Modern Communities
Networking health and mutual aid outward from individuals and families
When the government attempts to consolidate power, its two major barriers are regional autonomy and loyalty to competing social institutions. People with a strong sense of community and identity tend to rely heavily on their families, friends, churches, and civic organizations — not the government.
I’ve heard stories of women that come together each day and laugh with each other while they prepare meals together for their families. Sisters that encourage and help one another through life. I deeply long for that connection and bond today.
I want the same for my husband. I wish he had brothers he could count on when everything seems to fall on his shoulders. He carries the weight of our entire little world and I admire his strength every single day. But, I also long for brothers to help him carry the load.
I wish my daughter had a village of unruly children to play and learn with. She has friends from our homeschool community but we all live so far away from each other and have conflicting schedules so it is very difficult to get the kids together for more than a couple of hours at a time. She loves her animals and keeps herself busy with her art. She’s a very happy little girl and I am grateful! But I long for her to have the village.
I remain committed to political reform, engagement, and amending our democracy one thinker and voter at a time. Yet there may come a time (and it will come at different times for different localities/incomes/occupations; it may already be here for many) when the task of convincing our fellow citizens and reinvigorating our political units becomes impossible, even counterproductive.
When that time comes you will want to be as self-sufficient as possible, while being part of as large a productive social network as possible. There’s an obvious tension between those two imperatives, so this essay is about strengthening our communities. Doing these things might make society happier and healthier, and it is fulfilling work, but it’s also prudent at a time when many of the large-scale institutions which help to manage our lives become more deranged and distracted, and less credible. All of my points are extremely general but, I believe, still apt.
Most people aren’t doing any of these things and they are unhappier and weaker for it. When the day arrives and tough choices must be made you don’t want to be living in a suburb, buying all of your food and consumer products on DoorDash/Amazon, completely reliant upon a paycheck from a large corporation, without any friends or emergency resources or ways to protect yourself.
Communities emerged as evolutionary solutions to the problems of scarcity and survival. Consequently our minds evolved to live and grow in the context of small, close-knit communities. If this is an element missing from your life I encourage you to begin cultivating it today.
I have written some about personal health. These counsels tend to be simple and intuitive and generally revolve around one dictum: try to live as our ancestors did. Humans evolved to live and to thrive in certain conditions and those conditions did not include processed sugar or opiates or office work or smartphones. Get outside, eat well and in moderation, stay active, stay connected, and protect yourself from the myriad corporate entities which have now dedicated themselves to monetizing your envy, your unhealth, your distraction, your insecurities, and your longings in order to generate a reliable flow of profits from you to them.
But humans also didn’t evolve to live alone. In fact, solitude will, in moderation, generate neuroses and unhappiness. In higher dosages it will generate insanity and death. Even people who have been judged guilty of terrible crimes and who are condemned to spend the rest of their lives in the company of rapists and murderers much prefer their fellowship to decades alone in a cell. In fact, our modern ideal of individualism (individual thought and subjective identity) is mostly a fallacy. We don’t just live and communicate in networks, we form meaning and selfhood in them too. Your subjective experience and your thoughts and beliefs might feel as though they’re the products of a rational and unitary mind but that is 80% illusion. Your beliefs and your values and your sense of self are just as surely social products as are the money you use and the podcasts you watch.
It is, in fact, impossible to be healthy alone. As anyone who’s ever observed a family beset by addiction or codependency or abuse will attest, it’s also impossible to be healthy in close quarters to many unhealthy people. Health requires an individual daily commitment… and then a constant connection with other healthy people. This used to be nearly automatic for the members of our species but that is now far from the case. With the individual as the basis for our national society and economy and the increasingly common reflex of turning to our phones or shopping or streaming services or ordering in to salve our dissatisfactions we are constantly becoming unhealthier on a range of metrics, individually and communally.
There is an entire galaxy of ‘masculine self-improvement’ videos out there (as well as other kinds but those types I do not usually watch). Jordan Peterson, Jocko Willink, Andrew Huberman, Chris Williamson… all focus on ways that people (especially men) can improve themselves ethically, spiritually, physically, romantically, financially, neurologically. It is an earnest and useful content subgenre and I’m glad it exists. I often watch such videos. Yet the focus of all of these videos is individual empowerment. Where are the videos about building healthier and stronger communities? This project is necessary for long-term individual flourishing and for political stability.
West Park Baptist Church, Delray Beach, FL
It is a fact that there are many politicians and executives and administrators who are consciously or implicitly encouraging a situation with more disease, more unhappiness, and more dysfunction because this is a general condition which benefits them. It ensures profitability or it keeps people distracted or dependent upon the systems they work for. Just look at the violently disdainful reaction of the culture against the ‘tradwife’ phenomenon (essentially young women who explicitly embrace a traditional lifestyle of mothering and homemaking, and who often create online content about this lifestyle). Their choices don’t negatively affect anyone else… surely our laissez-faire attitude and toleration of individual choice would see them treated with equanamity? Not so much. This is a choice which, if adopted en masse, would erode the ideological and financial power of many powerful people. Such people do not want communities of working men and homemaking women to spread across the country, even if those choices are fully free and satisfying to the people making them. There are many such discouraged choices these days and many of them are eminently sensible and healthy… but they threaten the profitability or power or status of some large organization. Our culture is primed to attack such choices. Ultimately, individuals will have to be educated and encouraged to make them anyway.
Our personal health and safety and fortunes depend on us not just improving our own individual lives but in rebuilding our communities. This cannot be done through legislation or grants or to-down directives. It must happen organically. I actually think American communities are stronger than statistics might lead one to believe… but I’m less confident that conditions are moving in the right direction. This is a project in which everyone can participate.
America has always held out the promise of a boundless future and the possibility for fierce independence. Those hardy individuals determined to make their own way and distrustful of financial and political power (notably including my ancestors, the Scots-Irish) have functioned as a bulwark for the nation against foreign enemies and toxic domestic centralization, and a corrective for the course of the nation. They have loomed large in our cultural and political life and they are still closely-bound with what we imagine to be our history, and the American dream.
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A nation without an active and predominant ethos of personal independence and freedom is not America, regardless of our flag or institutions. A nation without a network of healthy, local communities is not America. A nation without productive farmland and the capacity for local self-defense is not America. A nation of people without any resilience of self-sufficiency is no longer America. The bad news is that there’s no easy fix for our problems and healing will require changing the lives of millions of people. The good news is it’s in our hands (mine and yours) today. If you want to rejuvenate your country, improve your corner of it. If more of us do this, mindfully and wisely, this nation can again be a shining city on a hill.
Some Suggestions
Here are some humbly-offered reflections about ways that individual might be able to assist in the construction and reconstruction of American communities:
Church or other Religious Service - religion has been a fundamental component of human communities for +10,000 years. Find an amenable and active and healthy group and begin attending regularly.
Volunteering - if you’re prosperous or retired or you work from home you probably have plenty of time to dedicate to this kind of activity. Even if those things are not the case, though, you can probably find some community service with which to help. I also recommend this for people who are lonely or anxious or depressed. I consider this suggestion to be at least as effective as SSRI’s, although it never seems to be recommended by medical providers.
Clubs & Leagues & Teams - find something you love to do and do it with other people in an organized and regular setting.
Roderigo Mendes Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Delray Beach, FL
Intergenerational Activities - if you’re old find activities with younger people. If you’re young, older. Human communities naturally contain a diverse array of age groups and this is important for teaching each other and reminding ourselves of different perspectives. If you’re young you probably have some foolish notions and if you’re old you’re probably running largely on neurological autopilot and (in many cases) enjoying the comfort and wealth you spent a lifetime accumulating. In either case, share your insights and impulses and resources with others. Our federal budget is being bled dry to subsidize older voters, to the detriment of the entire country. There’s nothing we can urgently do about that but we can cultivate interpersonal links between generations.
Mentoring - this is similar to the previous item but is especially aimed at adult men. There’s a serious dearth of grown men who can act as mentors and role models to young people. It might take some doing to find these opportunities but they will pay hundredfold dividends to society if you begin and it might end up being the most fulfilling role in your life.
Encouraging others to do likewise…
[W]hen Hungary’s young right-wing Fidesz party faced its own entrenched leftist post-Communist “deep state” in the late 90s and early 2000s, it responded by pivoting to a brilliant strategy of parallel organizing. Understanding that Hungarian civic life had been systematically corrupted and destroyed by the Communists, and the people left atomized and dispirited, the party deliberately turned away from “high” politics and founded what it called the “Civic Circles” movement.
This Civic Circles movement focused on establishing community organizations across the nation to bring people together in grassroots civic action, volunteer work, and education in practical self-governance. Its chapters of local volunteers collected trash, and helped with childcare. They founded new parallel educational and media institutions, and provided forums for intellectual discussion. They promoted art and culture that celebrated national pride and conservative values, and served as a patronage network to help launch promising young talent throughout society.
In doing all this, Fidesz succeeded in building out an entirely new grassroots power-base among the Hungarian working and middle class, which it could then easily incorporate and mobilize for mass political action. It’s been winning political landslides ever since. The party went on to successfully conquer the institutional strongholds of the post-Communist regime, reverse left-wing cultural hegemony, and even transform Hungary into something of a beacon for despairing conservatives around the world. But it achieved all this through a strategy of pre-political community organizing, which established a foundation of parallel societal power and legitimacy.
Somehow all those practical suggestions from your blog for community don't seem enough (I like the others, for companionship, outdoors, exercise, challenge and health). Maybe they could work for a few people. Religion can be a powerful community glue, but we probably need a new one that is more relevant to modern life, and consistent with science. It's hard for many moderns to pretend to believe ridiculous stuff just so they can have a community.
Volunteering also seems lame to me, because it is not offering people a wholesome alternative. It might help some poor people become more middle class, but the middle class is part of the problem. It might feed hungry people, but people need more than just food. It might clean up some trash, but that's like putting lipstick on the pig of Climate Change and industrial pollution. And spending energy on these superficial things means there is less energy to spend on more impactful things. But yeah, it might also create some community among the volunteers, sure.
Mentoring would be great if the youngsters could be mentored into a meaningful world, with villages or tribes, and intact healthy families. But just mentoring them to continue the disaster we have wrought is not satisfying.
Clubs: yeah, I tried getting the local recreation department of my town interested in me teaching international folk-dancing, but they weren't interested. Probably no takers for alternative tech, or evolutionary psychology or physics clubs in this conservative town either. I tried getting my 2 liberal friends interested in deer hunting, but they weren't. The third was interested, but 2 people is not a club.
Intergenerational: the younger generation is so lost in their social media, and care about how they look and the approval of their peers more than anything else. Their world is so small and parochial, despite the globality of the internet. They are not interested in anything I can offer them.
I think the answer is intentional communities. But ones that value families, that have a healthy balance of liberal and conservative values, that value local production and consumption of goods and services, and that are part of an economic federation of ICs.