Large societies produce disconnected citizens?

I've been following the discussion about integrating the municipalities in Finland with conflicting thoughts. I am yet unable to make my mind about the issue - if it is a good thing or a bad thing. There's a lot of contradictory thoughts in my mind about it and here's one I came aware of after listening to author and doctor Edward Tick and his work with post traumatic stress disorder with veterans. This sounds like a long shot but actually it is quite close to our function as society.

Dr. Tick was seeing the PTSD as a incomplete initiation. Where our soldiers has been sent to serve our society abroad, facing their fears and deaths, facing the experience that is very disintegrating experience to one's mind or soul if you wish. After serving their time, they come back but no one takes care of integration back to society. Some of them wounded, everyone sacrificed a lot, they fly few hours on a plane and BOOM! Back to normal life - at least that's what is expected of them. All of them also has to deal with the discussion in society if we even should've been in that war anyway. Others evaluating the value of their sacrifice which on a personal level is huge.

Well is this so? Go to school, get a car, get drunk and go to army. Is this the initiation to our society? Initiation on both levels - individual and social - is at best finding the place in society, to serve society as a full member of it and to get personal fulfillment and sense of belonging in doing that (Mircea Eliade, Rites and symbols of initiation). I agree totally with that description. But looking our societies today makes me wonder if the initiation is left solely on the individual level and on personal responsibility. The initiation to be a acknowledged member of one's social environment is not self-evident anymore. This leads to wrong kind of behavior - even criminal - and leaves automatically some people outside our society.

From initiation point of view, going towards bigger social clusters leads to alienation and social exclusion. When we have problems already with this amount of centralized governance and with large and loose societies, why make this worse?

Note: This is not a tragedy only on an individual level. It is also money related issue, but even more a security and wellbeing related issue on social level.