Atomized societies become dangerously volatile during crises.

Evidence

Returning to Sloterdijk’s nautical metaphors, it is the Pamir, rather than the superferry, that offers a fitting emblem for the hyperpolitical present. In earlier times, individuals were embedded in dense social networks and participated in a wide array of intermediate associations. Today’s societies are composed of increasingly atomized and isolated individuals. As long as history moves along smoothly and predictably, this need not necessarily be a problem. But when societies enter choppier waters, atomization amplifies their volatility—and the collective incapacity to respond to today’s political and ecological crises. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 240

Categorization

• XREF: The Pamir emblem is the book’s core diagnosis condensed: loose cargo is a hyperpolitical society. Directly serves the reader’s aim of explaining why total political saturation produces so little durable change. — connects to: The social can be dissolved by inertia as much as by panic — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 306; Mass panic is rare even under conditions theorized to produce it — John Drury, The role of social identity processes…, 30
• STORYSTEM: The shifting barley cargo is a ready-made fictional disaster motif — a crew’s time-pressure decision with inert matter that turns on them.