Repost: tribal forces

Maybe it is true that culture has become too heterogeneous (also too primal and self-indulgent), and that this has created problems with communication (since clear communication is necessarily homogeneous and also primal, relying on sharing commonalities). I detect a communicative chasm between myself and another whenever I hear them seem to proclaim that they are "completely free to do what I want", because what they consider freedom is rarely something that I would have any interest in doing. Yet, I have no means to communicate this to them.  They are free to SMS 'Big Brother" or free to work long hours in order to pay off a mortgage? These things would be nightmares to me, but I have no way of communicating that, in a way that is taken neutrally and objectively. Far more likely, someone will attack me if I tell them that their world is not my world, and their desires are not at all like mine.

This superfically expressed cultural of individualism (actually, egotistic solipsism, which I, myself, have explored and experienced as part of my self-induction into Modernism)  becomes ursurped in practice by a narrow and emotional tribal force .

Since an assertion of one's experiential differences is culturally taken as a criticism of the flavour or nature or quality of another's experiences, then one must certainly refrain from acknowledging differences. To do otherwise would invite censure or misunderstanding, or hurt egos and confused relationships. So the apparent freedom, understood and expressed in terms of being "free to do whatever I want" ends up with the majority adopting very defensive stance,  where what is really acceptable is to do  "whatever it is we are all already doing."