This week the question is Do You Have Community?
We’re communal animals
We are a social species; we need to cooperate to survive. While
Dunbar’s number has been dethroned by more recent brain science, it still seems that the maximum number of relationships most people can comfortably and meaningfully maintain in some way is ~500. Smaller numbers, between 50 and 290, seem to be more common. These numbers, then, are part of the definition of community.
Community is necessary in multiple ways
We depend on a group of people we comfortably and/or meaningfully maintain relationships with for emotional care and meaning; to check, support, and expand our understanding of reality; to feed, clothe, protect, and plysically assist us; for recognition of our existance and of our achievements and fears; in order to achieve goals; and to combat loneliness, among many other things. Our physical and emotional survival are strongly impacted by the presence or absence of community. Our interactions with the biosphere and individual ecosystems are determined by our communities.
Community can be toxic
Because we are so dependant on community, it can really do a number on us. Examples are everywhere, from incels to the the recognizable reality of
Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”. Toxic communities damage individuals in multiple ways, such as by causing emotional harm, distorting or limiting our understanding of reality, depriving us of physical necessities, denying our humanity, blocking us from opportunities to succeed, causing loneliness, etc. Communities that do this also tend to normalize destruction of ecosystems and the biosphere by tying such destruction to survival at every level.
Commodification Destroys Community
Destroying and then monetizing the functions of good communities is a quick source of income, and removes control from a community to give it to individuals instead. Midwives/wise women were demonized, outlawed, and burned in witch hunts, for example, in an effort that continues to this day. Environmental observations and actions were famously stripped from Native communities to allow wide scale intended and unintended destruction of the north American continent.
The push toward commodification works best if individuals become consumers; there is more profit in selling something to 100 individuals than to 1 community. The suburbs are a prime example of this, where you can see 80 backyard pools and no community rec center pool. The environmental destruction involved in this scale of mass replication is part of why the top 1% are so important to and invested in climate chaos.
Good community versus bad community versus cults
Communities change all the time, and a good community can become bad, or vice versa. There are signs to look for when evaluating a community. These include:
Signs of a good community include:
Shared common goals that align with members’ needs
Freedom of expression and the freedom to ask questions
Promoting fairness
Clear policies and obligations
Transparency and effective communication across the board
Concern for the individual in the community
Celebrating community heritage
Leadership that is responsible and responsive to the community
Signs of a bad community include:
Goals out of line with stated community goals
Discouragement of discussion, punishment for asking questions
Unfair practices
Unclear organization
The community always beings more important than an individual
Drastic changes in the goals and ID of the community (hijacking)
Top-down leadership sustained in ways that do not align with stated community goals
Signs of a cult
Absolute authority without accountability to the whole community
Zero tolerance for questions, discussion, or criticism
No transparency in organizational structure, or money or assets
Love bombing and deceptive recruitment tactics
Deprivation (sleep, food, clothing, contact with the outside world)
A new life, secret phrases and symbols, secret rites of passage
Again, communities are not static and can transition between states, usually based on individuals or subgroups in the community and their needs/objectives. But the bad end of the scale happens when the community/cult seeks to control the behavior, access to information, thoughts, and emotions of the individual members and the good end happens when the community exists to aid and uphold the individual members.
How will the definition of good community change as climate chaos intensifies?
As our goals narrow down to just survival, how will that change how communities function? The oligarchs and autocrats are betting on more cult-like organizational structures being the way, as that both increases the need for their acquisition and hoarding of resources and their control over as many resources as possible. Certainly the
Mad Max tendencies of many consumers seems to be that might is right, and the huge amount of gun ownership in the U.S. argues that most Americans think the same.
But there are whole communities who are making decisions together right now on leaving or moving to higher ground, and they are making these decisions as communities. In the U.S., communities that have been hit by ecosystem catastrophe that have not dealt with their specific needs and problems as a group
have been destroyed one person or one family at time.
What are you doing about community in your life?