Picture a society with a single member: yourself. There are no others, no neighbours, no companions. And yet, in this solitary society, the structures of social life persist — roles, norms, expectations.
You rise in the morning and greet yourself. You cook a meal and feel the need to thank the cook. You make a mistake and feel compelled to apologise — to whom, exactly? To yourself, and yet also not yourself.
The society of one is not empty. It is dense with reflexive alignments. The self fractures into positions: speaker and listener, judge and judged, friend and adversary. Social meaning emerges, not from numbers, but from the capacity to take perspective, to construe relation where none is physically present.
The experiment shows that society is not reducible to a collection of individuals. It is an architecture of construal, a scaffolding of roles and relations that can persist even when only one body is present to enact them.
What this reveals:
Society is not built out of individuals, but out of relational positions. The “one” already contains the many. To imagine sociality without others is to find, within oneself, the architecture of the collective.
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