This critical insight is not constructive and active but destructive and passive. Pensky argues after Robert Merton that melancholy constitutes a specific form of rebellion: the despair and hopelessness of the melancholic arise from the concrete or imagined condition of utter helplessness in the face of a social order experienced as oppressive or stifling. From this perspective,

melancholia is a retreat from and a total rejection of society, due not only to the repressive function of social norms but also to the total effect of society, which the melancholic experiences as suffocating. The melancholic's rebellion is therefore a passive one. Under the conviction, whether justified or not, that all avenues toward effective action have been closed off, the melancholic rebel recedes into a resigned interiority, brooding over the very conditions of the impossibility of action themselves. (Pensky, 1993, p. 34)

Benjamin Barber, on the other hand, is less optimistic. He remains skeptical as to whether virtual communities formed on-line can actually be seen as fulfilling the requirement of a democracy incorporating strong participatory and deliberative elements. As he puts it, "Lolling in your underwear in front of an electronic screen while accessing with your dancing fingers the pixels generated by anonymous strangers across the world is not my idea of forging a community of concern or establishing common ground, let alone cementing a trusting friendship" (Barber, 2003, p. 39).