Individual responsibility beside politics
In an episode for the Team Human podcast titled Post-Election Monologue: This Game is Not Reality, host Douglas Rushkoff provides a thoughtful commentary on the bigger picture of contemporary social and political trends in light of the presidential elections in the United States of America. Douglas’ salient point is to not rely too much on state institutions or, rather, to understand that we have a role to play beyond the formal workings of government. This is encapsulated nicely in the closing words:
I encourage you all to breath, to speak with loved ones, to meet your neighbours, to engage as fruitfully and charitably as you can, to do favours for people, to ask for favours from people; put the social back into socialism and stop worrying about the politics for the moment.
What Douglas describes is the workings of a community. I have long now been convinced that this is the way forward for a more peaceful society. What the average person experiences now is alienation, disenfranchisement, and loneliness. They spend most of their day in closed spaces, within an urban setting, lacking a strong social network around them, deprived of sufficient sunlight, and perennially stressed.
I spent years living in large cities where I did not know my neighbours at a human level. The few times I tried to be friendly, I was met with a cautious “hello” and a polite, albeit distant, “goodbye”. After a while, I stopped greeting people on the street, despite my friendly demeanour. It was soul-crashing to not say anything when I would rather wish somebody a good morning and, should they need, help them with whatever I could.
This is the norm in cities: to not trust those around you and to try to rely on your own devices or those of a select few individuals you know. You cannot trust those around you because they come and go. Your neighbour today will not be there long-term for a number of reasons. They have no roots in the given milieu. You do not know who their parents are, what their grandparents are doing, and who they are friends with. As such, social relations are limited to a smaller circle of like-minded individuals which, in turn, creates a real-world filter bubble that is then turbo-charged by social media into levels of extremism and paranoia.
I made the difficult choice to abandon the comforts of the megalopolis in pursuit of a more humane—a communitarian—way of living. Here in the mountains I greet and am greeted by virtually everybody. For example, I have a safety vest that I got as a gift from a person who had noticed me walking the dog during twilight. The man called me to his garage, where we got to know each other, and gifted me this vest. I did not even know his name (or he mine) before that encounter, yet we were aware we were living in this remote place where cooperation is a prerequisite to harmonious social experiences. In return, I helped him over the years with lots of chores.
There are many such stories, including those that involve the hut I built. I will not forget the day when a local from the nearby village drove by when I was doing a video call, reached to my room’s window, and told me he had brought that some materials I could use to improve my building. I never asked for anything and did not know this person before but, again, we develop mutual trust through our deeds. At the time, I wrote Anonymity and community, which is a commentary on the fact that too much privacy is not conducive to a communitarian life: you need to put yourself out there, to be available for others, to come to terms with the fact that others will talk about you, and to recognise that people trust what they can measure. From that article I posted:
Eponymity engenders a sense of trust as the person is a known quantity and their actions are traceable. Each member’s identity is common knowledge. It thus forms part of the community’s shared narratives and collective notion of selfhood. Narratives are about who is who, who does what, what happens where, and so on. They concern the people in the place, drawing linkages between the two magnitudes of community and locality.
This is all against the backdrop of my experience in institutionalised politics par excellence. When I was working at the European Parliament, I felt that I was operating at a level of abstraction that was decoupled from the quotidian life of those people in communities. Citizens are almost understood as mere numbers, disembodied agents of aggregate patterns. I would spend my energy analysing what the European Commission is doing, how the European Central Bank is conducting its policies, what the various political groups are concerned with and, generally, how an impersonal apparatus of power, the legal-institutional order of the European Union and its Member States, was concerned with its own survival and proliferation.
As I understood the disconnect between the world of politics and that of everyday affairs, I also realised that the thinking, philosophical or otherwise, that appealed to me the most was the one that applied to day-to-day issues. I dismissed grand theories of social reform, from Platon’s utopia to the fantasy world of Marxists, all the way to the imaginary collective of the nation as a secular deity that embodies statehood. In 2019 (five years ago!?) I wrote Against the secularised theology of statecraft, but did not revisit this essay to see how I have evolved intellectually.
The point is that I remain of the view that what we need is to not neglect personal qualities. Virtue matters today as much as it mattered in the small colonies and city-states of the ancient Greeks. To be honest, to conduct yourself with kindness, to have honour in how you treat others and yourself, to be close to nature such that you understand your place as part of a cosmos that does not revolve around you. This is the world where people are not divided along partisan lines; where matters of identity, of claiming to be someone or doing something, are secondary as deeds speak for themselves.
There is still a need for politics at a level of authority above that of the local communities. What matters though, is to remain committed to a bottom-up understanding of social organisation where the individual, their family, their neighbour, and clan at-large (“clan” literally or figuratively) assume responsibility for their actions, contribute to the preservation of their shared spaces, and act in solidarity towards those whom they can trust all around them. We do not need to remake the world for this to happen. What is of import is that we each do our part and not render ourselves helpless by hoping that some state actor will perform our duties in our stead.