Will your community feed your cat?

There has never been more talk about communities and yet less actual community. It is time we properly understood the science of isolation and why it is very, very bad for us and for society.

Everything is a community now – the Coca-Cola community, the pizza-eating community, and perhaps most egregiously, Rachel Reeves' non-dom community (which is a community of people united by the fact that they don't live here). Which means we've never had so much community.

Now go on your holidays, leave your key under the flower pot, email the pizza-eating community to come and feed your cat and then, when you get back, let me know how your cat is doing.

In ways that I don't think people properly appreciate, there has been a war going on over 'community' and community is losing. It is generally talked about in politics as 'just one of those things', a natural phenomenon which occurs independent of human action. When community declines, that's just the public voting with their not-feet.

And in ways that people definitely don't appreciate, the failure to embed people in communities is an absolute disaster for our society, one which is causing irreparable damage. Both these things need to be understood and accepted before we have even half a chance of restoring what we think of as social cohesion and the resultant possibility of a functioning democracy.

First, why does community matter? Here I'm primarily interested not in social sciences but the biological sciences – this stuff isn't guesswork, you can see it in an MRI scanner. This systematic review of neurobiological studies into loneliness identify “abnormal structure (gray matter volume or white matter integrity) and/or activity (response to pleasant versus stressful images in social versus nonsocial contexts) in the prefrontal cortex (especially medial and dorsolateral), insula (particularly anterior), amygdala, hippocampus, and posterior superior temporal cortex”.

But this second study really gets to the point of our current social crisis; “Loneliness associated increases in inflammation and neural changes consistent with increased sensitivity to social threat and disrupted emotion regulation suggest interventions targeting maladaptive social cognitions may be especially effective”.

If that is too technical for you, let me translate – loneliness fucks your brain, makes you ill, drives you paranoid and makes you angry and erratic. Does that sound like any society you may be familiar with? If you picked the US, that's low-hanging fruit. Have a glance out of the window.

It is really easy to write the social science of community and isolation – it provides support and cohesion. Community is the sine qua non of social science. It is equally easy to write the economics of community – you just count up the value of all those cat-feeding services and it produces a big 'community is exceptionally efficient' number.

And the political benefits of social cohesion are no less clear. More cohesive societies are easier to govern and they are much more effective at building collective infrastructure and creating voter consent for tax

But it's the behavioural factor that is less understood. Even I tend to emphasise other factors such as the intentionally rage-inducing social media algorithm. But the fundamental truth is that community makes us better people because it embeds us in empathetic relationships outside our immediate family grouping. It is hard to underestimate the effect of this.

When we are embedded in diverse empathetic relationships it both better helps us understand other people and their needs and it regulates our emotions and improves our behaviour. Other people are like a compass for us – when we are unduly emotional alone we amplify it but when in company we recognise it is too much and regulate it. This is good for us.

Equally, on our own we exist in a brutal, icy world of unlimited ego. If we are all that is in the room, we are all that matters so all our behaviour is by definition good. When we are with others we exist partly in a shared space where our behaviour affects others and where we can see our behaviour affecting others. Empathy pulls us back from extreme behaviours. We want to be liked by our community.

See all the shit that politicians tell you is what you want, what makes a society better, what the goal of policy is? You know, ambition, choice, change? Well choice and change are fundamentally exhausting to the brain and most of the time we go out of our way to avoid it. The entire brain is designed to help us make choices efficiently by not thinking about it too much.

And ambition isn't even measurable in the brain. The drive to achievement is (technically, goal-directed behaviour), but that is about specific goals. I am not an ambitious person but I am very goal-directed because getting things done is important to me. You have to redefine it as ambition if you have any hope of seeing ambition.

Meanwhile see all the things that politician go out of their way to tell you they are not interested in (those are all the things that they call 'personal choice')? They really matter. You're not meant to choose ambition, it's meant to be your fundamental driver, but you are meant to choose community and if you don't that's your problem. This is upside down politics.

“There is a solution to this, but it is a solution a politician will never say out loud – engineer in community”

I bet you think the breakdown of community 'just happened'. It didn't, it was engineered. Because do you know who absolutely loves low rates of cognitive emotion regulation? Retailers and advertisers. Excessively emotional people buy things while their compatriots who are embedded in community are out doing much more rewarding things.

All that neuroscience above basically tells us that the more isolated we are, the less rationally we act. Again, someone in a house full of close friends is a lot less likely to engaged in out-of-control online shopping.

This is a complex symbiosis. We have reengineered our society for shopping then it has reengineered us. On the one hand, this wasn't particularly meant to destroy community, but on the other, it did. To shop more we worked more and so had less time with friends. To make shopping easier we built fast roads and dedicated 'retail parks', sort of religious monuments to consumption.

Cities are turned over to retail. Glasgow is at times like a funnel that drives you incessantly towards shopping. It is a challenge I put to people who can't see this – go and spend two hours in Glasgow city centre doing something interesting and constructive without spending any money or planning to spend money later (and you're not allowed in Goma).

Other aspects of how we engineered out community include the loss of local infrastructure and facilities and the ever-rising cost of accessing those that are there, the loss of green space, the multiple bureaucratic barriers to voluntary activity like sports clubs, the centralisation of work so long commutes become the norm, the decimation of economic activity on high streets...

But the recent engineering moves are even more sinister – we are being engineered out of the real world altogether. We now largely exist in a digital space and that space is fucking awful. The real world has its problems (one minute it's Liz Truss misruling, the next it's Keir Starmer...), but it pales in comparison to the horror show that is life online.

Controlled by billionaires with varying degrees of right-wing to far-right ideology and entirely engineered (all of it) to take your money away from you and make you angry at something else, a giant stinking propaganda machine which you willingly let into your house, in almost every possible sense, the internet has failed us.

There is a solution to this, but it is a solution a politician will never say out loud – engineer in community. In capitalism it is OK to engineer things that make profit but never that make society better. We need to reverse the atomisation of our society, driven by corporations and billionaires.

I am itching to go on to explain how to do that but there isn't going to be space here. Worse, what you perhaps haven't realised by now is that this is still a contribution to my seemingly never-ending thesis on fixing our food system. Food shopping (along with pubs and clubs and schools and gala days and the like) was one of the key ways our communities connected.

You see the people on your street on your street, but you saw the people from three streets over in the shop. I am lucky to live in a strong community where I know a lot of people and generally I just assume that I'm going to spend at least ten minutes more than necessary when I go shopping locally because I'm almost certain to bump into someone I'll end up chatting with. It is a pain in the arse – and a very great joy.

But what breaks my heart about all of this is seeing young people trying to cope. Yes, social isolation and loneliness are skewed towards elderly people, but the systematic practices of how to live in community are something young people are not learning. If you read much about Gen Z and its relationship to dating and hobbies and participating in things, you keep finding the same underlying drive:

The drive to make meaningful connections. This is a generation raised in the digital space, in a post-community era – and they're massively, disproportionately on a regime of anti-anxiety and anti-depression medication. It's those unregulated emotions, that abnormal brain structure we learned about above.

If we cannot recognise that just because someone else eats pizza or drinks Coca-Cola it does not make them part of the same community as us, this will get worse and worse.

But there is good news; the evidence suggests this is reversible (see the studies cited above). All those abnormal brain structures can recover, can become healthy again – as soon as we are embedded in diverse empathetic relationships.

I really am losing patience with politicians just now. They won't go five minutes without telling you how awful it is that the public is being more and more nasty to them. They seem not to connect this with the fact that people are also being nastier to teachers and nurses and ticket collectors and everyone else. And they never seem to see this rising anger as their responsibility, their problem to solve.

We can solve the rise of anger, the erratic failure to regulate emotion, the neurological harm it has done, but we cannot do it without getting our hands dirty and changing the way our society operates so that it naturally creates communities rather than destroying them.