Reforming communities

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:

• The Problem of Hype Stimuli

• The Problem of Demographic Decline

In the final installment I will tackle the question of how to form communities that can implement the very solutions I suggest in parts 1-3. 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.