The Paradox and Promise of Community

There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace—and ultimately, no life—without community. ~M. Scott Peck

Participation in meaningful community is the greatest unacknowledged hunger of our time. ~Family Therapy Networker

We are individual designs in the fabric of life: We have our own integrity, but simultaneously we are part of the fabric, connected to and defined by the whole. Community is the human dimension of that fabric. ~Tom Atlee

The title of this post is the title of the first chapter in The Community of the Future from The Drucker Foundation. In this chapter, Margaret J. Wheatley (one of my favorites!) and Myron Kellner-Rogers explore the difficulties and the benefits of community. They lament that, “Particularly in the West…we move toward isolation in order to defend our individual freedom.” By doing so, we end up lonely and impoverished. They contend that we must live in the paradox of community: the conformity required to live together and the need for our own independence.

The authors describe communities that do not require members to forfeit their freedom. People in groups must know why they are in community, and their conditions of belonging can be kept to the minimum. One junior high school has only three rules: “Take care of yourself. Take care of each other. Take care of this place.”

“Our great creativity and diversity, our desire for contribution and relationships, blossom when the heart of the community is clear and beckoning, and when we refrain from cluttering our paths with proscriptions and demands.”

Have you experienced the joy of community in which people know why they’re together, have a “cohering center of shared significance,” yet keep the demands for conformity and sacrifice of one’s individuality as minimal as possible?

Conformity

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves, in order to be like other people.  ~Arthur Schopenhauer

My mother used to tell a story she found amusing. It was about coming to fetch me from school in the first grade. I was standing in front of the class when she arrived, pretending not to know my colors. I don’t remember this event, but this is one of the saddest stories I’ve ever heard.

For I had been happily reading at least since age 5, had known my colors for far longer, and was academically way ahead of most of my first-grade class when I began school. But I had been admonished so strongly not to “show off,” to be like others so I would be liked, that I had hidden my abilities in the quest for acceptance.

It was many years before I was aware of my conditioning, and many more before I could move beyond it. Even still, I find myself thinking, “How will this look to others?” when I decide on a course of action. This is actually a skill that has served me well in career and political situations, but I have had to come to an understanding about the limits on its value. And I have suffered from applying it in situations where it is not needed.

I think this explains why authenticity is so very important to me now. I cannot bear to pretend any longer that I am something I am not. I actually think age is helpful in this regard, as we who are in public service approach retirement and can be whoever we are. How do you deal with this dilemma, in a political world?