Life & Wisdom Quote by Valerie Solanas

Solanas goes for the throat by refusing the comforting language of “community” and swapping in something colder: a pile of sealed-off households. The line is built like an insult disguised as a diagnosis. “Our society” sounds broad and civic; “merely” snaps it shut, turning the claim into a demotion. Then she lands on “isolated family units,” an almost clinical phrase that drains the family of warmth and recasts it as infrastructure: a set of private cells, each managing its own needs, each trained to treat everyone else as background noise.

The intent is less nostalgic than prosecutorial. Solanas isn’t mourning lost neighborliness; she’s arguing that the family, in a capitalist and patriarchal order, functions as a containment system. If the primary loyalty is to the household, politics becomes domestic logistics: protect your own, compete with others, outsource care to whoever you can afford, and call it responsibility. “Community” would imply shared risk, shared resources, shared obligations. Her phrasing suggests those bonds have been replaced by privatized survival.

Context matters because Solanas wrote out of radical feminist fury in the late 1960s, when the “happy family” was marketed as social stability and used to discipline women’s labor, sexuality, and ambition. Read beside her broader polemic, the subtext sharpens: isolation isn’t an accident of modern life, it’s an outcome. A society of family units is easier to govern, easier to sell to, and harder to organize. The line weaponizes a familiar ideal to expose how it can be used as a political anesthetic.