What needs to be returned to is what I call the ‘social imagination,’ which is the idea that human beings have the right to be the authors of their own worlds rather than being simply an expression of the world that they happen to have been born into. They always have the right, and indeed the obligation, to be makers of their own world, which capitalism, of course, doesn’t allow.
“He disliked being alone, preferring company, however problematical, to no company. In cities such a willingness to socialize can lead a man up peculiar streets indeed, anything from all-out Uzi-toting misanthropy to a full Dickensian embrace of human diversity, foolishness and all. But to move in that direction, to open up instead of shut down, meant risking the possibility of finding spiritual dimensions sooner or later hiding inside a space he thought he owned and knew, and what would the next step have to be after that? Herbs, crystals, astrology? California?”
Thomas Pynchon