[MD] BBC documentary 'the trap'

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Khaled]
On a side note here. You tend to see less or no homeless or destitute 
people the smaller the towns or cities get.

[Arlo]
I had a friend once suggest that "urban" living is unnatural, that 
the human psychological norm is in groups about the size of a small 
village or a tribe, where one person can, realistically, know all his 
"neighbors". In the X thousands of years of human history, this has 
been, of course, the way things were (mostly). Humans organized 
themselves into communities based on this psychological limitation of 
how many people, reasonably, can any one person keep straight.

Even in cities, over most human history, you have the formation of 
"communities" within the cityscape, wherein most people stayed, 
worked, lived, etc. "Neighborhoods" were, despite the vast landscape 
of millions of strangers, areas of psychological health where people 
could feel safe, cared for, invested in and protected.

This has changed. In ZMM Pirsig writes, "The explanation, I suppose, 
is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with 
loneliness. It's psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the 
physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people 
are small, and here it's reversed."

Pirsig lays the blame on the demise of this sense of community on the 
S/O paradigm that has taken hold of Western culture.

"It's the primary America we're in. It hit the night before last in 
Prineville Junction and it's been with us ever since. There's this 
primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie 
spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go 
through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of 
what's immediately around them. The media have convinced them that 
what's right around them is unimportant. And that's why they're 
lonely. You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of 
searching, and then when they look at you, you're just a kind of an 
object. You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're 
not on TV."

Pirsig, too, notices that in smaller communities this self-made 
psychological isolation is not as rampant.

"But in the secondary America we've been through, of back roads, and 
Chinaman's ditches, and Appaloosa horses, and sweeping mountain 
ranges, and meditative thoughts, and kids with pinecones and 
bumblebees and open sky above us mile after mile after mile, all 
through that, what was real, what was around us dominated. And so 
there wasn't much feeling of loneliness. That's the way it must have 
been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Hardly any people and hardly 
any loneliness. I'm undoubtedly over-generalizing, but if the proper 
qualifications were introduced it would be true."

The "funeral procession" of those urban commuters, the loss of 
reasonable "communities" within the urban landscape, the S/O 
profiteering of a runaway consumerist culture, the "de-humanizing" of 
people into these large impersonal patterns, all this culminates into 
what Pirsig describes as such. "I know what it is! We've arrived at 
the West Coast! We're all strangers again! Folks, I just forgot the 
biggest gumption trap of all. The funeral procession! The one 
everybody's in, this hyped-up, fuck-you, supermodern, ego style of 
life that thinks it owns this country. We've been out of it for so 
long I'd forgotten all about it."

We are strangers again.

Right there. That's the problem.

In small towns, the "market" responds as people make decisions 
knowing how their own actions impact the well-being of their 
neighbors. If your local shop kept a hazardous workplace where your 
neighbors were getting seriously injured, you would not shop there. 
They would go out of business. But when the shop is overseas, and the 
people getting injured are strangers in every way, then such issues 
are not of concern. So long as I get my cheap goods, then what else 
is there? The "invisible hand" breaks down.