How America lost the art of association You can help rebuild it

“In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville after touring Jacksonian America. The French writer had seen that Americans seemed particularly good at forming civic associations that incorporate both freedom and responsibility; in doing so, those associations formed citizens who were capable of governing themselves and flourishing in every domain of human life, without being consumed with the kind of political zero-sum games that threaten not only life and happiness, but progress, too.

Nearly two centuries later, do we Americans retain the talent for association? The signs aren’t promising. We belong to fewer congregations, clubs, unions, and lodges than our grandparents did. We report fewer close friends, and a rising share of us claim none at all. Time spent alone has reached record highs, and the Surgeon General has declared loneliness a public-health emergency. The genius for association that Tocqueville admired has not been abolished, so much as left to atrophy.

The breakdown in association results in what I call the problem of “the one and the 99” — the direct and unnatural relationship between a human person and a large group. It is a perennial problem, but current conditions have accentuated it dramatically because our technologies are built to connect the one directly to the millions, dissolving everything in between. The platforms that promised to bring us together did so by hollowing out the associations that once stood between the person and the mass. A man scrolling alone is plugged into a crowd of strangers — exposed to their moods, their fears, their judgments — with no friend group or congregation to mediate the encounter. We have never been connected to so many while accompanied by so few. 

Its political manifestation is the self set against the state, with no intermediary institutions or forms of association between them — except a few good group chats, if you’re lucky.

That is not only a lonely and somewhat pathetic way to live. It is also dangerous. The human quest for community does not disappear in these atomized environments; it simply gravitates toward more totalitarian forms of government and belonging.

History has tried to warn us about this danger — and it also shows us the way out.

In the gray hush of 1970s Czechoslovakia, where even silence seemed state-issued, there was a band called The Plastic People of the Universe. Its music was raw, dissonant, and defiantly Western. The band didn’t shout slogans or call for revolution, but played loudly and boldly. For that, its members were arrested by the Communist government in 1976.

Among those watching was a playwright and dissident named Václav Havel, who would eventually become president of post-Communist Czechoslovakia. Galvanized by what he saw, Havel wrote a 1978 manifesto in samizdat (self-published) form that passed from hand to trembling hand across the country, under the title The Power of the Powerless.

“Everyone understood that an attack on the Czech musical underground was an attack on a most elementary and important thing,” he wrote, “something that in fact bound everyone together: it was an attack on the very notion of ‘living within the truth,’ on the real aims of life.”

Havel’s essay centers around a memorable image — a hypothetical greengrocer who places a sign in his shop window that reads “WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!” The greengrocer doesn’t really have a strong belief that the workers of the world should unite. He places the sign in the window because it is the easiest thing to do. “The poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots,” Havel wrote. It gets put up because it is the default thing to do, like unpacking the onions and carrots and putting them on the shelf.

Acts like that, Havel suggested, are the lifeblood of what he called post-totalitarianism, in which people aren’t coerced by force into doing things; they voluntarily do what they think is expected of them. They don’t want to cause any trouble, so they quietly and perhaps even unconsciously engage in performative acts that signal belief in the status quo.

Havel’s poster has not disappeared; it has migrated. Today, it is the reflexive repost, the slogan in the bio, the conviction adopted because the people nearest us already hold it. Few of us examine these gestures any more than the greengrocer examined his sign. We perform them because performing them is the path of least resistance — and because everyone around us is performing them, too.

That is social contagion: the unconscious transmission of belief and desire from one person to the next, the reason a slogan or a fear can move through a crowd faster than any argument can. Post-totalitarianism is simply social contagion left unchecked — a society in which the pressure to perform runs strong and widespread because people do not have the kinds of friends, or civic associations, that would immunize them from it. If our society were a human body, it would have high blood pressure which, left untreated, would damage its vital organs. The way to treat this societal disease is not through medication, but through exercise: in our case, the exercise of healthy association that acts as a check on the pressures of power.

Power rarely comes from one source. It often comes from the way people relate — through trust, fear, stories, and rules. “It is in the basic associations of men that the real consequences of political power reveal themselves,” wrote the sociologist Robert Nisbet in the 1950s. Nisbet understood that political health depends on the strength of intermediate bonds that lie between the individual and the state — families, congregations, and local associations that give shape to common life. Once these bonds dissolve, the individual and the state meet face-to-face, naked and unmediated. That is the crisis of modern politics: not too much government, but too little community.

Havel saw a way to reconstitute the civic bonds that helped people live with more integrity, not according to the lies that falsely held his post-totalitarian society together. What if the compliant greengrocer chooses to change his behavior? “Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself,” he wrote. “He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings.” The greengrocer, Havel continued, “has not committed a simple, individual offense, isolated in its own uniqueness, but something incomparably more serious. By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game.”

The “one” who thinks that he is alone is never truly alone — that feeling of alienation, of isolation, is precisely what the state wants him to believe. Small acts of defiance are never done in isolation, in part because they appeal to the conscience of others. They wake some up; they help others form new associations. It was the fearlessness of a singular rock band, after all, that gave Havel himself the courage to form an association of his own.

In 1977, he and a group of public intellectuals, writers, philosophers, workers, clergymen, artists, and former political prisoners published a manifesto known as Charter 77. It wasn’t a formal organization, but a kind of moral fellowship: a living association of people who wanted to “live within the truth.” In a society built on compliance, the mere act of signing their names became an act of differentiation.

Our society will remain enervated and paralyzed if we believe that the only choice is between the one and the 99 — between isolation and totalizing conformity. The way forward begins with realizing that a vast middle ground exists. The one cannot be connected to the 99 directly without being in danger of either dissolving into it — or isolating for self-preservation. The self and the crowd are not in a natural relationship.

Imagine going to a large concert with a group of friends in a vast stadium filled with 100,000 frenzied fans and losing your friends in the crowd. You suddenly lose sight of your reference point, of those familiar faces, and you become a stranger in an anonymous crowd. It is your friend group — the intermediary association between yourself and the crowd — that keeps you anchored.

In a strong sense, that is the situation that many people find themselves in today, with the loss of the intermediary associations that Tocqueville saw were so important to the American character. A healthy civic association does not measure its success in membership count or the number of events hosted. Unlike the crowd, your association will notice if you stop coming, and it is there that the value lies. You will be sought out.

History suggests that the most transformative associations are rarely massive at the start. Charter 77 had 240 initial signatories. The Oxford Inklings rarely had more than six or eight members in the room, yet changed literary history. Jesus chose 12. Associations of a modest size are large enough to test ideas against resistance, yet intimate enough for personal accountability.

If you can’t claim to be part of a community of that character today, you should stop waiting for it or looking for it. It is time to build the associations on which progress depends.

This essay was adapted from the author’s book,  The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, which has just been published by Macmillan.

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