Executive Summary

• The Destructive Practices To Stop Doing
• The Regenerative Behaviors To Do More Of
• Getting The Foundational Pieces In Place
• The Payoff, For Both You & Society

If you have not yet read Part 1: We Need a Social Revolution available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part 1, we compared non-hierarchical, bottoms-up secular social revolutions with hierarchical, top-down political and technological revolutions managed by the state and corporate sector.  Next, we surveyed the erosion of social connectedness and social capital, and asked who benefited from this fraying of the social order.  While certain players derive some benefit from political divisiveness and from the sale of technologies that undermine authentic connectedness, it seems that much of the social-order decay is collateral damage—destruction that wasn’t intentional.

How can we strengthen or repair our own connections and social fabric in such a disintegrative era?

There are two basic approaches: stop participating in destructive dynamics, and assemble the foundational pieces of a connected social life.

The First Step: Stop Consuming Poison

If we use physical health as an analogy for social health, the first step towards improved health is stop consuming poison, i.e. stop destroying one’s health.

In the realm of decaying social relations, the poisons are readily apparent:

• The mass media, with its dependence on hysteria, fear, group-think and obsession with virtue-signaling as publicly displayed proof of one’s fealty to righteousness.

The mass media and social media both substitute passive watching and clicking for doing things in the real world via active participation.

• Smartphones, when they cease to be occasional means of communication and become addictive: those who take their phones to bed, interrupt sex to check their phones (yes, studies have found this to be disturbingly common), ignore live conversations to respond to texts, etc., have a monkey on their back.