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The experience of American towns analysed by Sennett points to one well-nigh universal regularity: the suspicion against others, the intolerance of difference, the resentment of strangers, and the demands to separate and banish them, as well as the hysterical, paranoiac concern with ‘law and order’, all tend to climb to their highest pitch in the most uniform, the most racially, ethnically and class-wise segregated, homogeneous local communities. No wonder: in such localities the support for the ‘we-feeling’ tends to be sought in the illusion of equality, secured by the monotonous similarity of everyone within sight. The guarantee of security tends to be adumbrated in the absence of differently thinking, differently acting and differently looking neighbours. Uniformity breeds conformity, and conformity’s other face is intolerance. In a homogeneous locality it is exceedingly difficult to acquire the qualities of character and the skills needed to cope with human difference and situations of uncertainty; and in the absence of such skills and qualities it is all too easy to fear the other, simply for reason of being an-other – bizarre and different perhaps, but first and foremost unfamiliar, not-readily-comprehensible, not-fully-fathomed, unpredictable.

— Globalization by Zygmunt Bauman

Unlike the ontological insecurity, the identity-focused uncertainty needs neither the carrot of heaven nor the stick of hell to cause insomnia. It is all around, salient and tangible, all-too-protruding in the rapidly ageing and abruptly devalued skills, in human bonds entered until further notice, in jobs which can be taken away without any notice, and the ever new allures of the consumer feast, each promising untried kinds of happiness while wiping the shine off the tried ones.

— Postmodernity and its discontents by Zygmunt Bauman