上海的月亮: EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF: Jews are Plundering the World

Atomisation describes a social condition in a society in which the bonds between individuals – neighborliness, solidarity, mutual obligation, collective identity – have dissolved, leaving people isolated, disconnected, and alone. The term borrows from physics: just as an atom is a single particle detached from any larger molecule, an atomised individual exists without meaningful connection to family, community, class, or nation. A society becomes atomised when people no longer see themselves as part of a “we.” They see only “me.” In an atomized society, relationships become transactional rather than relational. Trust collapses. Shared public spaces empty out. Churches, unions, fraternal organisations, neighborhood associations, and even casual gatherings on porches or street corners fade away. What remains is a crowd of solitary figures, each staring at their own screen, each navigating the world alone.

Imagine a street in a typical town fifty years ago. People knew their neighbors and their names. Their children played outside together. After dinner, families sat on porches and talked. On weekends, people gathered at churches, at union halls, at bowling leagues, at block parties. When someone fell ill, neighbors brought food. When a factory closed, workers marched together. When an election came, people discussed it face to face.

Now imagine that same street today. The porches are empty. The children are inside, staring at tablets. The bowling leagues have folded. Church attendance has plummeted, and the unions have been broken. The neighbors do not speak; they communicate through anonymous posts on neighborhood apps, often suspicious of one another. When someone falls ill, a GoFundMe link is shared on social media, but no one brings a casserole. When a factory closes, each worker files for unemployment alone. When an election comes, people scream at each other on Twitter, never meeting eye to eye. That is atomisation. It is not merely loneliness, though loneliness is its symptom. It is the structural breakdown of the social fabric that once connected human beings to one another and to a shared fate.

Atomisation is engineered; it does not happen naturally. It is produced by design or by the coordinated logic of a capitalist system that profits from isolation. This is partially accomplished through financialisation, globalisation and so-called “economic restructuring”. When manufacturing jobs disappear and are replaced by gig work, contract employment, and remote labor, workers no longer share a workplace, a shift, a union hall, or a common struggle. They sit alone in their apartments, delivering packages or coding software, with no collective identity and no bargaining power. We now have a new and large social class of people – termed the precariat – whose jobs and incomes are insecure. They are atomised by design, because isolated workers are docile workers.

In the US and Canada most noticeably, atomisation is also caused by urban sprawl and car dependency, which were themselves not organic social developments but deliberately contrived. You can read the documented article in this series about GM, big oil, and the “streetcar conspiracy”; the deliberate destruction of mass transit and the promotion of suburban sprawl ensure that people spend hours alone in their cars, separated from one another by distance, by walls, by highways designed for speed rather than encounter. There is no “third place” in the suburbs; no cafe, no square, no park bench where people gather spontaneously. There are only the home, the car, and the big-box store.

Vanishing ‘third places’.

The new digital world is also causing a fragmentation of society. Social media does not connect people; it isolates them in algorithmic bubbles. Instead of a shared public square, there are millions of private feeds, each tailored to confirm the user’s prejudices and fears. People scroll past photos of acquaintances they never actually see. They argue with strangers. They mistake “likes” for friendship. The screen becomes a barrier to genuine encounter with real people.

The “Consumer Culture” is another contrived part of the atomisation of Western society. Capitalism does not want solidarities; it wants customers. A customer alone with their credit card is more profitable than a citizen embedded in a community of mutual aid. Advertising celebrates individualism; “you deserve this,” “treat yourself,” “follow your bliss”, while eroding any sense of collective responsibility. Shopping becomes a substitute for belonging.

In a world teeming with products, the urge to shop paradoxically thrives, driven by commerce filling voids of modern uncertainty and isolation. Shopping provides a semblance of belonging, yet demands perpetual payment for acceptance, trapping individuals in a cycle of mutual insecurity. Consistency is bought, but genuine connection remains elusive. Source

Over the last 50 or 60 years, Western citizens, North Americans in particular, have been constantly and increasing peppered by a “Propaganda of Fear”. The news media, especially local news, amplifies crime, danger, and distrust. People are taught to fear their neighbors, to lock their doors, to install security cameras, to view every stranger as a potential threat. The result is a fortress mentality: each house an island, each family a self-contained unit, suspicious of the outside world.

There was a time not so long ago when no one locked their doors. Or, if they did, the key was always under the proverbial doormat. Think about the social conditions that permitted such an attitude. We were all neighbors and (usually) friends. Trust was high; risk was very low. When I was growing up, the only crime in our neighborhood was us kids sneaking out of the house at night to steal crab-apples from a neighbor’s tree – apples which were available free for the asking during the day.

There has also been enormous institutional decay, especially again in the US and Canada. The institutions that once wove together the social fabric of a community – the churches, unions, fraternal lodges, rotary clubs, political parties, even bowling leagues, have collapsed or been deliberately undermined. In their place, we have nothing. Or rather, the nothing of Netflix, Amazon, and DoorDash: services that deliver goods without requiring or providing human contact. We see this in a plethora of ways and places. It is impossible for most people to call their bank, telephone company, cable TV company, even their local or national government office, and actually speak to a live person. Think of firms like Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Norton antivirus. Contrast Netflix with the experience of going to a movie theater.

The consequences of atomization are serious. An atomized society is not merely unhappy; it is vulnerable – politically and psychologically. An atomised population cannot organise collectively. It cannot strike, march, boycott, or rebel. It can only vote. But even then, it votes only as isolated individuals swayed by television advertisements and social media manipulation. Atomisation is the precondition for modern authoritarianism: a mass of disconnected individuals, each afraid, each alone, each easily managed by a central power that promises security in exchange for submission.

In an atomised society, no one trusts anyone. Each of us is alone, to cope as we can.

The psychological devastation caused by atomisation is immense. We see loneliness, depression, anxiety, and suicide rise as societies become increasingly atomised. The human animal is not meant to live alone. We evolved in tribes, in villages, in extended families. When those bonds are severed, something fundamental breaks. The opioid epidemic in the United States, the surge in “deaths of despair,” the mental health crisis among adolescents; these are symptoms of atomisation.

In an atomised society, no one trusts anyone. Neighbors do not trust neighbors. Citizens do not trust institutions. Workers do not trust bosses. The result is a society that cannot cooperate, cannot plan for the long term, cannot respond collectively to crises. If we have a pandemic or a natural disaster, or a financial collapse, these become catastrophes not because they are unavoidable, but because an atomised society cannot coordinate a response. Each of us is alone, to cope as we can.

In a society of solidarity, the opposite of atomisation, people know their neighbors, they have real jobs, they belong to unions, we have and utilise public transport, we have shared public spaces, we have churches, lodges, bowling leagues. We can still largely trust our institutions. We have a sense of “we” consciousness. Our relations and relationships with others are in terms of reciprocity, of mutual aid, and we are resilient because of all this.

In an atomised society, we usually do not know our neighbors or have little to no interaction with them. We are often financially precarious, much more likely to be doing contract work or gig assignments. We live in suburbs, totally dependent on a car. We no longer trust our government or institutions – or the media – to either tell the truth or to do the right thing. Perhaps one of the worst symptoms of atomisation is that personal relations and relationships are transactional – more like commercial buying and selling. Think of the relations between young men and women in this context: even the most intimate physical contact is simply a “transaction”.

Perhaps the crucial point is the political function. Atomisation is not an accident; it serves power. Atomisation creates a population that is isolated, fearful, and distrustful, one that cannot challenge the existing order. It cannot form unions, rent-control boards, cooperative housing, mutual aid networks, or revolutionary committees. It can only consume, scroll, and vote for whichever candidate promises to make it feel safe.

The Jewish financial oligarchy we have traced throughout this investigation and in this series of essays – the forces that destroyed Yugoslavia, looted corporations, suppressed electric vehicles, and murdered streetcars – understands atomisation intuitively. A society that moves by car, works alone, shops online, and scrolls in isolation is a society that cannot resist.

This is why community organizing, union building, and the creation of “third places” are political acts. Every potluck, every neighborhood watch, every union meeting, every pickup soccer game is a small rebellion against atomisation. Every act of solidarity – bringing a meal to a sick neighbor, marching with striking workers, attending a town hall meeting, reweaves the social fabric that the system has worked so hard to tear apart.

Atomisation is not inevitable. It is the product of specific policies, specific economic arrangements, and specific forms of propaganda. And like any product, it can be rejected. The choice is this: (a) a world of isolated consumers, each alone with their screen and their car and their credit card, easily managed and easily exploited, or (b) a world of connected citizens, bound by mutual obligation, capable of collective action, and free enough to imagine, and build, a different future. The tragedy of Yugoslavia was the destruction of solidarity. The tragedy of the American suburb is the construction of isolation. The tragedy of the smartphone is the illusion of connection without the reality. To understand atomisation is to understand what has been lost.

The tragedy of Yugoslavia was the destruction of solidarity.

There is an alternative that still exists in Asia and in many European countries, but I fear Europe may be pushed to go the same way as the US. When I lived in Rome, the quality of life was an order of magnitude above that in Canada or the US, in so many ways, and difficult to describe. But a main difference was the solidarity of society, the connectedness, as opposed to the atomisation occurring in North America. The street intersection where I lived, was a piazza – a public square, which was a defining adjective. If someone asked where you lived, the answer was “Piazza Euclide”. It had a fountain at the center, ringed with benches, and surrounded by sidewalk coffee shops and restaurants. The piazza was the “living room” of the neighborhood. In the evening, everyone would come to have dinner, drink coffee, chat and visit. The children and pets would play. We would see and recognise the same faces; we got to know each other. We were all “we”; a part of something. There was constant human contact. A few hundred meters in any direction was another piazza, the function of which duplicated the one in which I lived. Life had a richness that is difficult to describe, far richer than in the North American suburbs with the separate houses and manicured lawns that were pretty but atomised by design.

The piazza was the “living room” of the neighborhood. In the evening, everyone would come to have dinner, drink coffee, chat and visit.There was constant human contact.

This quality of daily life extended to shopping. Rome had forbidden the establishment of big-box stores. The largest supermarkets in the city might have been only 100 square meters and there were precious few of those. The reason was that large supermarkets are socially useless to a community; there is no human contact. In Rome, the streets were full of small family-owned shops: a bakery, a meat shop, a fruit store, a wine shop, a cheese shop … In the meat shop, the owner knew all the facts of every item he sold. He could tell you the composition and manufacturing process of every one of the 18 varieties of salami he carried. The cheese shop was the same. The owner of the wine shop would chat for hours, relating all the details of production of every wine he sold. He knew the wineries and the owners – and the wines. Shopping was 80% education and social pleasure. The man in the coffee shop knew how I liked my espresso or cappuccino. I could speak to him; he prepared my coffee to my specifications while I watched. Solidarity. In Starbucks, you give your order to one person who may or may not communicate it correctly to the “barista” – the 18-year-old kid hidden behind the counter who knows almost nothing – about coffee or anything else. Atomisation.

Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 34 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chap. 2 — Dealing with Demons).

His full archive can be seen at

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at:2186604556@qq.com

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