Matrix Society

Once apon a time your community was where you were born, lived, worked and died in. It defined you and you were defined and known by it. Within the community, which had known defined limits as to who was within it and who was outside of it, there were smaller cliques. Cliques of churchgoers, the pub regulars, your school year mates and so on, many faceted loose cliques ebbing and flowing but within the all embracing sense of the known community. Of course there were exceptions people had to move about or married into new communities, but, by and large, these small discrete communities shaped the fabric of our Nation. It was the norm, there was no other model to comprehend, that was how life was and out of it emerged our civil structures of law and order.

Times have changed and very recently too. What was, is now no longer. We all are now members of multiple communities, loose communities with ill-defined boundaries and even more amorphous membership. We belong to so many discrete communities, where we live, where we work, where we spend our leisure, where we shop, where we receive education and so on. Each area of activity on the whole disconnected from any other, but of course, depending on the degree of geographical ranging, with lots of overlaps and possible interconnections. Loose memberships, drifting in and out without often without any conscious recognition by any. Not particularly bound by any loyalty to it and with little desire to make connections. Life is too busy to make meaningful contact with such a wide and diverse range of encounters with an expected short contact duration time.

This is the society that we now find ourselves living within. A matrix society with very wide but superficial connections. Yet our ideological model still assumes the tight-knit community of yesteryear when we talk about society and working together in community driven undertakings. The challenge that lays before us is to make sense of this matrix society, find ways that strengthen our membership of all the various communities we enter and work towards replacing a detached aloofness with instead a commitment and obligation. No easy task. What is sure is that we have to reestablish contact with ourselves, in all our different interconnections, if we are ever going to be able to resist this ever onward move to totalitarianism.