Our most Precious Commodity – Social Unity.

By August Pointneuf

Poor, vulnerable Emma West, in her display of agonized stress.

We might not know what the precipitators were but we do know that she was behaving abnormally. A frightened person, frightened for herself and by  maternal fear for her child, implanted in an assertively aggressive crowd.  She was intimidated by the surrounding alien appearances, by their distinct looks, different dress, foreign voices and, to her, unpredictable behaviour.

She was frightened by being far outnumbered; she was the fearful lone victim in a cascading barrage of screaming paranoiac defensiveness,

Now visualise her instead in a homogenous group: people she was accustomed to and whom she could rely upon to behave predictably. What she needed in her distress was the constancy and the calm equilibrium of a mature society. She could have been with people who did not appear frighteningly different from her culture. Yes, in this context the passengers in that notional tram-of-similar-people would have seen her as behaving waywardly. But Instead of attacking they would have seen her for what she needed, empathy, assistance and compassion. They would have addressed her curious behaviour with calmness. One could have expected these people to accommodate and reconcile what they hoped would be Emma’s temporary aberration. They would have helped her.

Emma West has been accused of “antisocial behaviour”. It is exactly the reverse. She showed, in caricature, the intrinsic mechanism of individuals who attempt to protect and promote their society from forces which they see as alien. That is social behaviour in their terms 

Less widely promoted was a counter-attack by MarmiteMan4, young, white and aggressively critical of Emma West.

MarmiteMan4, proudly asserts his fervent, unbridled emotions of youthful enthusiasm. He spouts the beliefs of youth, with proclamation of idealism, and implied defense of the subjugated. It is the spring harbinger of a boy’s social awareness.
 It is the social heart of a youthfulness which is yet to reach the patrimonial brain of age.

His divisiveness is not unexpected; it is a natural sub-agendum, which temporally separates youth from age. Youth searches for absolutes: the perspectives of context are the findings of age

The youth-age divide is not harmless. MarmiteMan4 fires the same enthusiasms which propelled the rebellions of recent history.
But it would be expected to resolve. That is the business of the close family and the business of the dinner table shared by the same peoples and a homogenous culture.

How should we interpret the other, more deeply entrenched, social divisions which are apparently irreconcilable? 

This cannot be done by looking at them as they are at present. These views and stances have been long incubating, not for years, but generations. What each illustrates, irrespective of the emotive and precipitating causes, is the progressive polarisation of societies. These societies have been confused by the forced juxtapositions of peoples with a variety of origins and beliefs.

There is little point in attempting to rationalize or justify one or the other. Both demonstrate stress, both demonstrate a fragmentation of society. Both demonstrate divergent values, and when viewed alongside one another show how the outcome of political social manipulation will inevitably lead to conflict.

It is possible, of course, for inherently distinct groups of people to reach levels of acceptance of one another and a relative (if impermanent) harmony. But there will always be thresholds at varied levels and to different provocations.

A few overt symbols of one group or the other can rapidly prompt an impulsive and aggressive eruption.

Once one group, or both, is subject to sufficient social pressures – economic or otherwise – and a specific threshold is reached then a feed-back polarisation will intensify unstoppably.

Ultimately all rationale is lost. Crisis is reached. After that there can be no “natural healing”, no spontaneous reversal.

All of this was predictable. Authoritative voices have long been raised against the smug political doctrine of forced “diversity” (or its failed predecessor, forced “integration”).

But these politicians have chosen not to learn. Indeed much of their tactic is founded on divide-and-rule. They seem still intent in their tack despite the onshore winds of increasing social stress which make calamitous internal insurrection now ominous.