Prisoner solidarity changes one’s experience of ordinary social distance

Evidence

On my first night of freedom, a stranger in my native city, not having yet reached my friends of former days, I pushed open the door of a café. Suddenly, I experienced a feeling of fear — or something close to fear. I could not understand how these squat, bulging buildings could conceal such deserts. I was lost; the few drinkers seemed more distant than the stars. Each of them was entitled to a huge section of bench, to a whole marble table … If these men, shimmering comfortably within their tubes of rarefied gas, seemed inaccessible to me, it was because I no longer had the right to place my hand on their shoulder or thigh, or to call one of them ‘fat-head’. I had rejoined bourgeois society. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 465

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the essay on sacrifice and shared physical intimacy — the camp’s forced physical merging versus bourgeois reserve. — connects to: Collective mistreatment among prisoners generates mutual kindness as a survival strategy; Arbitrary meaningless inmate categories prevent solidarity among camp prisoners; Prison design deliberately provokes distrust to block prisoner solidarity (+2 more)
• SEED: Possible angle: how sudden descent into extreme solidarity (prison, military, hospital) permanently recalibrates one’s tolerance for ordinary polite distance — a sociological essay.

Broader Connections

• Collective mistreatment among prisoners generates mutual kindness as a survival strategy #expands (0.92)
• Shared brutal treatment can grow solidarity among incarcerated women #exemplifies (0.90) — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 107
• Arbitrary meaningless inmate categories prevent solidarity among camp prisoners #complicates (0.85)
• Formal similarity of social position creates solidarity regardless of personal character #expands (0.82) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 595
• Prison design deliberately provokes distrust to block prisoner solidarity #complicates (0.80)