The Emptiness Of “Community”

This article was submitted to Amerikaner by Grant Norman. If you would like to submit your own content to Amerikaner.org, please email AmerikanerContributions@Proton.me

In the grand tradition of modern-day journalists, I have made an observation in my personal life which I have decided to assume is typical of a system which I presume exists. Even if the data does not back me up, and I certainly won’t be taking the effort to disprove my hypothesis, thank you very much, I choose to believe that what I think reflects the actual state of things.

Such is internet writing in the year 2024.

The trend that I believe I have identified is the erosion and replacement of the concrete notion of “friends and family” with the more nebulous “community”. I see this trend in advertisements especially. Where marketing directed at selling products to children or promoting political activism to adults once highlighted the need to impress, compete with, convince, or simply enjoy the company of your friends and family, it strikes me that these have been replaced by a vague appeal to “community”.

What is a “community”?

Well, there is certainly a dictionary definition of the concept, but no matter what it is a less tangible thing than the friends and family that come to mind when one hears those words. You can call up your friend or your cousin for help and know that he will be there, but an appeal to the “community” for assistance is always a riskier endeavor. You put your quarters into the machine and hope that it pays out when the time comes.

The replacement of friends and family by community is an easily understandable phenomenon. As Americans become more and more atomized, and the totalizing nature of politics drives wedges into relationships taken for granted, they are grasping for something to fill the cleavage opened up in their lives. Communities that share a political, religious, ethnic, or consumptive identity, or some combination of those things, promise a life raft for the men and women left adrift in this country.

The replacement of real bonds with vague higher concepts is also not a new development. The economic, political, and social upheavals since the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution destroyed wholesale the ties of kith and kin which existed in Europe for centuries. The links in the “chain of being,” as it were, which connected the lowest peasant to the highest king, were shattered, and had to be replaced by something, anything.

For some, the answer came in the form of Marxist politics and parties, appealing to the atomized worker, suffering from the replacement of a knowable lord with an aloof employer, with no responsibilities toward the employed, save that they be paid. For others, nationalism promised a bedrock for belonging, something to be proud of and a sense of purpose, after the elimination of the old structures, rights, and responsibilities of the pre-revolutionary era.

Both of these developments were rooted in real needs – the exploitation of the worker by the capitalist class, and the common heritage and destiny of a people – but for all their grandiloquent promises, their appeal can be understood as providing a home for the socially homeless. This is why it should hardly surprise that in many cases, especially in the interwar years of the twentieth century, many drifted between the two poles of socialism and nationalism.

The real revolution was the friends revolutionaries made along the way.

Ultimately, a “community” is a fragile and toxic thing. The very notion of a “community organizer” speaks to the hollowness of the project of replacing real ties with vague appeals to commonality with total strangers. These strangers have no real ties to each other, their support is fickle and begrudging, and they reinforce the lowest common denominator of their memberships, when they don’t implode under the first sign of strain.

You can pick from a laundry list of these empty projects in the United States today, but the “Black Community” is one of the most egregious examples of failure to accomplish anything for its members that could be found today. One could easily make the case that the “community” of online White Nationalism is running in close second place. People are not looking for “community” as much as they are looking for the friends and family which they have lost.

A community’s value is in its ability to form those friendships and family, otherwise they are as sterile and foolhardy as the Shaker cult of Christians, which didn’t believe in reproducing. The cause may get the young man to volunteer to fight, but what makes him actually fight is the man in the trench beside him and the family he has at home. Our task as Amerikaners is to rebuild the ties that have been destroyed and discarded, and that is a tall order.

It is the work of a lifetime, the necessary precondition to the revolution that many fantasize about. If your “community” can’t provide a dog-sitter, then it won’t produce any meaningful successes.