The TLDR:
- Think about what ‘community’ means to you. How important is it?
- It means something different in different contexts and to different people
- It can be meaningful or just transactional
- Being aware of what your group wants from their conceptual community is crucial
- The broadest definition is just a number of people with something they share
- At its deepest and most meaningful, Community is a group of people willing to
◦ be vulnerable to/with one another
◦ choose indispensability over disposability
◦ take ownership in the group and stay invested
◦ work toward being a group of all leaders
The Long of it:
When you hear yourself or someone else say ‘community’, do you think about what that means to you, and ask what it means to others? How important is community to you? Context is king.
When we hear the word community, it evokes something for us. A bedroom community, the gaming community, community action, community development, intentional community and so on. Each one of them evokes something on a long range continuum from meaningful, inter-personal relationships to purely transactional ones. The problem is that the same word in the same context still has a different meaning if people aren’t careful. The same word causes some to feel moved to pour their hearts and souls into a ‘community’, believing that it is a strong source of meaning for them, whereas others consider it a means to an end that only a few will benefit from.
On a purely technical level the Latin commūnis (“common, ordinary; of or for the community, public”) only imparts a population that is unified in one manner or another. So we could say a to-be-defined number of people with a shared interest or characteristic. It’s important for those people to clearly agree on what that is on the aforementioned spectrum or there will be some dissatisfied people in the mix.
How often have you been a part of a community where there is an almost machine-like order to it, where people adhere to habits, customs, and rules in order to keep a process going toward an end? M. Scott Peck, a psychiatrist most known for his book The Road Less Traveled would call this pseudo-community. He describes it as well-intentioned friendliness among people who want to be sociable and have ties but they rarely risk going beyond the outward shell we present to others that reveals few flaws or vulnerabilities. Pseudo-community is conflict avoidant to the extent that problems are either ignored, covered up, or problematic people are shunned and ejected in order to continue a facade of ‘perfection’.
So long as this pattern remains, a sense of true belonging will evade members of this community. Brene Brown effectively describes true belonging in her book Braving the Wilderness as “…believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world…” “True belonging is not passive. It’s not the belonging that comes with just joining a group. It’s not fitting in or pretending or selling out because it’s safer. It’s a practice that requires us to be vulnerable, get uncomfortable, and learn how to be present with people without sacrificing who we are. We want true belonging, but it takes tremendous courage to knowingly walk into hard moments.” We could add a few things to Brown’s assertions.
Firstly, bravery is on a spectrum that if pushed over the line can compromise a person’s safety and in this day and age, for many people who do not have the best parts of a demographic venn diagram of privilege, their physical safety can be at risk. Second, skills for how to facilitate that community space where people can be both authentic and flawed, as well as accepting of the authenticity and flawed nature of others, finding a consensus of how to ‘be’ together, requires a level of attention and effort that not many people are ready and or willing to bring to a community. There are many spaces where pseudo-community is the only type of community that can have any longevity.
However, in some rare cases an opportunity arises when chaos presents itself in that pseudo-community and you may have just enough people who have the willingness to be vulnerable, accept the vulnerabilities of others, do the work with integrity, authenticity, skill and love in order to work through the chaos, through the emptying of biases, distortions or struggle for power, to share, accept and build on the thoughts and ideas of the group in a genuine manner. This rare and valuable moment is that opportunity for True Community.
This True Community is a worthy thing to aspire to, but we must all build the skills to get there and in the mean time pseudo-community, though its name makes it sound like it is something to be avoided, can still offer a place for people to be and work together, to share stories, to break bread and to conspire aspire to create True Community.