An individual without social connections either despairs or turns to an authoritarian state

It is in the individual, in every individual, that a society exists, is founded, develops or perishes. If the spirit of sociality begins to fade amongst individuals, society ceases to exist and individuals turn against one another, thinking only of themselves.

Understanding, solidarity and communication are paramount to the spirit of social life, and it is this that leads us to speak of ‘civil society’, if not ‘community’. For a society to exist, there must be effective socialisation amongst individuals. Today, socialisation processes have changed profoundly and have become less rigid, partly due to remote electronic social communication.

Furthermore, in today’s multi-ethnic and multicultural societies, the historical and cultural homogeneity of the past has been lost. Even in the face of otherness, conflict and class struggle, our societies were, at the same time, both divided and united by the actions of the major political parties with their distinct ideologies. Today, a formless and fluid social fabric of realities and sensibilities that are difficult to define prevails, due to the large-scale migrations of the last half-century, which are by no means as easily integrated as was once believed, is still believed, or as one might wish. This means that the presence of the state and the rule of law struggles to drain the swamp of individual and group ‘anomie’, which shatters – to the point of erasing – the character and stability of what we continue to call, in the strongest sense, ‘civil society’. The most desperate forms of individual loneliness are on the rise and facilitate the proliferation of anti-social or asocial micro-groups, which in many cases end up fuelling both organised and individual crime.

I said ‘desperate individual loneliness’, that is, the growing social phenomenon of a lack of socialisation due to the absence or precariousness of two stabilising factors: work and cultural identity.

The decline in social behaviour, caused by a lack of social interaction, leads to an increase in crimes committed by individuals in their criminal isolation, the motives for which often remain indecipherable. Sociology, more or less since its inception, when discussing the masses, mass society and urban crowds, has identified this modern phenomenon and termed it ‘anomie’. In the ‘solitary crowds’ that characterise modern societies, it is always ‘the others’ who constitute the mass and the crowd – that is, a stream of shadows that may be real or may be imaginary. Thus, everyone has become accustomed to perceiving the mass of other human beings as an anonymous collective entity, always potentially and vaguely hostile, threatening, enemy-like and almost devoid of true humanity.

Today, in multi-ethnic and multicultural societies, this everyday experience of otherness has developed further compared with the last century. Everything is in flux, and even what was once the ‘neighbourhood’ has recently disappeared. Social interaction is becoming dehumanised and technologically derealised. ‘Anomie’ arises when agreements and norms, communication and sharing become so loose that they eventually disappear.

But when the practical fabric of social ties no longer constitutes ‘civil society’, the danger lies in the political tendency to envisage and seek an omnipresent, authoritarian, purely repressive state that controls and punishes, yet to which citizens cannot even attribute sufficient moral and civil authority. This is the militarised state as conceived by right-wing parties. If the liberal-democratic or liberal-socialist left does not wish to lose support, it must work to foster social bonds based on self-regulation and even self-governance. In societies where some form of moral and civic culture no longer prevails, voters’ political preference for an authoritarian and repressive state inevitably gains ground. Dictatorships and authoritarian regimes always arise from social chaos and insecurity.