Flock cameras spot you and its AI network identifies you as individually violating some law. You receive a citation in the mail. Intuitively you wonder why this surveillance system doesn’t acknowledge any of your good public deeds it must have caught on their cameras.

On another level, you intuitively realize this system ignores any socioenvironmental context hindering your ability to make optimal choices. Sure, everyone is responsible for their personal choices but not responsible for externalities limiting their options.

Instead of affirming you or appreciating the externalities, it atomizes you into an objectified individual to be adjudicated in our adversarial legal process. The adversarial judicial process then “legitimizes” or excuses this damaging isolation of less advantaged individuals.

Atomization culture covers that set of norms privileging any overemphasis of the individual to the neglect of socioenvironmental contexts. And tends to focus more on negative individual aspects than positive ones.

Defunction: psychosocial imbalance norms

Hyper-individualism emerges when emphasizing individual prowess to the neglect of social supports. The opposite extreme is overemphasizing social supports to the neglect of individual capacities. Western culture tends to spur more of the former.

Optimal wellness (i.e., peakfunction) depends on balancing the personal and social realm. Self-needs (like autonomy and self-initiative) resolve on par with social needs (like group cohesion and community supports). When self-needs resolve more than social needs, or when social needs resolve more than self-needs, psychosocial imbalance creeps in.

This tension informs one’s political views. Progressives’ self-needs (like self-expression and self-acceptance) generally resolve more than their social needs (like societal acceptance and cultural inclusion). Conservatives’ social needs (like family cohesion and economic optimization) generally resolve more than their self-needs (like personal self-protection and self-initiative).

Each tends to guard their resolved needs while generalizing how others ought to regard their unresolved needs. Atomization culture risks reifying or reinforcing this imbalance.

Examples:

1. Atomized protesters – activists cut off from each other in ways that authorities they critique can dilute their effectiveness for inspiring meaningful and lasting structural change.

2. Atomized voter - as driven by personal rational choices divorced from social aspects.

3. Biopsychological pathology – the idea that pathologies exist primarily or exclusively within the individual and not in the external social realm; contrast with the idea of a “sick society”

4. Decontextualized entrepreneurship – idealized as individuated effort overlooking cooperative aspects.

5. Egotistic power – influencing others primarily or exclusively for selfish gain.

6. Existential crisis – losing a sense of meaning or purpose in life from extended isolation from deeper social connections (potential source of some forms of depression).

7. Family estrangement – limiting personal contact with loved ones.

8. Ghosting – abruptly discontinuing communication with a once meaningful relation.

9. Individuated illness – characterized as individual malady rather than an understandable consequence of living in a sick society.

10. Intellectual supremacy – valuing who apparently is individually the smartest in the room rather than who is the most emotionally mature or unselfish or loving.

11. Loneliness epidemic – normalizing personal isolation from each other.

12. Myopic criminal investigation – generally excludes or downplays socioenvironmental factors.

13. Myopic mental illness diagnosis – typically excludes or downplays socioenvironmental factors.

14. Objectifying adjudication – victims and offenders of crimes treated exclusively as self-interested actors apart from the social dynamics hindering their chances to resolve interpersonal conflicts; the adversarial process imposes this self-interest assumption in ways that neglect human potential to work meaningfully through a conflict that can satisfactorily resolve each other’s affected needs (such as restorative justice).

15. Over-responsibility – holding individuals accountable for factors beyond their personal control.

16. Permitted narcissism – public actions privileged to serve the self at the expense of others.

17. Politically privileged self-righteousness – rationalizing evasion of critique of one’s impactful ideological views as their right of conscious; maintaining blind spot for how they affect vulnerable others.

18. Privileged offender – illicitly harming another in a way not explicitly illegal and tends to be regarded as a personal right that is divorced from personal responsibility.

19. Reified civil inattention – politely respecting other’s public and potentially offensive behavior to the point of not offering them helpful feedback.

20. Reified privacy – isolating oneself to the neglect of emotional intimacy needs.

21. Reified self-interest – personal motives privileged to devolve into selfishness, alienating the self from others.

22. Self-absorbed ecology – disregarding one’s damaging impact on the environment.

23. Self-centered economics – amassing resources with little to no empathy for how it impacts others (excessive resourcing).

24. Social media anonymity – presenting idealized self, staying estranged from meaningful interpersonal connections.

25. Uncontextualized trauma – emphasizing personal damage while neglecting structural damage at its roots.

There could be many more examples of such hyper-individual alienation and atomization defunctions.

Refunction: psychosocial balance path

Need-response aims to shift our common incentives toward isolation to more interpersonal engagement and meaningful connection.