crimes appear, in other words, in almost every instance as particular acts without any link to the universal, without any connection to the social order in which they exist. One might have a theory about crime—blaming it on “liberal judges,” for instance—but when crime actually strikes, it seems random and irreducibly singular. Hence, it becomes impossible to interpret crime, to grasp particular crimes within their universal significance. 9 But nonetheless crime does have a universal significance, and it does emerge from localizable conditions, despite its appearance of isolation and particularity. In fact, one could convincingly argue that crime should be easier to understand within the current context of global capitalism than ever before in human history, simply because never before have those who live in squalor been bombarded on a daily basis with nonstop images of opulence. Making connections like this is increasingly difficult today, however, because subjects increasingly view their experience as an isolated, essentially private experience.

COLM O’GORMAN: I feel very, very strongly from my own professional perspective that if any organisation is seeking to advance the human rights of any group of individuals or population, it’s incredibly important that their positions are fully informed by an engagement with that population and with those people. So rights holders’ participation, and active rights holders’ participation, is incredibly important. And ensuring that your campaign and your calls are representative, and reflect what that rights-holder group actually want, as opposed to your assessment of it, even if you’re a member of that group, is absolutely vital. I think it’s fair to say that there was a disconnect between the case that was presented for civil partnership and the lived reality for LGBT people. Now, I don’t know if that was GLEN’s fault or even their responsibility – GLEN are GLEN, you know, they were an organisation doing a piece of work, and their structure is their structure, and their constitution is the way that they’re constituted, but I do think that there needed to be more of a considered engagement with the LGBT community in all of its diversity, you know? And it’s not white, middle-class, male, single, with concerns about pensions and inheritance and income tax and property. Those are very real concerns for people, but they’re very limited. They deny the reality of huge numbers of people. Absolutely women, and men who aren’t concerned with that. Again, it’s been really interesting in the context of the whole debate that we’ve had on prejudice [in early 2014] that you know one of the things that I think was most valuable about what Rory was certainly saying, and it’s something I feel very strongly too – prejudice is nobody’s dominion. Look at this community. Look at how this community treated lesbians. Look at the view of lesbians in this community. Or transgender people particularly. There’s no point in imagining or pretending that the LGBT community would be very different from wider society, and that power and influence wouldn’t be almost automatically in the hands of educated, middle-class, middle-aged men. That’s the way the world has been. And it’s changing thankfully, but it’s the way the world has been.

shame is rooted in our fear of disconnection. It’s a very painful, predictive kind of negative emotion: If I do not meet society’s expectations, then I will become isolated from and rejected by others.

Somehow, he argued, societies need to build or maintain backup systems that are disconnected from interdependent, fragile modern networks. Often, that means an analog alternative.

I see this work as soul activism, a form of deep resistance to the disconnected way in which our society has conditioned us to live. Grief is subversive, undermining our society’s quiet agreement that we will behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life force. It is riddled with energy, an acknowledgment of the erotic coupling with another soul, whether human, animal, plant, or ecosystem. It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed; it cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and still. We move in jangled, unsettled, and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us. It is truly an emotion that rises from soul.

I have said that science is impossible without faith. By this I do not mean that the faith on which science depends is religious in nature or involves the acceptance of any of the dogmas of the ordinary religious creeds, yet without faith that nature is subject to law there can be no science. No amount of demonstration can ever prove that nature is subject to law. For all we know, the world from the next moment on might be something like the croquet game in Alice in Wonderland, where the balls are hedgehogs which walk off, the hoops are soldiers who march to other parts of the field, and the rules of the game are made from instant to instant by the arbitrary decree of the Queen. It is to a world like this that the scientist must conform in totalitarian countries, no matter whether they be those of the right or of the left. The Marxist Queen is very arbitrary indeed, and the fascist Queen is a good match for her. What I say about the need for faith in science is equally true for a purely causative world and for one in which probability rules. No amount of purely objective and disconnected observation can show that probability is a valid notion. To put the same statement in other language, the laws of induction in logic cannot be established inductively. Inductive logic, the logic of Bacon, is rather something on which we can act than something which we can prove, and to act on it is a supreme assertion of faith. It is in this connection that I must say that Einstein's dictum concerning the directness of God is itself a statement of faith. Science is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith. A faith which we follow upon orders imposed from outside is no faith, and a community which puts its dependence upon such a pseudo-faith is ultimately bound to ruin itself because of the paralysis which the lack of a healthily growing science imposes upon it.

For decades, long before these new antidepressants were developed, we have been disconnecting—from each other, and from what matters. We have lost faith in the idea of anything bigger or more meaningful than the individual, and the accumulation of more and more stuff. When I was a child, Margaret Thatcher said, “There’s no such thing as society, only individuals and their families”—and, all over the world, her viewpoint won. We believed it—even those of us who thought we rejected it. I know this now, because I can see that when I became depressed, it didn’t even occur to me, for thirteen years, to relate my distress to the world around me. I thought it was all about me, and my head. I had entirely privatized my pain—and so had everyone I knew.

Modern man is an island, in a historical sense. Every society born of revolution is an island, and it is an island that floats, like a thin film on the surface of history. He is always moving, disconnected from all that came before him, and never holding still long enough to strike the roots necessary to pass something on to those who will come after.

We need to move away from the indoor society.

Indeed, the chemical imbalance story encourages us to think of ourselves as governed by the chemicals in our brains, with this chemical control seemingly disconnected from the many life events, that, at least according to past understandings of human nature, could be understood to dramatically alter one’s moods. We are mechanistic machines, and if our mood molecules are out of balance, with this imbalance presented to us as a “disease,” then it makes perfect sense to think that a solution must lie in a pill that fixes that imbalance. But is the claim true? Did scientific investigations find that this is indeed so? Every society would do itself a favor if it publicly sought to answer that question. In this book, Terry Lynch has done just that. And in so doing, he has told, step by step, how psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry constructed and sold a false story to the public. By the end of this book, readers will be asking a new question: How could this falsehood have endured for so long? As Terry Lynch writes, there was never good scientific reason to believe that antidepressants fixed a chemical imbalance in the brain. The hypothesis that this might be so arose from an understanding of how an antidepressant acted on the brain. Once researchers discovered that an antidepressant increased the activity of serotonin in the brain, they hypothesized that perhaps people suffering from depression had too little serotonin. However, researchers then investigated whether this was so, and discovered that it was not. Even by the early 1980s, researchers were saying that it didn’t appear that a deficit in serotonin activity was a cause of depression.

Quotas by country ensured that over two-thirds of immigrants were from just three countries—the U.K., Ireland, and Germany. Starting in 1965, all this would change. Some changes would be for the better. But some of the changes have not been. From that moment forward, U.S. immigration policy has gradually become disconnected from the interests and views of Americans. The Immigration Act of 1965 is a now largely overlooked part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society agenda. But the president, unveiling it at Liberty Island in New York, called it “one of the most important acts of this Congress and of this administration.”20 He was not exaggerating.21

Winston Churchill once said "We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us". In a broader context, we have shaped our technology to achieve greater productivity, responsiveness and hyperconnectivity in the global community. The unintended consequence is that our technology is now playing a greater role in defining who we are by shaping our culture creating an "on-demand" society that is disconnected from our local communities.

Play in common society and succeed in the game it sells you but disconnect from it often, so you’re never really owned by it. Because the sport the majority is playing is only an illusion—sort of a waking dream—that too many good people are donating the best mornings of their finest days to as they put money over meaning, profits over people, popularity over integrity, being busy over family and achievement over loving the basic miracles of the now.

And this is what’s so dangerous about a society that coddles itself more and more from the inevitable discomforts of life: we lose the benefits of experiencing healthy doses of pain, a loss that disconnects us from the reality of the world around us.

Though we have been trained as psychologists, we have each found it necessary to defect from professional interpretations focused entirely on individuals and families, and on mental constructs separated from the cultural, social, and economic worlds in which they are embedded. We do not want families to assume that the role of psychology is to help individuals and families adapt to the status quo when this present order contributes so massively to human misery, psychological or otherwise. Our psychology should not exist in a vacuum of disconnected theory, where classrooms, research, and clinical encounters are considered apart from conflicts and suffering in society, where personal history is severed from the historical context and social institutions one has inherited.

We all can become magicians of sorts. But to experience this higher reality I’m speaking of—to really find it—you’ll need to leave the world a lot. Play in common society and succeed in the game it sells you but disconnect from it often, so you’re never really owned by it. Because the sport the majority is playing is only an illusion—sort of a waking dream—that too many good people are donating the best mornings of their finest days to as they put money over meaning, profits over people, popularity over integrity, being busy over family and achievement over loving the basic miracles of the now.

Buckingham argues that young people's lack of interest in news and their disconnection from politics reflects their perception of disempowerment. "By and large, young people are not defined by society as political subjects, let alone as political agents. Even in the areas of social life

Hardly anyone has weakened democracy from within as much as the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump. But it would be uninteresting, predictable, and unjust to write about his failings without even briefly illuminating the other side of the coin. The polarization of American society is certainly not only or even primarily his work. Left-wing politics has contributed its share too, by being increasingly disconnected from the priorities and needs of large parts of the population and full of self-righteousness. Also, if one disregards Trump’s narcissistic self-dramatization and an erratic political style that shows little respect for democratic institutions, one sees an administration that made three important course corrections: the economic decoupling from dictatorships, especially China; the growing pressure on Europe to fund and strengthen NATO; and a critical stance against the abusive market-dominating practices of Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and, most importantly, Chinese surveillance tools and platforms. These policies have all been continued in Joe Biden’s presidency. In style and language, their differences are vast; in substance, strikingly few. Underplaying Trump’s leadership on these fronts does no favors to a substantive critique of his democracy-damaging legacy. From the beginning of his presidential bid, Donald Trump used aggressive and incendiary language, presented simplistic worldviews, and pointedly depicted his opponents as the enemy (US, the good guys, versus THEM, the bad guys). This is the emotional fuel of polarization. His rapid rise was based in part on relativizing racism, and throughout his term, Trump downplayed any cases of police violence against blacks, including the murder of George Floyd in 2020, as isolated incidents. He called protests against racism “un-American.” Deeply associated with Donald Trump’s administration are the terms “fake news” and “alternative facts.” And it is here that lie the most dangerous, democracy-damaging legacies of his time in office. Fake news has been around as long as news has been around. For thousands of years, it spread as rumors in the marketplaces and gossip behind closed doors. Today, it spreads globally within seconds on social media. So fake news is not new. It’s just become more dangerous. And it becomes a problem for democracy when social groups, political parties, or NGOs accuse the other side of falsifying facts and label facts that do not serve their own agenda as fake. Trump not only reinforced this tendency, he elevated it in his political communications and campaigns.