Atomisation

The divide-and-rule tendency of the Pit, which seeks to isolate each individual by the clever use of the doctrine of "personal independence". By undermining and uprooting all natural loyalties, whether to family, religion, nation, custom or tradition, each individual is cut off from all sources of support and sustenance outside the cathode-defined "reality" of the Pit. The doctrine of selfishness is preached, playing on the natural selfishness of each individual (which normal societies encourage her to curb), to the point at which trust between spouses and even mothers and children may break down, with each individual primarily "out for herself", and therefore, by the same token, an isolated, atomised unit completely dependent on the Pit because she has no other sure haven to turn to.

We may note in passing that the so-called "sexual revolution" was an important stage in the creation of an atomised society. In Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Anti-Sex League tried to suppress sex because "loyalty to an individual is disloyalty to the State", in the Pit, loyalty is much more subtly broken down by the Cult of Selfishness, while the mystic bonds of eroticism are destroyed not by trying to ban them (which would only lend them greater allure) but by the opposite process of banalising sex and desensitising the erotic sensibility by a grotesque and trivialising over-exposure.

Atomisation necessarily goes hand in hand with deracination and usually with deformism.

---