Community Used to Be the Default; Now We Have to Seek it Out
Solidarity begins with place
Those of us seeking to retrieve some community and connection today do it with greater awareness of the alternatives. We don’t retrieve collectivism by happenstance, but by choice. This enables us to consciously leverage the power of grassroots connections, bottom-up politics, and cooperative businesses — and build a society that is intentionally resilient and resistant to the forces that would conquer us.
Early internet enthusiasts had little understanding of how the network’s anticommercial safeguards protected the humanistic values of its fledgling culture. Rave kids didn’t understand the real power of their ecstatic rituals, which was to reclaim the public spaces in which to hold them. Many members of Occupy were too dismayed by losing Zuccotti Park to realize that the bigger victory was to develop a new normative behavior for activists and a consensus-driven approach to administrating the demos.
Likewise, the members of early communal groups were generally unaware of the real power of solidarity. They weren’t collectivist by design so much as by nature. Members of a group just tended to believe the same things. Their labor wasn’t particularly specialized, either. They were necessarily bound by their common location, needs, and worldviews.
Only after humans emerged as individuals, with differentiated perspectives, conflicting beliefs, specialized skills, and competing needs could we possibly comprehend collectivism as an active choice. It is in that positive determination to be members of Team Human that we derive the power and facility to take a deliberate stand on our own behalf.
Solidarity begins with place.
While it’s tempting to rally around the emotionally charged issues of the mainstream media, they tend to be abstract, polarizing, and unconnected to people’s lived experience. Whether or not an enemy politician is indicted for deleting the wrong email has a whole lot less impact on real people than whether there are chemicals leaching into the water supply, enough funds for the schools, or places for the elderly to go during the day.
When politics are truly local, issues can’t be so easily distorted by the partisan framing of cable television. One remote county’s redistricting of farmland or revised policy on recycling doesn’t interest national news conglomerates looking for ratings, anyway. And on the rare occasions when a local issue does show up on the national news, those of us with direct knowledge of the story can only marvel at how our reality differs from what’s being depicted on the screen. All national news is distorted — we just have no way of evaluating it.
Team Human participates in national and global politics from the bottom up, the small to the large, and the local to the national and beyond. We can still be guided by bigger principles, but those principles are informed by living in a community, not by listening to talk radio.
It’s not easy. Local debate on almost any issue ends up being more challenging than most of us expect, but even the most contentious town hall conflicts are tempered by the knowledge that we have to live together, in peace, after the fight is over. When you live somewhere, you can’t just tune to a different channel and get different neighbors. Everything comes back around.
This was section 85 + 86 of the new book Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, which is being serialized weekly on Medium. Read the previous section here and the following section here.
