De kwetsbare samenleving

Samenvatting

The Vulnerable Society. Vulnerabilities in modern societies are explored at three levels. At the ecological and technological level, the vulnerability of humans tends to crystallize at ever higher levels of aggregation: the collectivization of risk, or "world risk society" (Beck). At the level of interdependencies between people, there is a tendency toward further taming of violence within societies or survival units, but this is not necessarily the case between societies. Even within societies, pockets of violence remain, and behind the scenes of civilized life, and in the human imagination, violence is rampant. Complex societies seem especially vulnerable to the problem of "recreancy" (Freudenburg). At the intrapsychic level, people show a tendency toward risk taking in order to compensate for the safety of their living conditions. The same safety, paradoxically, seems to produce diffuse feelings of insecurity. While modern ideals of autonomy foster positive feelings in the case of individual success, they induce negative feelings in the case of individual failure: "dispensable self" (Sennett) or "negative individualism" (Castel). Domestic violence, random violence, and depression may be understood as differential reactions to the psychic vulnerabilities of men and women in contemporary society. 114 References. Adapted from the source document.