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Community, Belonging and the Polycrisis
Wherever I go and ask people what is missing from their lives,
the most common answer (if they are not impoverished or seriously ill)
is “community.”
— Charles Eisenstein
ChatGPT, the A.I. robot, often gets things badly wrong
It even makes wildly false statements rather routinely. But sometimes I find it useful to ask the bot a question as a very small part of my research process. Today, I’m glad I did. Oddly enough, it gave me the words I found difficult to articulate.
I asked:
Author and speaker, Charles Eisenstein, has said “Wherever I go and ask people what is missing from their lives, the most common answer (if they are not impoverished or seriously ill) is ‘community.’” And yet, in some sense, most people do live in what are called ‘communities’ — be it a village, town or city. It’s not so easy to conceptualize and make explicit what is missing in the lives of people, which is often called “community”. What is this missing element which so many complain about?
The bot said:
The missing element that people often refer to as “community” is a sense of belonging, connectedness, and shared purpose with the people around them. While people may live in the same physical location and interact with others on a daily basis, this does not necessarily translate to a feeling of community.
True community involves a deeper level of connection, where people feel a sense of belonging and are able to create meaningful relationships with others. This can be fostered through shared values, interests, goals, and a sense of mutual support and cooperation. In contrast, many people feel isolated, disconnected, and disengaged from those around them, which can lead to a sense of loneliness, anxiety, and even depression.
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We Need A Social Revolution
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We Need A Social Revolution
In the conventional view, there are two kinds of revolutions: political and technological. Political revolutions may be peaceful or violent, and technological revolutions may transform civilizations gradually or rather abruptly—for example, revolutionary advances in the technology of warfare.
In this view, the engines of revolution are the state—government in all its layers and manifestations—and the corporate economy.
In a political revolution, a new political party or faction gains converts to its narrative, and this new force replaces the existing political order, either via peaceful means or violent revolution.
Technological revolutions arise from many sources but end up being managed by the state and private sector, which each influence and control the other in varying degrees.
Conventional history focuses on top-down political revolutions of the violent “regime change” variety: the American Revolution (1776), the French Revolution (1789), the Russian Revolution (1917), the Chinese Revolution (1949), and so on.
Technology has its own revolutionary hierarchy; the advances of the Industrial Revolutions I, II, III and now IV, have typically originated with inventors and proto-industrialists who relied on private capital and banking to fund large-scale buildouts of new industries: rail, steel manufacturing, shipbuilding, the Internet, etc.
The state may direct and fund technological revolutions as politically motivated projects, for example the Manhattan project to develop nuclear weapons and the Space race to the Moon in the 1960s.
These revolutions share a similar structure: a small cadre leads a large-scale project based on a strict hierarchy in which the revolution is pushed down the social pyramid by the few at the top to the many below. Even when political and industrial advances are accepted voluntarily by the masses, the leadership and structure of the controlling mechanisms are hierarchical: political power, elected or not, is concentrated in the hands of a few at the top.
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