Atomization

“Flaubert had a penchant for remote intimacy.”

Frederick Brown

First, Nietzsche killed the Christian God; then Trump and Putin killed the state; then AI killed relationships. And family is our most fundamental, foundational relationship. Now, we are killing families. And what are we left with? It seems all that remains is an immense intellectual history and an uphill battle to raise our children within the cannons of a world that no longer exists. Within the cannons that upheld traditions and values no longer relevant to our present.

In Honoré de Balzac’s The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, a sharp and well-written 1842 epistolary novel-length exchange from a father explains to her daughter how the state lives only if family institution lives. Once the institution of the family is corrupted, the state also fails to survive. “Any country not founded in paternal authority has not guarantee of existence, for with that authority begins the ladder of responsibilities and subordinations, which runs straight up to the king…Every animal has its own instinct: man’s is the family spirit.”[1]

In our case, we also gave out on the family-God-state as a global society in the name of neoliberalism that now has now been pronounced dead.

What is to fill these voids? SM and algorithms catered to our weaknesses?

by Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani

[1] Honoré de Balzac, “The Memoirs of the Two Young Wives,” p.58. New York Review Books, New York 2018.