What happened to humanity?

Photography/Writing By A.R.Arthur

A free form social commentary reflection on social relations, Gen Z and the collapse of reality.

In the past, as we always hear from previous generations and see presented in the media, including previous generations who now no longer necessarily apply the same historical or anecdotal evidence they discuss, that people were once a lot more giving, a lot more friendly, a lot nicer. People would check in on each other. People would check in on their neighbours.

People would give each other Christmas cards or Eid gifts, or whatever the religious background of the neighbour or the area was. People were a lot more welcoming and open, and not even just open, just human. If you were sick, or they heard you were very sick, or they heard something about you, they would come and say, “Oh, how are you doing? Are you okay?” They would send you a message. Now there is an ugliness, I think, that has come to pervade much of the modern era. And I have to unfortunately get very poignant when I say that my generation, Gen Z, I think perpetuates it the worst as the youngest or newest generation coming into adulthood. This article will look at civic and social sense, the boundaries of society, and what has now become a community-less community, or a community-less husk of what a community used to be. Society is based on social cooperation, communities, and the social worlds which humans inhabit together, not just individually. Individuality comes as part of that collectivity.

This article will also touch on the idea that everyone wants to be part of the village, or everyone wants to be the villager who gets helped, but nobody wants to be the person in the village who has to make the sacrifice. Everyone wants to get what they can and is grateful for it, or, in most cases, isn't grateful for it, but they do not want to be part of the inconvenience. And finally, we have to ask where we go from here. Has hyper-individualism truly become the final death knell to humanity, to social cohesion, to social development, and, of course, to the maintenance of society at large? Or have we become so accustomed to societal developments that we have forgotten our own power? Perhaps returning to an era where cooperation exists, while modern developments in social thinking can still exist alongside it, could allow us to live in a world truly on the path to a utopia.

Everyone wants, but does not want to give. We live in an era now where, societally, people no longer want to reciprocate. They openly say to you, “We don't want to. We don't want to do things.” Or, “Our mental health is more important.” Or, “Oh, we can't be bothered. We're too tired.” Or, “Everyone's just busy.” But they will be the first people to make sweeping statements about their own inability to contribute to social engagement, friendship, partnership, relationships, or familial relationships, and then demand that those same social rituals be maintained for them. “How could you forget my birthday?” “How could you forget Christmas?” “How could you not maintain these things?” It becomes a question of maintaining a certain level of social engagement that suits the individual.

What I'm talking about in particular here is the idea that a lot of relationships have become quite superficial and very transactional. We no longer have friendships that necessarily stand the test of time. People will take the slightest offence and stop talking to someone forever. I'm not talking about strong views, nor am I talking about situations where there is genuine and serious tension. There is a lot of tension, I think, between Gen Z and other generations, and I will say that whilst I don't think most of the criticism levelled at Gen Z is fair, because I've heard this criticism since I was literally seven years old, I also don't think we can pretend Gen Z is entirely separate from the problem. I am older Gen Z. I was being criticised for the supposed failures of my generation from an early age, when I had no meaningful ability to impact or affect any of the things for which I was being blamed. It shows you something about the hypocrisy and hatred that can sometimes be directed towards younger generations.

Humans are addicted to this idea of fleeting youth and when they see it before them it places their own mortality at the fore of their thinking. This also ties back to the massive industry surrounding aging, beauty standards and of course, the media perverse obsession with the infantilisation and replication of youth at all costs.

However, I do think a lot of Gen Z also perpetuates these behaviours. For example, I know multiple men who seem to think it is normal to only have friends on demand, when they want them, when they are up to it, when they want to call, when they are all right, when they are free. There is no real reciprocity. And it is not just a local thing or a national thing. It is something I see repeatedly. There are, of course, many women who do this too, but this also ties into the crisis of masculinity and the male loneliness epidemic. I've said in a lot of videos before on my own social media that I don't believe in the male loneliness epidemic because men make their own loneliness. These are issues within society. Hyper-individualism, selfishness, and the structures surrounding them also stem from patriarchal control, patriarchal capitalism, and the maintenance and spread of patriarchal domination globally.

So, I think the idea of having a village, even in itself, is flawed. That is something we are starting to understand now. Even the idea of the village in our conceptualisation of it is typically masculinised, because the vast majority of village-based societies, or our understanding of villages, are based off patriarchal views of those societies: men going off to fight wars and bring home food, and women caring for children at home, within the village, for example. So what does it mean when we say everyone wants to be part of the village, but nobody wants to do the work of the village? Even that idea itself has to be questioned because of the patriarchal and capitalist connotations that have become attached to it. When you start to consider this, you can understand that the very framework through which we understand society, sociology, and ultimately humanity, is flawed and has been changed and amended by the very ideologies we are trying to move away from. It is another point that is particularly intriguing.

It is also very important to acknowledge that a variety of our social interactions nowadays are transactional. However, this transactional nature is not simply the result of individual behaviour. It is furthered by the processes through which we live. For example, it is very difficult to maintain traditional ideas of a village or a community when everything is so rapid in speed, and when time and space are so compressed. The work of Anthony Giddens, Jean Baudrillard, and a variety of other hyper-realist and postmodern thinkers speaks to this. How can we now seek to even be individualised when the very world in which we are individualised, the hyper-real digital landscape, is one of interconnectivity? And how, at the same time, can we claim society or claim to be in a true community in the truest sense of the term when those communities are imagined communities themselves? People like Benedict Anderson and Stuart Hall have touched on imagined communities, both within a more sociological context and, of course, within the context of nation states.

However, I think it is important to acknowledge that these imagined communities go beyond these macro assumptions. They are micro-entities as well. My social world, my TikTok, or the Fahmidan world, is a social imagined community to some extent, and is a small microcosm social world. It isn't as simple as just dividing and conquering.

Therefore, when I say to people that everyone wants to be in a village, but no one wants to be a villager, it goes deeper than simply demanding assistance, care, or support that one does not reciprocate. There are a variety of other factors.

Of course, we can touch on the patriarchal elements. We can talk about straight men in particular, who benefit the most from men who perpetuate these ideas. We can give anecdotal evidence. But we can also go deeper. We can look at the very fundamental basis of these ideas, ideologically and socially, and at their very fundamental conception. How did these ideas come about? The idea of an imagined community in itself is another example that can, at least, be attuned to supporting capitalism. The imagined community of the nation state, for example, supports the maintenance of capitalism because nation states maintain the global capitalist patriarchal order. There is a strong and inherent thread that goes across everything, and it means that we are in an era where hyper-individualism isn't only something to be afraid of. It could be the very difference between a life lived and a life not. People now say, “Oh, well, you can only get a job through networking. You can only do these things through communities.” I firmly believe in meritocracy and meritocratic development. That's something I've always advocated for, both academically, socially, and in my writing career. However, it is important to acknowledge that it is the very communities from which people have escaped, and the notion of community, the notion of the village, that has made even that networking so difficult because people no longer have the communities behind them, imagined or real.

To note, when imagined communities are considered in this context, I am not referring to made-up fairy-tale communities. We're referring to communities imagined and made by people on a day-to-day basis. The community that Fahmidan has maintained is a community created on a day-to-day basis. Your community, if you have one online, or if you're a writer or a reader, is maintained every single day through the ways that you participate in it, and the way those interactions then branch out into other people's communities and circles. It is a very complex mix of things, but it is symptomatic of hyper-real postmodernity.

There is also a boundaries problem. People now use boundaries as an excuse for refusing ordinary reciprocity, but also as a means of extracting from others. I genuinely believe it is a calculated thing nowadays. People see how bad the world is, how difficult the social world is, how difficult the economy is, and the new form of grasping behaviour becomes how much you can use your social capital to benefit yourself without helping others. It does not have to be a physical thing. It could be having people get you a job, sending out requests, doing a lot of legwork for you, sending your CV around, or doing things that actually take a lot of energy nowadays because of the way the market is structured. People will not necessarily reciprocate that. They will ask you specifically for things that only you can provide, or ask you to do things only you can do, but then will not reciprocate when you need them in your own time of need. This is not about giving specific examples. It is something I hear all the time. There are countless discussions about it online. Everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be part of it. This brings us back to the massive difference between individuality and individualism. It also brings us back to the irony of meritocracy. People need these networks not only to access opportunities, but the erosion of community destroys the very networks that make those opportunities possible and accessible.

So, what do we do if Gen Z inherits it? Something that I think is really important to notice here is that the constructive conversations Gen Z is having in our early twenties and teenage years are completely different, as I have been physically told by numerous people, from those of previous generations. This isn't a better-or-worse comment. I really don't care about all these semantics. What I'm telling you is that Gen Z is being left with a world that ageing Millennials, Gen X and Boomers were not left us with. The oldest Millennials are now in their forties, and they have enacted very little social change. In fact, arguably, social systems are significantly worse in many respects, to the extent that the limited Millennial representation we have within positions of power has not translated into the meaningful change that some might have expected.

The phrase kicking the can down the road comes to mind. There is this paradox of community. As I've said before, everyone wants the benefits of collective society while resisting the obligations required to maintain it. We're then expected to perpetuate that society while being a generation that has been scapegoated for problems that we were physically unable to deal with. I physically couldn't invest as a five-year-old to outperform the stock market. I wasn't alive in the 1990s or able to vote in the 2000s for the political actors and systems that helped leave the world in the situation it is in now. Previous generations had considerably more opportunity to shape those systems. There is something very strange about directing that anger at a generation that physically did not have the ability to make those decisions. It is easy to blame someone else, of course, when you benefit from the system. But now that you have a generation that is unequivocally not going to benefit from the system in the same way, it becomes a problem because we are no longer going to be party to the kicking down of the bucket, so to speak. Not only are we not benefiting, but we are recognising that perhaps no one truly benefited, and those who did benefit often did so at the expense of the wider social world.

So where do we go from here? It is most certainly not conformity, and it is most certainly not finding a universalism that I think a lot of people expect to hear from me. This isn't a West-versus-East approach. I don't agree with that, and I certainly do not agree with an Eastern universalist approach, which can be just as

detrimental. What we do know is that we need to work towards a new conception of community that combines individual autonomy with collective responsibility.

For example, community can be used to deal with crime in a very different way. A lot of people are failed by legal systems, I think, to some extent, because legal systems are too far removed from the people they serve, in the same way that politics can be too far removed from the people it serves. People will say, “Oh, this is better. It's objective.” But if the system was truly objective, then so many of the failures we see, including cases involving violent sexual crimes against women or children, or cases involving police officers who commit violent crimes against women or children, or people who get away with wrongdoing because of their standing, would not be happening in the ways they do. I don't believe in the idea that the legal system is somehow inherently objective or inherently capable of serving everyone equally. And I think it is really important to acknowledge that. This isn't because all police officers are bad, or because every individual working within these systems is bad. No. It is because when we consider these societal institutions, when we consider the functioning of society, and when we consider patriarchal understandings and patriarchal capitalism, it is all intertwined.

This takes us back to the central point. We can prevent further social decline, but acknowledging the social decline and social malaise that exists now, rather than ignoring it, is what will ultimately allow us to preserve a sense of concrete humanity. Human beings, and the society which they inhabit, create and maintain on a day-to-day basis, are active. Society is created. Society is maintained. It does not simply exist around us. And in order to maintain it, it takes compromise. It takes disagreement. It takes discord. It takes people being inconvenienced for change and for the betterment of society.

This is most certainly not a raging endorsement of some wayward socialism. I don't think any of the big three, socialism, communism, or capitalism, are going to save us, because all we have seen is the failure of these things. When I hear people claim to be “champagne socialists,” when I have now, over the last three months, researched that idea, I've come to understand that the vast majority of socialists as well are just on the same stupid flex as the capitalists that they seem to hate. So, we have to do better beyond ideological means. I think all of these people who are very hell-bent on perpetuating ideological means and unfair systems, and ideological approaches that will benefit them only, are a massive part of the problem. That includes a lot of the left that thinks its approaches will work universally, when really it can become, and has become, Western neocolonialism in leftist repackaging, and the Western right can, and has done, the exact same thing through traditional right-wing neocolonialism. This isn't going to save us.

What is going to save us is a collective reimagining of the social world and what that realm might be.

My name is A.R. Arthur.

Thank you for reading. < Back