Wellness Calendar: Sunday 27 April

Splendid isolation vs society

Imagine you end up washed ashore on an island with no other human inhabitant. You are in total, splendid isolation. To help you survive and thrive on this island, you are likely to need all of these things: your capacity to think. Your capacity to feel. Your capacity to do things. Your organismic self (from your cells to your organs to your nerves and your senses). Your survival instinct. You will be marooned on this island for 10 years, after which you will be rescued…

Now imagine you have ended up back in the same place you lived in before you took your ill-fated adventure across the seas. You are now surrounded by lots of inhabitants. To help you survive and thrive in this society, you’re likely to need pretty much all of the things you needed on the island. But it’s quite likely you will also need or need to be aware of most of the things from the list below.

Morality. Economics. Law. Duty. Education. Health services. Obedience. War. Social services. Normality. Conflict. Armed forces. Governance. Opinions. Values. Identity. Politics. Beliefs. Power. Drugs. Race. Control. Patriotism. Racism. Justice. Intelligence. Sex. Consent. Injustice. Advertisements. Sexism. Punishment. The media. Norms. Family. Work. Authority. Friendship. Crime. Bigotry. Money. Police. Relationships. Parenting. Recycling. Inequality. Popular culture. Violence. Religion.
Housing. Voting. Famine. Alcohol. Elections. Truth. Environment. Sexuality. Freedom. Pollution. Gender. Prison.

What a minefield to have to navigate! And no doubt that’s just the start of all the things you’ll be expected to get your head around in the name of social conditioning, the definition of which is: society training its citizens to act in a way that’s generally considered to be agreeable and acceptable.

So how are you going to cope with all of this stuff, having lived alone on an island for years? Are you going to be able to re-learn the teaching of your society?

What if you can’t be conditioned, because you’ve become too wild, too much your own unique, individual person? What do you think would happen next? Would you fail? Fall on hard times? Get arrested? Would you become isolated from your own kind? Would you wish you were back on the island again, even though you were so lonely there?

This is a roundabout way of getting you thinking about the demands your society places on you. Or put another way: how much of yourself is governed by your society?

Save to My SD scrapbook