Social Withdrawal as Social Protest

Considering the issue of social withdrawal I have generally found myself looking at reports on the matter from or about Japan, and discussion of the issue as it may apply elsewhere in the English-speaking press (mainly though not exclusively the American press). Recently, though, I happened on an item in the French newspaper 20 Minutes discussing the topic, which caught my attention right away with the title: "Hikikomoris français: 'J’ai fui le monde car il était trop dur, trop brutal, trop insécurisant, trop injuste, trop dégoûtant.'" Translated the quotation, from one of the article's interview subjects, says "I fled the world because it was too hard, too brutal, too insecure, too unfair, too disgusting."

I have long tended to the view that there is something of this view of society in much of the social withdrawal we see (in regard to work, for example), be it the milder forms of withdrawal in which people may hold a job, etc. but do the absolute minimum to survive and keep aloof from other people at all other times, or the more severe forms we see, as with the hikikomori who refuses to even come out of their room and face their family--but the preference has long been to see it as a matter of individual pathology, etc.. However, here we have an explicit social criticism on the part of one of the sufferers, who flatly says that he found the world outside unbearable--a reaction hardly implausible given how society is structured, how people treat each other, and the rest, and especially how all this is felt at the "sharp end." The fact that the response to such criticisms so often tends to be sneering callousness ("Welcome to the real world!") only underlines the fact--and suggests that those seriously interested in where the world is going would do far better to put such phenomena in their proper context than, in line with the conventional, cowardly, mediocre norm people treat as mature and pragmatic, deny the existence of any context at all.