Philip Slater's The Pursuit of Loneliness

Slater analyzes American society according to three "desires" which he says are discouraged by the national culture:

the desire for community---"to live in trust, cooperation, and friendship"; the desire for engagement---"to come directly to grips with one's social and physical environment"; and the desire for dependence---"to share responsibility for the control of one's impulses and the direction of one's life" (8).

The desire for community is frustrated by the cultural emphasis on individualism and competition; the desire for engagement is frustrated by the irrational American belief in detachment and magical cures for social problems; and the desire for dependence is frustrated by the high cultural values placed on independence. Slater stresses that these frustrating factors are not merely institutional (schools, media, etc.), but are practiced and nurtured by individual citizens. Still, the endless repetition of messages of competition, detachment at work in the culture make it difficult to reverse the trend.

Slater points out that competition, detachment, and independence are present in other cultures, but American society is unique in the degree that it values and encoura

. . .
eath (consider the cult of youth), about the socioeconomic causes for crime (the emphasis on police and prisons), about the simple fact of waste disposal (dump it in anybody's neighborhood but ours). The obvious conclusion is that the American people do not want to think about death, illness, aging, crime, poverty---until they are forced to look at them through national crisis. The ghettos are riddled with crime and have been for decades, but the culture at large does not take notice until the misery and rage of the ghetto spills over into the white, middle-class mainstream. On the other hand, there is that counter-force working within the culture and within the hearts of souls of the American people which announces, if sporadically and dimly, that something is wrong with such denial. There are always overt forces at work at the same time which urge us to pay attention to these unpleasant facets of life. What the American people do too much, says Slater, is blame the messenger for the message. The people who demand that attention be paid to such critical problems are called "radical" and are dismissed by the culture at large so that the people can remain in denial and the leaders do not have to tackle such problems: Evasion cr
. . .

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Approximate Word count = 1508
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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