The problem
Modern societies increasingly seem to mistake functional survivability for meaningful human flourishing. This confusion shapes not only politics and economics, but also how contemporary societies understand agency, autonomy, resilience, participation, and even personhood itself.
Modernity that didn’t happen
The prevailing assumption of late modernity was that the erosion of traditional structures would eventually produce more reflexive and autonomous individuals. Thinkers such as sociologist Anthony Giddens envisioned modern individuals becoming capable of consciously constructing coherent identities through participation, reflection, and engagement with pluralistic democratic life. Identity was to become a reflexive project.
But this reflexive modernity either never fully materialized or proved historically unsustainable. For over a decade, my wife and I have asked people “Who are you until now?” and we never got a spontaneous Giddens-style answer. What emerged instead is not total collapse, nor full atomization, but something more subtle: partial dislocation.
As is
People still maintain intimate relationships, trust structures, familial continuity, and minimally stable routines. These little islands of trust preserve enough experiential continuity for individuals to remain psychologically functional. Yet they do not amount to integrated democratic subjectivities or coherent ontological systems. The continuity they provide is often existential and relational rather than deeply reflective or ethically integrated.
The result is a society in which people are not flourishing in any substantial sense, but are increasingly succeeding at “getting by” (concept by Bruce Alexander). This distinction matters.
Partial dislocation
Contemporary societies frequently reinterpret the ability to function economically and socially as evidence of autonomy and agency. If individuals can sustain employment, navigate institutions, maintain relationships, express opinions, and continue participating procedurally, then they are considered resilient and autonomous. But these capacities may merely describe stabilized insufficiency.
The problem is not complete psychosocial collapse. It is the normalization of diminished forms of existence, of partial dislocation. This condition differs from classical alienation narratives. Individuals are not entirely disconnected from reality or from others. They often experience genuine intimacy, loyalty, care, and local solidarity. However, these stabilizing experiences increasingly remain bounded within shrinking radii of trust and recognition.
Outside these radii, others increasingly appear as symbolic fragments, epistemic irritants, identity signals, disruptions, or abstractions. Importantly, this does not necessarily result from coherent ideological extremism. In many cases, people do not inhabit stable or internally coherent ontologies at all. Rather than deeply integrated worldviews, many individuals maintain fragile continuity-effects. Their identities are sustained through recurring relational, symbolic, and affective patterns that preserve enough continuity for psychological functioning. This fragmentation exists not merely between groups, but also within persons themselves.
The digital component
Under these conditions, contemporary digital systems intensify instability through what might be called epistemic pumping: continuous activation of identity fragments, emotional synchronization, accelerated contextual switching, symbolic familiarity, outrage circulation, and perpetual partial resolution. These systems do not simply transmit information. They operate directly upon the fragile conditions required for psychosocial continuity.
This situation is historically novel. Human beings recursively discussing the human condition with a probabilistic machine like AI is not historically ordinary. Nor are algorithmic attention architectures, predictive behavioral systems, industrialized symbolic extraction, ambient computational persuasion, or continuous digital identity modulation.
Technology has not merely increased informational overload. It has weaponized many of the fragile mechanisms that individuals use to maintain continuity and orientation.
Historically, institutions, communities, religions, and civic structures often attempted - however imperfectly - to stabilize identity and psychosocial integration. Contemporary technological systems frequently optimize for the opposite: interruption, stimulation, reactivity, compulsive orientation, symbolic acceleration, and emotional activation. The same fragile continuity mechanisms people rely upon to get by become exploitable surfaces. This contributes to the emergence of implicit cruelty.
Implicit cruelty
Implicit cruelty does not primarily appear as explicit hatred or authoritarian violence. It manifests as thinning ethical imagination, ambient indifference, symbolic reduction of others, exhaustion-based emotional narrowing, interpretive brutality, and normalization of low-grade dehumanization.
A society may remain democratic, economically productive, rights-based, procedurally liberal, and locally caring, while simultaneously producing increasing forms of psychosocial and moral diminishment. This is what makes implicit cruelty dangerous. It can coexist with functioning institutions and sincere moral language.
Once societies collectively redefine adaptive coping as sufficient autonomy and agency, the threshold for explicit cruelty gradually lowers. Not necessarily because populations become ideologically monstrous, but because experiential reciprocity weakens, relational bandwidth narrows, symbolic abstraction intensifies, and ethical imagination becomes increasingly local and conditional.
The challenge
The danger is therefore not merely misinformation, polarization, or democratic instability in isolation. The deeper danger is that societies normalize diminished being while continuing to describe themselves using the language of freedom, agency, and resilience. At stake is the distinction between assumed experience and real experience.
Modern systems increasingly substitute assumed experience for real experience: symbolic participation for participation, informational exposure for understanding, expression for agency, activation for meaning, and mediated familiarity for relational encounter. As a result, people may cognitively recognize democratic principles while remaining experientially disconnected from democratic reality itself.
The challenge, then, is not revolutionary rupture. Revolutions often destroy fragile maintenance ecologies faster than they can be rebuilt. Nor is the challenge nostalgic restoration of an imagined coherent past. The task is evolutionary reintegration.
The task
This means we need to construct institutional, civic, and technological conditions that add real experience to assumed experience: consequential participation, embodied deliberation, relational, impactful encounters, mediation, co-regulation, friction against accelerated abstraction and snap interpretations and judgments, and opportunities for psychologically consequential democratic interaction.
The objective is not perfect integration or idealized social harmony. It is more modest and more urgent: preserving enough psychosocial depth, ethical openness, and experiential reciprocity that partial dislocation does not harden into normalized dehumanization.
Normalcy is hard work. Since meaningful democratic coexistence at scale is not self-sustaining it requires constant maintenance against fragmentation, acceleration, abstraction, and cruelty.
The central challenge of our time is therefore not merely technological or political. It is civilizational and anthropological: whether societies can still create the conditions under which human beings experience one another as real before implicit cruelty becomes explicit cruelty.