Community: The Final Chapter Guest Post by Dmitry Orlov

This is guest post was written by the irrepressible Dmitry Orlov and is being used by permission. Here is a link to the original article at his website. Orlov has a fine mind but does not suffer fools well.

Community: The Final Chapter

If you filter out from the common, mainstream uses of the word “community” all of the obviously non-community-related ones, such as “international community” (a lame euphemism) or “community relations” (a synonym for “public relations”) or “community center” (a synonym for “neighborhood center”) pretty much all that remains is “retirement community.” There are well over two thousand of them just in the US, with close to a million residents. In comparison, “intentional communities,” including ecovillages, monasteries, communes, survivalist retreats, kibbutzim, ashrams and so on are rather boutique, being mainly aspirational and ideological rather than practical in nature. But added together they present more or less the entire landscape of “communities” within the developed world. And all of them are degenerate cases.

The first cause of this degeneracy is a fundamental internal contradiction. Setting aside for the moment the various “intentional community” experiments, the reason people join retirement communities is because they essentially want to have their cake and eat it too. It usually costs quite a bit of money to buy into one, and the people who can afford to do so are in general those who have been active in the world at large, being for most of their lives a part of society rather than part of a community, and have amassed a bit of a fortune in the process. If they had children, then they have pushed them out into the world at large as well, or became largely alienated from them in any case by having little to offer to them once they reach adulthood.

And then, at some point, they realize that they can no longer fend for themselves in the world at large, that they are becoming increasingly lonely and isolated as their peers age out and die, and it is at that point that they decide to trade “society” for “community.” In essence, they have spent their productive years competing in the individualistic dog-eat-dog world of private business and pubic bureaucracy [sic], undermining and destroying community, but when they become old and frail they attempt to buy their way into community, which is to be synthesized ex nihilo using their purchasing power.

In turn, the purchasing power of their retirement savings has to be maintained by making the younger generations continue to undermine and destroy community by being active in the individualistic dog-eat-dog world of private business and pubic bureaucracy [sic], generating economic growth and asset appreciation that underpin the value of retirement savings.

I very much doubt that this basic point, that it isn’t possible to create community by undermining community values through individualism, would make sense to too many of them. Some of them do realize that their entire economic scheme is unraveling—economic growth has largely stalled (except for some ongoing financial bubbles)—and that their retirement savings are in increasing jeopardy. But they have no idea what to do about it, and it’s probably too late for them to try to do anything about it in any case. (Or is it? That is a question worth pondering.)

The second cause of this degeneracy is the degenerate nature of the communities in question. In order to be sustainable over the long run, a community has to include multiple generations and specifically make room for children born into them; it has to provide for the needs of its individuals, including room and board, upbringing and education, companionship and entertainment, and security; and it has to have a sense of its own unique identity, history and destiny, separate from the surrounding society. I have described these properties in detail in the book Communities that Abide. A retirement community is essentially a conveyor belt that takes old people and carries them to the grave, and is definitely not viable; nor is any community that fails to reproduce and keep up its numbers by having enough children and by retaining them within the community.

Viable communities cannot be formed without a key ingredient: people who are capable of doing so. They need to be generally capable, and enough of them should be of childbearing edge and willing to give birth to and bring up children. This is already a tall order. Success in society is usually predicated on being confined to some professional silo, and this does not produce people who are generally capable. Also, by the time most people realize that perhaps being part of a real community would be a good idea they have already “aged out.”

But that’s not all. They should also specifically be capable of a certain profound act of submission—of subordinating their individual interests to those of their community—and those brought up on the myth of rugged individualism are rarely capable of such a deed even in the context of marriage, never mind within a larger group.

They also have to be capable of putting their trust in people rather than in impersonal, bureaucratic institutions. This, it turns out, is difficult too: most people would rather put their trust in banks, which rob them every month, or in governments, which rob them every year at tax-time, than in groups of a group of people that will probably never rob them at all (unless they are all very unlucky). Some of them would rather put their trust in anonymous algorithms. (As I write this, NiceCash just got hacked and lost $62 million in Bitcoin. You’d think that this might slow down a few of the Bitcoin lemmings, but they are stampeding toward the cliff just as fast as before.)

Lastly, in order to form communities, people have to be able to overcome an image problem. Scratch a “rugged individual” and what you inevitably find is either a wage slave or a government sponge; in either case, a kept person—essentially a slave. But most people prefer slavery to the only two alternatives: being a peasant and being a nomad (peasants need land; nomads don’t).

Those are the two basic patterns of communities that abide that I have found in my research and described in my book: the Roma (Gypsies) are the nomads; the Anabaptists (Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites) are the peasants. But this is only a problem at the very outset, because those who belong to viable communities, when they consider who they are, do not see individuals; they see the community as a whole, and the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts and can be imbued with a type of dignity of which no individual, no matter how “sovereign,” is ever capable.

Returning to the question of what, if anything, can be done… Supposing that you are either too old, insufficiently versatile in your skill set, unable to part with “individualistic” habits instilled in you by the surrounding culture, unable to overcome the image problem and humble yourself to the point of becoming a peasant or a nomad, or any and all of the above… and supposing that you see the economic scheme unraveling all around you and feel that having some viable communities around would be a very good idea… what is there for you to do?

Well, supposing you have some money, then possibly the best you can do is throw money at the problem; not for your own benefit, or even for the benefit of you [sic] children, should you have any, but for the benefits of those who are capable of forming communities, and willing to give it a try. Because, after all, the starting point of any community is the act of putting others’ interests ahead of your own.