Is It Just Me?

Community seems like a good idea. People get the protection and resources of the masses. But any community comes with a loss of individuality to varying degrees. The tradeoff reveals itself in a number of ills, more so in some communities than in others. Take communism, for example. As it developed in the twentieth century, it quashed the free spirit of billions of people and led to the deaths of tens of millions.

Imprisonment and death under the auspices of community are extreme ills. There are “lesser” ills, also. Like magma undergoing a compositional change when it erupts as lava, the underlying beauty of almost every—if not every—social system cannot surface without changing. For magma there is usually a loss of constituent gases. In an emerging social system the change manifests itself in a loss of constituent individualism. We all seem to profess the virtues of individuality until two individuals meet. To make the community work, we relinquish some of our individuality. Every community has a constituent self-denial.

Utopian experiments always fail. You might point out “this one” or “that” to show a success story, and, temporarily, the society you point to probably worked. Then the second and third generations came along. Goodbye, Perfect Society.

“Is it just me, or do you think the rules around here are a little too restrictive?”