Written by Gen Zendahl - posted by JonahW on her behalf with her permission
A reflective synthesis on Zygmunt Bauman, social trust, and the living roots of collective life
I enjoyed everyone’s contributions… I felt this conversation was a seed for me. Please permit me to speak in a different language style, rooted in arts, mythopoesis and rather than academia, yet hopefully rigorous in it’s own way.
Thank you to our speaker for gathering us around the ideas of Zygmunt Bauman, whose concept of liquid modernity evoked a world in which the once-solid institutions of life — stable jobs, enduring communities, clear identities — have melted into fast, uncertain flows. In this world, freedom multiplies, but so does insecurity. Identity becomes flexible, but often untethered.
Our speaker named the consequence of this shift: a collapse of social trust.
Where once there was shared commitment to the common good, people now withdraw into individualism, privacy, self-protection, and survival. Not from malice, but from exhaustion and disillusionment.
We understood that we must rebuild social trust and need to re-invent idealism based in meaning, community, and stability.
I, and perhaps all of us, sensed something more, while these words ring true, they remain a bit abstract; what was missing was a tangible way of beginning — the how of re-coherence.
What, I ponder, does Bauman see and what does he miss?
He sees clearly:
- The dissolution of stable social forms, fluidity
- The rise of precarious, self-curated identities
- A shift from belonging to agile networking
- The anxiety of infinite choice and consumption
But he misses:
- Structural power and systems of inequality
- Global. embodied, ecological, and relational roots of incoherence
- Concrete design pathways forward
- The soul-level rupture beneath social fragmentation
He names the symptoms, but as a man of his time, he is not holding the vocabulary and perspectives we have now, not fully the soil we are aware of.
May I offer what has emerged in my reflection:
It was suggested we cannot go back, and I think that is only partly true, I think we can recapture the gold grains from the past, we can pan that gold from the sands of time, and recover our fundamental primal social selves, and the good things now lost.
Let us reframe coherence not as a return to past structures, but as a movement toward resonant integration…a kind of wholeness that breathes.
From this, five gestures:
- Sacred Ordinary
Artefacts of modern life must be re-examined. Can some of our tools still serve presence instead of distraction? Which ones?
- Relation at Every Level
From governance to digital design, systems must become aware of their full consequences. Feedback must replace fiction. We have to be humble before the facts.
- Rhythmic Life
Resonant with all life, stability is found in tempo, not rigidity. Coherence builds slowly, through ritual, and seasonal return.
- Re-rooted Kinship
“Tribe” and extended family is not nostalgia. It is survival. We must remake belonging not by reenacting the past, but by remembering and reshaping the patterns, but possibly in new ways.
- Compost What Extracts
Some tools, norms, and systems refuse relation, and are functionally incoherent. These must dissolve, collapse is both necessary and desirable. We cannot sanctify what denies care.
See the hunger for belonging… it can be clearly observed: people are desperate for belonging, and they will seek it in any form available.
Gangs, hate groups, and polarized political and “in group” movements, even consumer types, or generational cohorts, are not simply ideological choices, they are mimicries of kinship, formed when no real containers are offered. It is my belief that we cannot afford not to re-engage with tribe.
Belonging, and a sense of significance is not a luxury. It is human biological need.
If the culture fails to provide it, distortions will fill the gap.
Where many commentators hesitate. We named the edge many face now:
- There is puzzlement. Many do not know how to begin.
- There is hesitancy. No one wants to prescribe or coerce.
- There is abstraction. “Meaning, community, stability” are invoked, but often lack concrete embodiment.
However, I don’t think we need more critique, or backward looking research. We are out of time. We need ignition!
Where Might We Begin?
- Start from the body, not the idea
Transformation begins with felt shifts… safety, grief, beauty, co-regulation.
Bring meaning into the body, the arts is a portal.
- Through ritual, not rhetoric
Offer grief rituals, shared meals, cooperative practices. These rewire our sense of trust.
- Design for interdependence
Create systems that encourage people to need and support each other again — not out of scarcity, but from mutual care.
- Let models speak more than manifestos
Show working examples of community, not just theories.
Let people see and feel what is possible.
- Speak to longing, not lack
The desire for coherence and tribe already lives in people.
The task is to name it, nurture it, and shape it into new forms.
May I name the threshold I see we are at?
We cannot return to past forms of modernity and yet we cannot survive in unanchored fluidity.
We must then, create a third path, a coherence rooted in mutual care, a culture shaped by presence, a rhythm aligned with land, body, and belonging.
I don’t think this is a utopian fantasy, but the next necessary opening.
We are at the fracture edge — where the scaffolds of modernity no longer hold, and the new forms have not yet rooted.
The nervous system of our species flickers between overwhelm and numbness. This is not an era just calling for reform. This is a civilizational turning, metamorphosis is needed. To speak of coherence now is not to fix small deviations, but from chaos to midwife a new way of being. We need more than proposals, we must ring true and deep. We should speak incantations.
So then my incantation:
Let us not fiddle with discourse while the soul-starved burn and our children die. Let us build hearths of meaning. Let us risk presence, and dare to feel, fully. Let us remember what the old languages sang: that life is made whole not by control, but by love.
Fellow travellers, new friends, this spore has been cast. Let it find soil. Let it remember the forest to come 
) You point towards a rupture that is sadly common in research, an intellectual and dispassionate distancing, that attends to parts and fails to see the whole. (McGilchrist LH hemisphere)