I mean this in a personal sense: I live in a culture of participation. My family talks a lot; I talk a lot. Too much, sometimes. We argue about things, in a friendly and not-so-friendly fashion, depending.

Often I’m frustrated by people’s apparent inability to participate. Whole seminars go by in tense near-silence, punctuated only by abortive attempts to start a discussion, and the shuffling of feet. Eyes are locked firmly on books, notes, shoes. These people, I think, have never left school.

School is not the beginning or the end of the problem, but it does occupy a significant chunk of the middle. “Don’t talk back!” is the mantra of beleaguered teachers, beset on all sides by unruly pupils. “Don’t talk back” destroys the discussion, its admonitory tones withering our ability to respond, defend ourselves, question the orthodoxy. “Don’t talk back” is exactly what the government wants us to be told.

I say “the government” as though it is an active agent, engaged in the suppression of freedom of thought and action. The truth is more prosaic, but no less worrying. Backchat is a bother; dissent is troublesome; questions threaten the stability of, well, everything. We are meant to be good little workers, good little consumers, keeping the economy running, behaving in an orderly fashion.

What’s the point? What good is working, or buying, or acting in a proper fashion, without some underlying raison d’etre? Thatcherism destroyed society, so we have no duty to that; religion, for most of us, is no more than an empty ritual; and, bereft of any ideology beyond naked greed, it seems impossible to attach any value to our nation either, so patriotism is out too. America, despite its abject hypocrisy in so many spheres, at least claims to stand for something.

Let’s change tack. The internet is, in a sense, flat: you can type any URL into the address bar of your browser, and be instantly transported there. All destinations are equally possible, equally accessible (unless you’re in China). Never before has the sheer vastness of human knowledge been so overwhelming; never before has there been so much you could be reading.

This is, needless to say, a little overwhelming. There is so much to read, so much to respond to, that I find myself unable to keep up; I’m reduced to treading water, gradually sinking beneath the waves of information. Often, I can’t even begin to think of what I might say. I am drowning in the voices of the crowd.

You can’t have a conversation with a crowd; you can only lecture to them. Real discussion requires a small group. Discussion—conversation—is what makes us what we are. Let’s build some small groups; let’s start discussions; let’s build society anew.