Community is key

[Yurt]

I have an (infant) hypothesis:

"In an individualist world we are constrained by competition and self-interest. In a communitarian world our individual attributes are allowed to thrive in cohesion with one another."

Basically what I'm saying is that in a society where people are left to their own devices, there is certain to be conflict due to peoples' opinions and motives being kept separate from each other. However, in a community where values are shared, individual flourishing is inevitable and in fact more likely than otherwise. We would learn from others, respect others and collaborate with others to achieve both social and individual progression. This isn't really a Left/Right argument, more of an Up/Down one :lol:

Does anyone agree with this? Or at least think it makes sense? Or do you oppose this theory? I'm just posting this because I'm in the mood for hearing some diverse opinion as there's not many people in the real world I can discuss things like this about. :( Since I'm a new member my posts don't show until they've been approved; I meant to be more active since joining the other week but I've been super busy. Looking to get more involved in the forums in the near future so hoping this thread will kickstart my enthusiasm!

[Blake's Baby]

Well, I think what you're getting at here iss one of the most pressing social problems of capitalism. In a world where we are mostly reduced to isolated cogs in a (social and economic) machine beyond our control, where our creative powers are perverted and atrophied by boring jobs while we are told we must compete with (and fear) our fellow beings; and even our relaxation and leisure time is controlled and commodified, our pleasure is apportioned by media conglomerates, where we are consumers rather than producers of culture, we are truely living in an alienated state - alienated from our own powers of creativity, and alienated from each other as social beings.

So, yes, assuming I've understood what you're getting at, I profoundly agree that socialism is the liberatory movement of humanity as a whole, because it re-connects people with each other, instead of atomising us. I say it every couple of days - one human being is not a viable unit of survival (biologically, psychologically, ontologically, geneologically...). We need other people to be human.

Sorry, hope you weren't looking for a disagreement here! :lol:

[cyu]

Reminds me of this from http://z9.invisionfree.com/NS_Anarchy/index.php?showtopic=3

there is a false binary between community and individualism - the opposite of individualism is conformity, not community, and the opposite of community is alienation, not individualism

[Jimmie Higgins]

Basically what I'm saying is that in a society where people are left to their own devices, there is certain to be conflict due to peoples' opinions and motives being kept separate from each other. However, in a community where values are shared, individual flourishing is inevitable and in fact more likely than otherwise. We would learn from others, respect others and collaborate with others to achieve both social and individual progression. This isn't really a Left/Right argument, more of an Up/Down one :lol:

Does anyone agree with this? Or at least think it makes sense? Or do you oppose this theory? I'm just posting this because I'm in the mood for hearing some diverse opinion as there's not many people in the real world I can discuss things like this about. :( Since I'm a new member my posts don't show until they've been approved; I meant to be more active since joining the other week but I've been super busy. Looking to get more involved in the forums in the near future so hoping this thread will kickstart my enthusiasm!

Yeah, capitalism is an alienating experience where we all have to compete. For workers this causes demoralization, cynacism, and the fight for the crumbs of the system can also be a breeding ground for racism and xenophobia and so on. Even for the capitalists themselves, there is competition resulting in a totally chaotic world where what might make sense on a human level has to take a back seat to the logic of profits.

Ultimately from a marxist and anarchist perspective all this flows out of the major conflicting intrests of society - the desire of workers to have more control over their lives (this could be more stablity, more wages, or manifest in tons of other ways) and the need for capitalists to exploit from workers in order to create profits, which requires controling the lives and conditions of workers.

But things don't need to be this way and humans have mostly lived in cooperative groups in history. One annecdote I heard that relates to your post is a story about Jesuits (early in French involvement in North America) giving native americans a quiz to try and determine the intelligence level of people in the group. When the kids got the test, they all began discussing the questions together. The Jesuits told them to stop cheating, but the kids asked: "why, don't you want us to find the right answer? If we put our minds together we'll probably have a better chance". So - depending on the specific culture of this group of people - even though this group probably had some class distinctions, they still lived in a society where there was not such privite control of surplus and the means of production. The work of everyone was necissary in these kinds of arrangements so it was more like "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need". An induvidual test of any kind of aptitude would have made no sense because their society would have relied on the group effort - but in capitalism we compete for job positions and so on and so even in our understanding of education, it's about developing our intelligence as an induvidual commodity that can be sold on the market.