My views on society

      One of the unchangeable truths about the world is that humans are social creatures. If a bunch of humans were put onto a desert island with very few natural resources, those humans would form a society in an instant. It’s baked into our DNA to be friendly and to do what we need to do to keep everyone happy. No matter who you are, a truth that unites us is that we want to form societies. Or so I’ve been told at least.

    I’m not socially gifted, nor do I want to be socially gifted. I’ve been told by many people that choosing not to socialize is bad for you, that I should try and find a social group and make more friends, but in my experience, it just isn’t worth it for me. What makes friendship worth it for most people is they don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about it. They have an at least decent intuition of what will make their friends happy and help everyone else at least tolerate them. I don’t have that. On an intellectual level, I know how it works in general, but it doesn’t feel natural to me, and I’m aware that it’s only a matter of time before I screw up. 

   As a result of me neither having the skills to be social nor the desire to be social, I’ve developed an odd view of how society works, one that I’m not sure is even real. I just know that when I look at the world through that lens, life makes a lot more sense to me. I know that I’m not the only person who is, by choice or circumstance, not a member of society, so I refuse to believe I’m the only person who thinks that the world doesn’t work the way we think it does. But I’ve been trying to write about it, and one thought keeps coming up: what if I’m wrong? What if this isn’t just wrong, but the kind of wrong that everyone else but me knows is wrong? I don’t think it is, but I’ve never told anyone about this before. Not helping this is that, if I’m honest, I don’t think society is the naturally great thing we were led to believe. I don’t agree with people who say we’re in our best state in nature, or with the people who say we’re at our best in society. My issue is that everyone knows the problems living outside of society poses, but nobody seems to be able to acknowledge that society, at least the way we’ve always done it, has serious drawbacks. I don’t like that, given that society has always been, at best, deeply flawed, everyone is born under the expectation that we will want to live in society. Even if you really don’t want to live in society, you’re told your entire live you should want it. The way things are going, I don’t think we have much longer before we don’t have a choice but to live in society and given that society has always been somewhat invisible to the people living in it, that means we’re going to have to deal with the problems of society without any good ways to fix them. 

     I don’t think we should stop living in societies. I don’t like living in society because I’m not good at dealing with people, but even I still have a human in me that wishes she could just go out and make friends like everyone else can. What we need to do is turn society from something we just do automatically on a gut level into something that has hard rules to it that we all agree on. Not that long ago, people argued that we should have paper money instead of commodity money, saying that turning money from something that was tied to rarity to something that existed because we believe it exists would allow us to control the economy more effectively. It took a while, but now every country in the world uses paper money whose value only exists because we believe that it exists. I think we need to apply this idea more broadly. The reason we have so many laws is that as society grew larger, more and more of our rules needed to be written down so that people know what the final verdict is. So why not write down all our unwritten rules and talk about what would make sense on a societal level? Why not discuss with other nations what morals we have versus what morals they have? I firmly believe that what makes us human isn’t our capabilities, but our wants and needs. I think our future will have to involve what our desires are if we wish to grow and change the way we say we do.