Michael Pollak:
> Ideology is a remarkable thing. People will pound the table and tell you
> that the one truth they know for sure is that they were born alone and
> they'll die alone. And if you point out that actually, when they were
> born, their mother was there, in a hospital full of thousands, amidst a
> division of labor involving millions -- and that a hospital is also where
> they'll probably do most of their dying -- they'll act like you've used
> some kind of trick argument.
>
> But then, people are always saying that the poor should pick themselves up
> by their bootstraps, even though, physically speaking, that's impossible,
> and as a metaphor is equivalent to saying the poor should go take a flying
> fuck at the moon. And yet people say it as if it should shame the poor
> and not themselves.
>
> That thing Goebbels said about repetition inducing the feeling of truth?
> It's really true.
Goebbels, already? My Natural-Law fan interlocutors ran right to the Nazis, who have supplanted Edmund Burke's gallows-ridden vistas as the fate of those who question established order and received opinion too severely.
Occasional meetings for the purposes of breeding do not seem like much in the way of socialization, and neither does physical birth. (Although I have read that some monkeys don't know how to do sex unless they observe it; maybe humans are in the same predicament.)
Newborn infants and small children do require a lot of care, however, so that might be a good place to look for materially necessary socialization. Some animals don't recognize food until the parent shows them how to get it; it is not hard to suppose that humans may be among them. Besides thinking of some very primitive anti-social hunter-gatherers, and of human children raised by wolves and monkeys, it occurred to me that modern life might provide some examples of minimal viable socialization -- children raised by the television set, which certainly doesn't teach them how to find food and in general seems to exert a malign influence. Perhaps we are seeing experiments in radical individuation running to the extremes of human possibility. It might be useful to know.
Again, though, I don't know where to find the facts, the observations.