Reforming Communities

An Introduction

Jun 04, 2023

There is not a problem that exists today that could not be solved – or at least halved – by being shared. By this I don’t mean an emotional outpouring, but through communities based on strong bonds and shared values.

Tight knit communities have gotten a bad rap recently for being “cult-like”. They are criticised for being either too strict in enforcing their rules on to the group - particularly in conservative or religious ones - or too “free love” and chaotic like many hippy or “liberal” communes that tends to result in a vacuume where a charismatic leader typically steps into the void.

But what all communities have – whether successful in the long term or not – is an ability to resist the dominant culture in favour of their subculture, whatever that subculture may be.

The issue is that the modern mass culture creates a fair few problems and ones that are nearly impossible to find a solution for at an individual or national level, but all of these issues could be at least mitigated against by local community-based solutions.

Increasing obesity rates, declining fertility, the ageing population, and housing prices are merely a handful of issues that could be helped by creating a strong social system - not in the sense of government welfare – but of the interpersonal variety that existed before big society programmes came in.

What is bizarre is just when we are experiencing more and more issues that could use local action, local governments or “councils” seem hell bent on focusing on global or federal ones. A friend of mine who attended the most recent ANZAC day dawn service told me how disappointing it was that the Mayor used his speech to advocate for the Voice rather than the veterans in his community that were sitting right in front of him. Whatever you think of these issues, they should not be the purview of the local government nor is the dawn service the correct time and place to discuss these.

More importantly, all discussions of problems today are focused on the systemic or the individual, never smaller conglomerates of individuals which we use to call “civil society” or just “society”. Today, we always ask the state or the individual to solve the problem, we never look to civil society to find a solution. This is to miss a huge power that used to be central to a functioning demos.

This is, I am sure, in large part due to how gutted civil society is, but this only came about when people started thinking in exclusively in terms of state vs the individual.

The focus of all politics as being State vs the Individual also means that all solutions require lobbying the government to “do something” in the case of the pro-state intervention side and “stop doing something” from those on the pro-individual side. But when civil society is strong it has an enormous ability to work around whatever the government is either doing or not doing and protect the individuals in its community from the system – being political, economic or otherwise.

Many of the problems mentioned above are caused by the pincer movement of increased power over people at the same time as we insist that this power is best fought at the political level rather than solving its root cause.

The problems like obesity and fertility rates are politically salient issues at the moment where the solutions proposed are following the usual formula: Big society programmes vs commercial or individual solutions. But it was the cozy relationship between big government and big business that created many of these problems in the first place.

Instead of following the old script of demanding the government do more or less (but typically more) how about we try and find creative solutions for us, our loved ones, and our community first. Like when the plane goes down, we should first put on our own oxygen mask, then our own children, then the stranger who is sitting next to us and then we can help others moving out from us.

Proximity plus values has always been the basis by which bonds have formed between people that are capable of withstanding hardships. We shouldn’t pretend for a second that government help will always be there when we need it nor should we pretend that we can solve each problem ourselves. We need collectives.

Over the next few weeks I will explore what local collective solutions could be pursued to fix some of the great problems of our time, these are:

In the final installment I will tackle the question of how to form communities that can implement the very solutions I suggest in parts 1 and 2. This is perhaps the hardest part the equation.

Freedom of association has been the first of the civil liberties to die. In a world that frames everything as a fight between individual rights like “freedom of speech” and the state-based communal rights like “right to health care or education” the rights that can’t be exercised by the individual alone nor the government - such as freedom of association - were the first to get thrown away and read down in law. The key moment when this became apparent was with the civil rights law in the US and anti-discrimination law in Australia. Both of these laws demoted freedom of association in order to create a new right “to be free from discrimination”. In many ways this new fangled right is the fusion of the individualists and statist ideas. It is a right that can be exercised personally at the same time as requiring a nation state to enforce it as ordinary humans will naturally discriminate when forming smaller collectives.

The fallout from a demotion of freedom of association has made forming collectives based on values incredibly difficult and even frowned on as by nature these communities will discriminate and not welcome people who do not share the core values into their midst.

But the insistence on national communities rather than smaller ones has fueled polarisation. if communities could self-govern, how other people we share a country with differ from us (and our values) becomes of little consequence. One of the positives of this polarisation is that we may again find value in devolved power and civil society.

Perhaps this comes across as defeatist, but ultimately I think the natural progression will be that we move back into communities where we can feel like the neighbour shares our core values and their neighbour as well until the whole community can work together on shared aims.

We won’t cease to be at each other’s throats in national politics until such time as there is a devolution in power towards the local level, but that has to start with reforming communities that share values and can be empowered to enact a vision that is broadly shared.

This may be a big claim on my part, but the work of reforming communities and civil society is possibly the single most important thing we can be doing to guarantee a better (or at least not terrible) future.