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Humanity is most clearly seen in the communities and social groups we create together. I have had many people question that if I am against Global industrial society, then I can only be for Primitive societies, but even Primitive societies in a purely natural state do not create ultimate peace. Many people feel they can only be against this system by backing accelerationist ideas of collapse.
Societies are not the result of a contract of men trying to maximize their best interests as was believed by Thomas Hobbes, one of the fathers of Liberalism. Hobbes believed humans by nature are not ‘providing people’ with an ideal to which they aspire as the ancient philosophers did, the modernists view humans in their very lowest state. Hobbes calls this lowest state of human existence ‘the state of nature’. For Hobbes, history consisted of ‘progression’ away from the chaotic ‘state of nature’ and toward a civil order presided over by a leader capable of keeping the peace – in fact, he suggested a Sovereign. Primary to liberal thought is the idea that society is merely a contract among individuals motivated by fear of violent death to seek a more peaceful state. This insults the English to about the same extent to which it insults intelligence.
Where do Communities Really Come From?
Societies are a spontaneous association with others around us stemming from the immediate family and then expanding outwardly. The communities within society are a complex system of communicating groups made up of individuals. Some of these groups are inherited by natives alone through birthright and continuity, others are chosen and made up of cooperating people. The social bonds of people’s groups make them autonomous from the larger nationwide civil society or state. People fear mass collectivisation in the communist sense of course as it has only led to a loss of the meaning of life and consequently the mass murder of human life. Membership in a collective does not and should not destroy individual identity; rather, the reason we choose to cooperate with others is their individuality. When people leave their original community or home, it is in most cases to join another. Communities are made up of and maintain themselves by knowing who belongs to them. There are rights and duties given to and expected of those who take part, a give and take, and a group understanding of gifts, fraternity, friendship, and love.
Saxon Individualism
So where does our famed Saxon individualism fit into collectivism? The enjoyability of social life will need diversity of the member’s personalities and skills: this diversity is constantly threatened by capitalist consumerism as it tells us to buy the same goods, dress the same, have the same jobs in the same corporations and then go home and watch the same TV, video games etc. This is something I have written about before. Utter conformity or lack of differentiation would make us boring. The opposite issue would be the excess of individualism leading people to be alone and atomised with no like-minded people to join with. The whole exceeds the sum of its parts, the community will give you friendships, skills and achievements none of its parts could have done alone. In the larger nation-state or even the corporate workplace universalism and individualism have associated community with the ideas of submission to your government or boss, this has been pushed upon us by our representative two-party system of democracy and by the markets need to make consumers all alike.
How The Youth Were Taken Away
Many still feel a sense of belonging to local, tribal, cooperative or religious cooperative groups. The large nation-state and corporate capitalism have only put us at the mercy of more constraints than our community ever could. These are harsher, because they are further away in central halls of power, more impersonal, and more demanding. Business, profit, and homogenous subjugation to consume the same have replaced multiform organic models. What I mean by this is that the government and the corporate bosses have taken us away from our communities en masse. For example, When I was a teacher I saw a pupil ask why she is being taught maths at extensive levels despite her obvious contempt of the skill, she was told: “because it will get you a good job”. They meant in a scientific field beneficial to a large corporation netting the pupil a high salary in the industrial system. I later spoke to this girl and asked what she likes to do and what she is good at, she told me she is good at knitting and texting. I ignored the second statement but presented her with the idea of owning a knitting or yarn stall on the market. She did not see the relevance but upon explaining how maths would affect her profit, her pay, her rent and so forth she garnered a meaningful reason to learn maths. No one in state education had ever taught her of the small community level of the life to which she aspired. I am sure she will have a happier life fulfilling her part of the community, knowing who she is and her identity as an individual as part of an organic whole. If she was made to continue down the routes the state suggests she will end up unhappy in a low down job for some faceless corporation because her interest in maths at the age of fifteen wasn’t sufficient enough for our thirst for growth at the expense of people.
In becoming more solitary, we have become more vulnerable and more destitute. We have become disconnected from meaning in our daily lives because many of us can no longer identify with a smaller community model. There is no effort being put into understanding our place in the social whole. I believe many of us have lost affiliation with a home.
Modern societies tend to bring together individuals who experience each other as strangers, no longer having any mutual understanding of one another, most people cannot imagine a social group that’s not under the control of some regulatory authority. This has allowed the likes of Tesco or Mcdonald’s to buy our land and destroy the local economic diversity of our towns.
You Are Not a Consumer, You Are Part of a People
This second, millions of people across the country open the same supermarket branded food in an outfit worn by millions, on the sofa, thousands got in the same sale to sit and watch the same ‘popular on Netflix’ show. A neo-liberal market system and our submission to the state results in a two-pronged attack of abstract government rules that gradually intersect every area of your daily life, relations with others are engineered to ward off the threat of social implosion in liberal multiculturalism’s daily violence. Only a return to communities and politics on a ‘human scale’ can fix the exclusion or dissolution of the social bond.
“For it is in striving to act with love that we affirm love, and in devoting ourselves to noble causes we are redeemed, and in giving ourselves utterly to the service of truth, love and beauty in shared, fully democratic communities we rise to the life immortal”.
– John Papworth