219. Community Benefits

To be in community with others means understanding you are part of a greater whole. It means knowing other people and being known by them. It means developing lasting relationships that are both caring and trusting. It means cooperating on common goals and sharing the burden of work. It means giving and taking both emotional and material support. It means having people you can rely on when things go wrong.

For many people, this kind of community does not exist. It has become so easy to meet our material needs through transactional means that community is now felt to be unnecessary. The social benefits of community are no longer believed to be worth the social burdens that follow from it.

Instead, we retreat into ourselves, living insular lives at a distance from others. We do this because we want to live in our own personal paradise — a place where we get everything we want and nothing we don’t want. But by acting on this desire, we deprive ourselves of the social contact and connection we need. Often we do not fully grasp our need for community until it’s too late. It’s when we find ourselves at our lowest point, after everything has gone wrong, that we most need community to support us.

As we become more separated from others, it becomes easier for malignant forces acting out of self-interest within a badly constructed system to cause us harm. We know that a people divided is easily conquered, but we push this fact to the back of our minds.

We don’t want the struggle that building community requires. We don’t want to deal with others who might disagree with us, who might want things from us, who might be different from us. We don’t want to give up any of our resources to help others, even if it might ultimately be to our own benefit. Through total surrender to our desire for lasting personal happiness, we also surrender our own humanity and the community with others we so desperately need.