One of my favorite blogs, Balloon Juice, brought my attention to an article reporting research demonstrating that a perception of personal powerlessness leads to a greater tendency towards superstition, conspiracy theories, and false conclusions.  I think this has enormous implications for understanding America today.
As institutions become ever greater and farther removed from any sensitivity towards real people, increasingly we are immersed in a society where our influence in many of our daily activities is small and indirect.  Government is not open to our influence in any way we can actually experience.  The same holds for big business, big education, big medicine, and any other area of life where the personal has been overwhelmed by the impersonal.
That indirect emergent processes that coordinate our actions with others may be at work is irrelevant because we do not experience any efficacy on our part.  Thus, the emergent social process I study however beneficial they may be are inadequate for creating a good environment for human flourishing.  I fact, they may breed habits of perception and thinking that ultimately weaken the significant contributions they do make to human well-being.
I have been groping towards a theory of civil society as the actual realm of human well-being because it is not dominated by any single impersonal feedback processes.  This research suggests my intuition may be even more important than I had imagined.
In terms of broadly liberal social theory, it makes the case for focusing on the individual rather than some abstraction of a part of an individual as the unit of analytical and ethical concern.  Out with the ‘consumer,’ the ‘rational actor,’ the ‘citizen,’ and let us return to human beings in all their complexity. I believe this research also radically strengthens arguments for ‘small is beautiful,’ ‘buy locally,’ and the importance of a sense of place approaches towards social life.