Delocalisation
The process of eliminating essential services from local towns and villages, requiring increases in the need for travel and transport, energy and time, along with a loss of social capital, self-reliance, presence and morale. Examples: the centralisation of hospitals, schools, police, magistrates courts and probation services; the closing down of post offices, shops, pubs and abattoirs; and prohibitions preventing skilled craftsmen from recruiting apprentices by imposing health and safety regulations beyond the means of a small rural business.
These developments—persistent symptoms of capture and concentration—reduce ever-further localities’ preparedness for localisation and the Wheel of Life. They also destroy the sense of there being any place to which local people belong, or for which they can make any decisions, or bear any responsibility. The French philosopher Simone Weil called this “uproootedness”, and wrote that it is “by far the most dangerous malady to which human societies are exposed. . . . To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul”.D12
Related entries:
Demoralisation, Social Entropy.
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