> What if the reason for all of these issues ... have nothing to do with men and women and more to do with the fact that when we left our tribes, villages and c

> What if the reason for all of these issues ... have nothing to do with men and women and more to do with the fact that when we left our tribes, villages and communities to pursue the industrial dream, we cut ourselves off from the one thing we need to be happy — each other? Resolving the modern life vs village life tension might be the biggest cultural challenge of our era. David Chapman writes: Systematicity was always imposed by elites. Few people wanted it, and most would have rejected it if they could. The majority implicitly mistook material progress as something that just happens, not fully recognizing that medicine and jobs and roads and food and the internet depend on vast chains of “because.” Research by Robert Kegan, a psychologist whose work has heavily influenced my thinking on this topic, suggests that roughly two thirds of Americans are unable to fully cope with the demands of systematic institutions. They are “developmentally traditional people in a modern world.” The natural human alternative is the communal mode: unstructured, egalitarian, empathic, local, tribal, familiar, and comfortable. This mode—I’ve also called it “choiceless”—feels profoundly right. We evolved to live in such societies; they fit our psychology in a way systematic ones cannot. The problem is, the communal mode cannot sustain life on a planet of billions of people, much less provide the material benefits, entertainment, and understanding we are used to ... We currently have no workable alternative to systematicity. This makes anti-systematic politics entirely nihilistic ... The systematic mode can, should, must be superseded—not by the communal mode, but by something that combines benefits of both. I think that is possible. [1] Chapman thinks this synthesis is possible, but he does precious little to actually construct it: so far his work-in-progress book "Meaningness" reads more like a tentative existence proof. On the other hand, that's the exciting thing about it. Successfully synthesizing the modern and village modes of existence is a greenfield project. [1] https://meaningness.com/metablog/communal-vs-systematic-politics https://meaningness.com/metablog/communal-vs-systematic-poli...