Cities are filled with so many people. We don't know most of the people in them. There are limits to our ability to interact. But it still forms a disconnected family of sorts, where people don't talk to each other, kind of like a family that is too big to do so.
Source
We are a group, a society, a fragile "family" of strangers held together by an unspoken agreement: we all have a role to play in our cooperation for survival. THis benefits us all more than if we were to be lone wolfs, acting as an island, separate and not interacting in an economic mode of survival.
Various jobs occupy areas of interaction, some more critical than others. Bar tenders give out alcohol, but also listen to the people's stories and worries. Paramedics and doctors save lives of people in negative health conditions. We even have non-occupational roles to play out, such as being friends or lovers.
The world is a stage with a bunch of parts being played. We trust others to play the parts they have agreed to play, and we try to get along. When someone breaks the trust to get along, there is the role of a someone who protects and serves to try to make thing right. We call them police officer, or formerly peace officers.
But is this the only way for things to be? Do we need to depend on only certain roles to help us resolve issues? Why can't everyone take on the role of being a peace officer, to protect each other?
Keeping the peace and helping others in danger or in harm is optimally a role for everyone. If you are in a situation where you need help, does it make sense if only certain types of people who have a designated job can come to help you, to deal with harm being done? If we want to make a better world for ourselves or others, we need to be able to help each other when wrongs are being done, not simply depend on a special subset of people who have rights the rest of us don't.
If not a right for everyone to stop others from doing harm, it's not a right for anyone. A special group of people don't have rights that others don't. Rights are the purview of everyone, not only a special group.
If our society treats everyone has having less rights than a special group called police, then we aren't really a family int he best sense of the word. We're just strangers where someone people have more rights than others. we're in an Animal Farm like Orwell described, where all people are equal, but some people are more equal than others. The ruler and masters have their order following "dogs" that dominate over the rest of who have less equality than they do.
In many countries, if you dare to step in to stop harm from being done, even to defend yourself, you can be charged with a crime. People are made impotent through coercive centralized authority to abdicate their own personal responsibility to defend themselves or help defend others.
We are conditioned into begging a special group to come help us rather than do something ourselves. We are pressured to not helping others when our core being is yelling at us to help stop harm being done. We are controlled into being strangers that are afraid to help each other instead of being a family that takes care of each other.
Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.
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I agree with you in the part that everyone should take part in, to some extent, to protect themselves and people around them. Nonetheless, I think it is so difficult to define a perfect rule/ government to manage the system. Rules are made by people so there would be room for biases; and they are also enforced by people so there would also be room for abuse.
Yes, it's a predicament we're in that we won't solve until we learn to define what morality is and learn the moral law and moral rules to live by, and deal with them as smaller communities of involved people.
Some of it seems to be due to centralization of societies. If you take a look at anything centralized it becomes corrupt - government - banking - and in this scenario, cities. Society works better when they are small and spread out. Perhaps when/if we explore space as a society then it'll become decentralized and thus people's relationships will become healthier?
I agree, the cramming of people works against a better functioning way of life towards freedom and empowerment...
good creative thinking @krnel,keep it up
Social engineering to ensure obedience to not think for yourself.
Have you read any Zygmunt Bauman?
In chapter 1 of his book 'thinking sociologically' he outlines the functional necessity of basically having to ignore people in a large city or society of millions of people - so I don't think we are strangers to each other because of social control, it just has to be that way - I can't be 'an individual' or maintain close personal relationships without ignoring most people.
However, this does raise the tricky question of ethics - so he's derived this moral imperative (based on Levinas) of always 'being for the other' in whatever we do... as a basis for trust in large societies. It's kind of a radical moral responsibility which I think ties in with what your suggesting.
He also suggests that the issue of what is moral will always be ambiguous, and always open for discussion, a kind of future that is necessarily slightly uncomfortable as we work through our differences.
If you haven't read any, you might enjoy it, he's fundamentally for individuals taking responsibility rather than relying on whatever agents to do it for them!