Community
The critique that Slater offers begins with his identification of individualism as a major culprit in American culture. With an emphasis on individual identity and achievement comes a pervasive pull toward competition and push away from community. Competing egos are forged and found in the American marketplace. These egos expand in size as American organizations become (and are glorified for becoming) BIG. To be small is to have lost the battle for supremacy. To be large and controlling of a specific sector of American society is to have won the battle.
Along with the competition comes an emphasis on private ownership. We own our home, our business and our life. No trip to the laundromat. We have our own washer and dryer. We attend to our own garden rather than some community garden. We look for entertainment at home—be it television or the Internet. Most importantly, we purchased self-help books rather than looking for assistance from our neighbor or our “helping” institutions. COVID-19 only made matters worse. We “try to minimize, circumvent, or deny the interdependence upon which all human societies are based.” (Slater, 1970/1971, p. 13) We look for (and long for) what Slater identifies as the “Freedom Fix.”
As the American in Slater’ myth conveys, there is no room for any intrusion into our private life. Turf is clearly defined–and we are left alone to savor our personal gains. Everything is pushing us away from one another. Like the mythic American, we are left alone and lonely. Slater notes that the universe is not made up of unrelated particles. It is instead constituted of tightly interconnected parts.
As Miller and Page (2007) have noted, our world is not just complicated (many parts)—it is also complicated (interdependent parts). Similarly, viable societies are complex not just complicated. The Freedom Fix and Illusion of Independence simply don’t work. We are left in a state of alienation and loneliness as an estranged “particle” without any connection to other “particles” (people). Societies are unlikely to survive for long when many isolated particles try to solve shared problems while remaining competitive. It does work when members of a contemporary society try to find stability while taking many individual actions that often are contradictory.
Engagement
Slater proposes that loneliness also comes from a “compulsive . . . tendency to avoid confronting chronic problems.” (Slater, 1970/1976, p. 18) They avoid these problems because it would require interacting with other people in their community. For Slater it is a matter of either denying that a large-scale problem (such as climate change) exists until it becomes a crisis or looking to some magical external source to solve the problem (“some new technology will solve it all.”).
In order to provide a broader context to what Slater is proposing. I wish to introduce a concept from the behavior sciences. This concept concerns the way in which we locate control in our lives (individually and collectively). On the one hand, we can retain an internal locus of control with most matter of importance residing within our own prevue and subject to our own actions. On the other hand, we can retain an external locus of control in which the most important issues impacting our personal and collective life reside outside of our control. We have to look elsewhere for action and resolution. This external source might be a new technology that someone else has developed, a governmental policy that some other people are going to enact or the resolution of some war that people other than myself will be fighting. The source can also transcendent—such as fate or God.
I would suggest that reliance on someone else or something else to solve our personal and collective problems (especially the collective problems) resides in an external locus of control. For Slater, the assumed inability to engage in the resolution of important issues and turning to external sources comes from and leads to a withdrawal of collective action. Even when we do act individually or take action as an assembled group or community there are likely to be consequences of this action that we can’t anticipate.
