Social cohesion

The K-Landnews team has some recurring themes in the blog. Granted, they may not be obvious if the first few posts you come across are photos of old cars in Uruguay, snarky puns, or barely coherent rants.

Among all the breathless posts poking fun at the reality show of life, you should find a common thread - if we understand what we are doing - a general theme: that people are people with very similar fundamental needs and desires but hugely different ways to achieve those, some not so smart, some just brutal and vicious, some well meant but ineffective, some not well intentioned but with surprisingly humane outcomes.

Much of what we put into bytes on this blog is colored by the passage of time, that's what you get for not being twenty any more. Or, as we call it "the beginning of history" view of life. History, despite the books, movies and philosophical tomes, starts on a personal level with each of us rediscovering the world as we grow into the fatal, eventually terminal state of adulthood.

We happen to have observed the past decade plus and think that we are seeing a more oppressive environment than before. Which may be utter rubbish to you but seems real enough to us under a number of metrics.

Based on the premise that social pressure has increased and that control has increased, our little blog voice says: people are trying to do the right thing, but....

If you try to solve everything by piling on pressure, you will have to pile it on ever more because people will stop cooperating.

Some will scale back cooperation consciously, like the friend who found "The physical keys to BART transit" on the streets and turned them in to BART instead of going to the media with them.

The result is a weakening of social cohesion. 

Imagine, for example, some software source code from a vital US Department of Defense project leaves the country inadvertently, because people make mistakes. If the person on the receiving end is someone who lives an "okay life", that is to say trusted enough, treated well enough, the likely result of the mistake will be responsible safeguarding of the software.

If, on the other hand, the person on the receiving end is treated badly by his or her manager [weak social cohesion], bad things are more likely to happen.

Corporate security, law enforcement and those whose default mode is "distrust and control" might claim in this example that the threat of punishment for disclosure is an efficient deterrent against the software falling into the wrong hands.

What happened?

Nothing. The source code was kept safe. Social cohesion worked one of its billions of daily miracles.

Of course, the example could be completely made up.

This would make it perfect for infuriating those among us who can not handle the uncertainty of depending on complete strangers in almost everything we do.