Get Your Smart On
The growing desire for community and our commitment to individualism. Part 3 of thinking through the most challenging aspects of being human right now.
We have watched the price of food rise over the past few years, and so many of us have had to ask ourselves if we can afford our usual groceries. The price we pay for shelter is becoming prohibitive, with the unhoused population on the rise.1 Many Americans are just one personal, health, or climate disaster away from being on the streets.2 I was laid off twice last year, and have not had full-time employment since the pandemic. I know I am not alone.
It's dawning on us — one by one, and all at the same time — that if we're going to survive in the coming years, we are going to need each other. We need to share knowledge about how to grow food in containers on apartment balconies, how to forage safely in our backwoods, how to buy land together outside expensive cities, how to immigrate and find community elsewhere, how to forge meaningful friendships in adulthood, and how to make it through climate disasters.
The desire for community is on the rise. The problems that we face in the United States cannot be dealt with on an individual basis. At the same time, finding shared spaces and nurturing community is not all that easy. When I asked y’all what was the single most challenging thing about being human right now, number one was the feeling of isolation and alienation from others. But the second most-mentioned was the related difficulties with “comm operations”: communication, community, cooperation:
“That we can't cooperate for the common good”
“Building and maintaining healthy community with other humans.”
“The lack of connection or ‘we’ in our society, individualism to the exclusion of community/all others.”
A lot of the advice that I hear (and that I have myself given) is to just go out there and make friends, find people with whom to share a project and get it done. And of course, this is good advice, but ultimately unsatisfying. It feels both easy and impractical at the same time. So I started thinking, maybe we are missing a step. Maybe before doing “comms operations,” it is worth asking what is really in the way of us being in community? I think that a lot of work must go into keeping us apart, given that humans are social and political animals to their core. Let’s brainstorm the ways that we are actively held apart.
I’ve noticed that our separation from each other is, first of all, physical. In the case of the United States, our geography is divided into urban, suburban, and rural areas. Those areas are 'connected' by highways and roads that function as barriers between places as much as they serve to link them. For example, Segregation by Design shows how the construction of freeways around West Oakland (California) served to sever a thriving African American community from it’s downtown center.3 The traces of past segregation are still very much with us, living in our infrastructure. White flight creates the suburbs surrounding our cities, and then boomerangs back to gentrify cities. Sun-down towns maintain our racialized geographies in more rural areas.
Or take public transportation systems in urban places that function similarly, as I’ve written elsewhere regarding Portland, Oregon, the most intentional of intentional cities. Like many other cities, Portland metro is comprised of a number of towns that grew into each other, but these proximate communities, who share in many socio-political interests, are effectively disconnected by a transit system built to ferry workers into the center of the city, primarily serving the city’s business interests.
Or again, take the wealthy residents of the suburban Stony Brook on Long Island, New York, who resisted the construction of a public university, SUNY Stony Brook and the extension of the LIRR (Long Island Rail Road) from the city of New York out to the tip of Long Island for a decade (1960-1970). The campus is built with a road that goes all around it, like an inverted medieval city mural, only this road serves to keep the university from spilling out to the town proper, with its high end shopping, quaint lake side, and golf courses.
There are fewer and fewer shared or common spaces, like town squares, where people from different socio-economic and racialized identities and cultural backgrounds meet. Public commons like community centers, schools, parks, and libraries are disappearing or being starved of resources. Even malls, with its commercialization of our need for community spaces, have become less relevant as shopping has moved online.
These are just three examples, and I’m sure you could come up with your own based on your own experiences. Knowing this, that we are physically kept apart, lets us see that we need to learn to go beyond our habitual trajectories, learn to become travelers throughout our own towns, cities, and states, and perhaps do some “world-traveling.”4 But this feels dangerous and scary…
Beginning in the 1950’s era of the Cold War, U.S. Americans were taught to fear their neighbors.5 The government used propaganda to make Americans believe that communist were lurking everywhere, even in their own communities. Also, the development of nuclear weapons and the arms race with the Soviet Union created a constant fear of nuclear war. This fear was so intense that it led to civil defense drills, the construction of fallout shelters, and a general sense of anxiety, a shared affect. Today we are faced with an environmental and climate crisis that is a very real existential threat, where we should be afraid, and it is as if we are inured to it.
That fear of the Other was both outward facing, and turned inward. The rise of suburbia, as exemplified by Levittown, provided many with the dream of homeownership, but these communities were largely homogenous, with many refusing to sell to Black families. This created a sense of "us vs. them" that also fuel the fear of those perceived as "different." Popular science fiction movies played on the anxieties of the time, portraying alien invasions as metaphors for the threat of communism, where people might look the same but be secretly different.
This should sound familiar, since this fear of the Other has been displaced to immigrant groups today. If you wonder how Donald Trump has been able to garner the support he has, it is a testament to how entrenched is this fear. We could also go all the way back to the founding of our country and find this fear lurking in the religious fever dream of the colonizers, but I want to stay on course here.
As is argued in the documentary film "The Century of the Self," the development of the concept of the unconscious in psychoanalysis gave credence to the belief that people are not motivated by rationality, but more so by hidden fears and desires. Governments set to work manufacturing consent, and advertising successfully sold women cigarettes as “freedom torches,” the first successful campaign to influence consumer behavior by appealing to their desires — in this care, by appealing to the suffragette’s desires for individual freedom during this First Wave of Feminism.
Fear and anxiety are ever-present in the United States. Keeping people in a constant state of unease makes them more susceptible and helps maintain control. Personally, I realized this once I left the United States and found life elsewhere to be rather boring in comparison, from a lack of adrenaline.
Honestly, I don’t know how one takes a population that is under the kind of survival, pressure, fight or flight, and teach them to self-regulate in mass. I have an inkling that this is where empathy and compassion come in, and this partially explains the attack on public displays of empathy and solidarity, as I wrote about in my recent piece, “Who Is Afraid of Empathy?”. Another idea is where I left off with my last piece, that a social media platform where we can create and share affect and solidarity, like TikTok, is a threat to those who are in control. Finally, traveling especially to places where you do not speak the language, putting yourself in a vulnerable position vis-à-vis others, has taught me that people will step up and help you if you need help. So we are back to this idea of traveling, even if it is in a nearby place that seems far away. The fear of the Other is primordial, but it should not stop us from enjoying in a basic social trust that makes shared lifeworlds possible.
Even though I know the idealized image of the American nuclear family is false, when I think of community, I still envision it as a collection of nuclear families, through which traditional gender norms are passed down and enforced. Rejecting these norms, I distanced myself from the marriage imperative, the nuclear family, and mainstream U.S. culture—not to mention religion, which perpetuates the same hierarchy: as God above, so man below. Refusing to conform to these gender roles and social norms that don't serve me, I embraced individualism and sought alternative kinship structures. But what I learned is that compulsory heterosexuality sucks all the air out of all the rooms, making it incredibly difficult to form close, meaningful, and durable kin-like friendships. The community that I desire doesn’t exist in any permanent or sustainable way.
These more radical eruptions of community, like I have seen in queer communities or in the Occupy movement, are very difficult to institutionalize. They do not last, and maybe that is okay, becoming mainstream is not their goal. Typically, they are absorbed into pre-existing institutions, ultimately benefiting the systems of power already in place. They act as escape valves that let some social pressure out. But a trace always remains, a path to renew knowledge of how to organize, how to resist and empower the disenfranchised, and how to work with others with whom we may have significant differences. This knowledge is present, in living memory, and the tools are there for the taking.
Given the grave circumstances we now face, there might be a chance that the next time there is such a moment of eruption, something could come of it that could be longer lasting. But instead of mass popular movement, think small-scale changes and micro-programs to share human necessities like food, seeds, labor, housing, etc. This TikTok video expresses the sentiment well:
Don’t beat yourself up if you feel like you don’t have community or friends, because there are large forces keeping you in this alienated and disenfranchised place. We “can't cooperate for the common good” not because of a failure on our parts, but because of the successful axes of patriarchy, capitalism, racism, and colonialism.
This all has led me to think about the individualism that I cherish so much, and how that is related to my evolving desire for community. Can individualism be rehabilitated, and can an alternative kinship system be built on top of a reimagined individualism?
I've always been a staunch individualist. As a woman born in Latin America into a family with roots in Indigenous matriarchies, but in a culture that has patriarchy superimposed upon it through years of colonial rule followed by American control, I took refuge in my liberal feminist version of individualism. My belief in individualism allowed me to create an identity, in my teen years and beyond, apart from my family. Moving from Latin America to the United States as a young teen helped enormously with that. When I came to the U.S., I floated high on the ether of American freedom, dedicating myself with a lot of gusto to becoming American — an individual with aspirations to all sorts of impossible things, including the desire to become a philosopher and feminist writer. And I did all that.
But I did all that by cultivating a kind of deafness to critical feedback and an unshakable confidence in my intelligence. At one point while packing up my belongings post-academia, I looked over an old set of undergraduate papers and read the comments left there by my professors, instructors, and teaching assistants. With some distance, I can see that they were telling me I was not cut out for this type of intellectual work. If I had taken their comments to heart, maybe I would never had gone to grad school for Philosophy. Or maybe it was the desire to prove them wrong that egged me on. I don’t know. I don’t remember.
Individualism and non-conformity are closely aligned. It has been, for me, a point of pride to not fit in. I identify strongly with those outsiders who were kicked out of academia for all sorts of politically principled reasons. (I used to say that my goal was to get kicked out of at least one ivy league in my life. And I did that too…)
We have two paths forward, as I see it. We need to fight within the existing system and try to make changes using “the master’s tools”1 — individual rights, freedom of speech, public education, the freedom of the press, all the values and institutions that our liberal society has put on the table, many of which are good. And the other choice, which I think is more productive, is to build alternatives — rework the individual as shaped in and through community, and create communities that are not based in sameness and homogeneity.
Since writing this, of course, the U.S. government is threatening to ban TikTok and there was a mass movement to the Chinese Red Note app. As Hegel theorized, when thesis and anti-thesis get together, you know change is afoot and a new thesis is emerging. A “whole lot of little things” are about to get very interesting.
To be continued…
Continued Here: