What is a Community? This has become one of the more carelessly tossed about words in today’s digitally saturated world, yet I suspect that very little thought has been given to what the term actually means. Like concentric circles there are various types or degrees of community radiating out from one another ~ family being at the center, then expanding into neighborhood, parish, school, town or city. When I was young the neighborhood was a beehive of activity. It was the 1960s and several large families lived on our block, everyone being well acquainted with every other family on the block. Very few mothers worked outside the home and the street itself served as a kind of communal living room, overseen by adults sitting on their front porches (weather permitting) as youngsters played in each other’s front yards. Occasionally we even had impromptu parades and band concerts.

I lived in a moderately sized city where, joined by a friend or siblings, we might get on a bus and go downtown unsupervised, so long as we returned home before dinner time. Small drugstores featuring soda fountains and local grocers (AG Markets they were called) dotted the landscape, always one within easy walking distance. A large Montgomery Wards department store was only a few blocks from our home. The church stood at the end of the block; we walked daily to school as did the majority of students. There were tough kids, to be sure, but also nice kids who balanced the equation, with plenty of adult eyes overlooking the scene so that things never got wildly out of hand. The one thing we all enjoyed growing up was a gratifying sense of freedom which that neighborhood community provided. It was like living in a small town with big city amenities.

That is not to say that people didn’t struggle or that families, including my own, didn’t have their problems. There were fights and rivalries to be sure, but we also had a sense of belonging to a vibrant community where life could flourish and potentialities could be freely explored. From growing up in that environment I observed that there are four things necessary for a true, successful community to exist. 1: the physical proximity of people. 2: connectivity, meaning real person to person interactions – unlike a group of kids sitting at a table texting one another. 3: a set of shared principles, i.e., mutually accepted rules of behavior. 4: competent trusted leaders, whether parents, pastors, teachers, or political representatives who understand that authority derives from responsibility.

I also maintain that what is not community are those organizational structures whose interests are either narrow or exclusive such as political factions, advocacy groups, labor unions, corporate employers, even crime syndicates. Such bodies may be active within a given community or even influence it greatly. But due to their scale or specialized focus large organizations often transcend individual communities. Too often they tend to become replacements for community and in that sense are antithetical to what a community is truly meant to be. It’s the difference between a small community bank and a behemoth like JP Morgan Chase, which may have a local branch in your neighborhood but, in the final analysis, still remains a corporate outsider beholden to the Rockefeller syndicate, not to a particular community.

I fear the true idea of community is being lost in this age of centralization in part because the principle of subsidiarity, a concept which dictates that local decisions should me made at the local level whenever possible, has been lost or forgotten. Subsidiarity keeps control closer to home, meaning that the officer in the field who has a grasp on the actual situation is not being overly micromanaged by some disengaged V.P. 2,000 miles away. Moreover, the field officer is most likely also a member of the community, whose kids attend school with the other neighborhood children, etc. Subsidiarity allows him the latitude to solve a local problem in a way that best serves the community rather than being hamstrung by some inflexible corporate policy manual. But the banishment of this principle of subsidiarity is precisely the reason why countless communities large and small have long been eroded, if not economically destroyed in many rural areas like Appalachia, by the centralized power structures.

Unfortunately, over the past 80 years, notably since World War II, communities have been increasingly replaced by Power Nodes, mostly in the form of private corporate entities and governmental agencies, where power and control have displaced genuine authority based upon responsibility. As decisions regarding everyday life are made ever more remotely this loss of autonomy results in a fractured sense of community. Likewise, as the family is stripped of its natural internal authority the ‘atomized individual’ becomes the basic unit of society, more easily exploited by the immensity of corporate structures. Several centuries ago a Neapolitan named Giovanni Battista Vico anticipated this trend which “dissociates men to lose sight of humanity, nations, and families in the contemplation of isolated individuals.” In our day this atomization of persons reflected itself in the physical geography of our cities as town squares became vapid strip malls. Vital neighborhoods were replaced by high rise apartments and cookie cutter subdivisions or worse, ‘gated communities’ which resembled barracks style compounds.

The collapse of viable communities heralded the forthcoming of the collapse of families exiled to ‘pre-fabricated utopias’ which, after the war, generated massive suburban sprawl – soulless tracts in which there was no “there” there. Physically, schools increasingly resembled factories or even prisons. Highways primarily designed to move automobiles sliced through long established neighborhoods like Chinese walls with little regard for the thousands displaced. When criticized for such destructive policies New York City’s highway czar, Robert Moses, infamously retorted, “if the ends don’t justify the means, what does?” Such abusive hubris would later be echoed by an unapologetic Dr. Anthony Fauci in refusing to testify before a Senate committee regarding his role in the Covid disaster. For both men, and countless bureaucrats like them, organizational power trumps the good of actual persons or communities, because power to such as these is about control, not responsibility.

Corporate entities, whether public or private, could therefore be referred to as anti-communities as more often than not they mistake power for true authority. Power is the ability to act upon, whereas authority is the right to act upon a thing. By disassociating the use of authority from its proper and legitimate ends to some other end based solely on power projection, corporate power nodes can hamstring or destroy a community. In a healthy community authority serves its primary responsibility, namely the common good. Anti-community on the other hand is geared to absolute control – whether political, social, or economic. Other types of community such as the family, church, or neighborhood are thereby disabled through a slow, grinding process of undermining their authority.

Isolation of individuals is the key, drawing individuals away from the protective influence of their mediating communities by proposing the supposedly superior benefits of ‘autonomy.’ This means individuals are freed from the shackles of ‘antiquated’ community structures, traditions, or expectations. In this way the corporations incessantly package and sell the idea of emancipation (to women, minors, etc.) by way of the products and services provided, conveniently, by the self same corporations.

Self indulgence is marketed as freedom, the autonomous man or woman whose only obligation is to the self. Identity is no longer a function of family ties or church but rather becomes a matter of what car one drives, one’s sexual preferences, or which sports team or pop musician one may idolize. Whether we realize it or not, rather than gaining real freedom, we are simply being manipulated by slick corporate influencers, drawn into a descending spiral of virtual debt slavery to finance transitory whims. Cut off from the moral and social support of family, church, and community the lone individual falls easy prey to those powerful psychological and economic snares which the corporate powers have spent a century refining and perfecting.

The most lethal of these snares is what one social prognosticator, Professor Lewis Mumford, described as the Pornographic Fair. Mumford retraces the modern sexual revolution to its Renaissance antecedent. “And did not Lorenzo de’ Medici stage delirious carnivals through whose sexual indulgences the citizens of Florence could forget the loss of their freedom? (Aldous) Huxley, anticipating Hitler, saw that such corruption might be made more systematic and universal, with a gain in effective power to those who directed the system. So sexual promiscuity becomes a duty… (where) except for their work duties, everyone is reduced to an infantile dream state, and even the superior Alphas, the governing class, have a duty – as already today – to be infantile whenever possible... The unforgivable sins are to wish to be alone, to be selective, to be ‘different,’ to be self-governing.” (Mumford, The Pentagon of Power, 1964, p.226)

Did Mumford not here accurately describe the ‘Epstein Class’ some 60 years ago, long before any of us had ever heard of Epstein? He foretold an elite corporate class whose abuse of authority and power has enabled the baneful erosion of community in our nation through their gospel of ‘sexual liberty’ abetted by the rampant spread of opioid pain killers, marijuana, even fentanyl. The same hucksters and grifters apparently constitute the bulk of leadership among those corporate anti-communities which have done so much to annihilate truly productive communities during my lifetime alone. They have promoted crassness and vulgarity in the culture through their entertainment monopoly. They have reduced millions into debt slavery. I remember a time when an entire family survived with only one car; when women dressed respectfully in public and men addressed them as ma’am; when Sunday was a quiet day of church and family functions; when a blue collar worker could support his family on a single income. Under such conditions real communities thrived, yet as the GDP climbed toward the stars, social and economic stability declined commensurately.

Watching the family unit yield to autonomous individuals Professor Mumford proposed a metaphor called “Encapsulated Man.” Again, back in 1964 he seems to have accurately anticipated today’s technological world of cyber-connectedness, AI, and the trans-humanism now being advocated by high tech oligarchs. Observing a fully equipped astronaut Mumford writes, “Here is the archetypal proto-model of Post Historic Man, whose existence from birth to death would be conditioned by the megamachine… Is this not rather the state that the mass of mankind is fast approaching in actual life, without realizing how pathological it is to be cut off from their own resources for living, and to feel no ties with the outer world unless they are connected with the Power Complex and constantly receive information, direction, stimulation, and sedation from a central external source, via radio, discs, and television with minimal opportunity for reciprocal face-to-face contact?” (Mumford, ibid, fig. 14-15)

Recall that this observation, made 20 years before the first crude PCs came on the market, eerily awaits the rise of the internet, smart phones, or Chat GP. Mumford provokes the question whether any so-called “online community” is truly a community or is it merely a construct which in the long run further erodes the historic notion of community. For community infers something more than mere communication. It is not dependent on a server farm three states away or a vulnerable power grid. I maintain that community involves physical human encounters, otherwise one may be unwittingly communicating with a bot, a troll, or worse. Nor does a community invade one’s privacy or demand to know one’s precise location at every moment. It does not hide its face behind memes or sell one’s personal data for profit. What big tech corporates have sold mankind is a decoy instead of the real McCoy, virtual companions to replace real friends, because when the flood waters rise, you need a neighbor not a screen shot.

I want to add another consideration here, namely that we have been grossly short changed by a brand of corporate capitalism that has gradually shredded viable communities over the past 80 years. Americans have been tricked into a soul deadening (and wallet emptying) kind of consumerism by the very corporate Pied Pipers who have gotten filthy rich on our gullibility. These corporate pirates have long been playing both sides of the table by hyperscaling consumption through advertising, ‘big box,’ and on-line style retailing even as they have consistently outsourced the production and jobs needed to produce all those cheap goods commanding high prices which line the aisles of Costco and Sam’s Club. The gun the new robber barons have used to pull off this heist is called consumer credit. Consider that the outstanding credit tab just for vehicles alone in this country currently stands at $1.67 trillion! That may explain why a new pickup truck now costs over $80,000 which is about $30,000 more than the median wage earner’s income. Meanwhile the cost of home ownership has mushroomed well beyond the reach of most Millennial and Generation Z buyers. This is a social and political time bomb just waiting to detonate.

Back in 1973 a British economist named E.F. Schumacher was sounding the alarm about corporate capitalism running amok. Schumaker pleaded that what modern communities truly needed was not so much mass production as productive masses. He wrote a book called ‘Small is Beautiful’ in which he made the case for a new kind of industrialism geared to local rather than global interests, including the creation of smaller, more affordable appliances that small farmers and entrepreneurs could afford to help improve productivity. Modern commerce and industry needed to scale down rather than scaling up was his argument, quoting Gandhi in defense of his thesis. “There should be no place for machines that concentrate power in a few hands and turn the masses into mere machine minders, if indeed they do not make them unemployed.” Gandhi might well have been talking prophetically about Silicon Valley which, in time, did indeed create (digital) machines that have turned the masses into very absorbed and distracted ‘machine minders’ while concentrating enormous power into a few hands of big tech oligarchs.

As things turned out, Western capitalism chose to follow the wise advice not of Gandhi but rather that of economist John Maynard Keynes who, during the depths of the Great Depression wrote, “We must pretend… that fair is foul and foul is fair. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little while longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.” Of course, Keynes was the prophet of easy ‘fiat money’ and deficit spending which is essentially debt trap economics. We are now nearly a century beyond Keynes’ “little while longer” and yet corporate capitalists continue to operate on the premise that “fair is foul and foul is fair” to justify a program of “avarice and usury.”

Keynesian zeitgeist is surely sweet music to the ears of financiers but it only assures a future of perpetual bondage for communities large and small. It should be little wonder then that today little authentic sense of community survives except for the faux kind of communal loyalty that billion dollar sports franchises are supposed to stir in our hearts. It’s all a fake and a fraud however, because wearing a team jersey is no substitute for being connected with family, friends, or neighbors on some deeper level than that of huddling around a big screen TV. The corporation is a well oiled machine for maximizing profits, it is neither geared for the enrichment of your community nor toward genuine human thriving. If you doubt it then visit any rust belt city abandoned by the corporate employer who, 10 or more years ago, left town for cheap labor in Mexico.

Community is not a function of new sports facilities, entertainment venues, or shopping complexes which the politicians love to assure us all represent “progress.” What they are expounding is a culture of avarice, not of community. Community exists when you know your butcher and druggist by their first names. It means talking to, not just texting, family members and friends. This means protecting confidentiality especially in this age when peering AI listens in and records every word and movement of every person carrying a smart phone. Neither am I a big fan of sharing photos of family and friends online which may attract the wrong kind of unwarranted attention. We inhabit a very dystopian world today which works relentlessly to crush human community and replace it with something artificial, if not outright threatening. What avaricious corporations have prepared for us is an anti-community of autonomous but otherwise disconnected individuals, too many of whom now find social connections with AI generated ‘chat-bots,’ human substitutes that is.

We need to rediscover and to rebuild genuine, authentic communities before we loose our humanity completely. And while I have been critical of so-called corporate anti-communities it must be admitted that even as individuals we have strong tendencies towards avarice, envy, and the same desire to control others that typify those offending corporations whose only motivation is profits. In order to rebuild any true community we must be led by a different motivation which both past history and faith inform us is charity. Love of and respect for our neighbor is the only basis on which a healthy and vibrant community can long thrive.

Charity needs to be reinforced by something else which I fear is rapidly becoming a lost skill, namely that of personal communication. This means speaking directly to others person to person, looking them squarely in the eye, using respectful speech at all times, and avoiding hurtful gossip. Learn the value of silence, especially when you may have something salacious to reveal. We grow far more by listening than by talking. Finally, realize that technology is a tool, not your lifelong boon companion. Be willing to shut it off when it starts to monopolizes your thoughts. As basic as these things may sound, they become easy to forget in the hyper-stimulation into which our many screens draw us. In fact, the words ‘digital’ and ‘community’ ought never be used in the same sentence.

Be willing to embrace your family, especially at their most annoying moments. This is the acid test of charity, and charity is the foundational rock of true community. Learn again how to speak to and not simply past family members. This is perhaps the most difficult task because we have developed certain habits of speech and assumptions regarding our close relatives over the course of years. Family is one’s greatest challenge in terms of restoring community. It requires patience and much forbearance, but above all forgiveness. We live in a false world which pretends to offer us happiness and fulfillment through the sensations and material goods provided by clever corporate overlords. The price we ultimately pay for their entertainments however is the loss of any real sense of community. Community begins in our families and continues through the network of church, schools, neighborhoods, and civic life. It need not be lost amidst the corporate consumerist frenzy if only we are willing to prioritize those things of great value which truly matter: our God and fellow human beings.

Francis J. Pierson + a.m.d.g.