Breakdown of communities & Intrusive Government
Breakdown of communities & Intrusive Government
We seek BIGGER government because communities are breaking down. Government and communities are two competing means of achieving change at the local level.
I grew up in a place where everyone knew everyone else. Today, I do not know the name of my grocer. I cannot name five people who live near me. I only know them by their faces. While we have now created global communities, local communities are breaking down. And that is not good.
Local communities are important
There are essentially three kinds of activities a community needs to undertake.
Actions of the common good, where the benefits should accrue to the entire community, and none of the members suffers a remarkable loss.
Actions in the interest of the community that can yield profit with reasonable risks.
Actions where communities are reluctant to act, AND/OR the risks associated are unreasonable.
The community usually gets together to undertake the actions in the first category. Entrepreneurs design ingenious solutions to address the needs of the community, thus addressing the second category of actions.
The government is created to undertake the actions in the third category. In its purest form, we need a national government to take care of security (external and internal), operate the law and order machinery and document the rules of law (those we understand in principle).
The critical aspect of this is agreement within the community. If the community was in agreement and could act, then there was no need for a separate entity. Government as an entity became necessary precisely when the community could not or would not act. The inaction could be because of safety issues (military, protection, safety etc.), scale issues (infrastructure, trash disposal etc.), coordination issues (traffic management, trade, commerce, economics etc.) or ethical issues (determining guilt, punishment, etc.).
Community mechanisms have broken down.
Over the last four decades, there is growing distrust amongst community members that prevents any positive achievement. The distrust can be exploited only for adverse outcomes. Thus, protests and campaigns are more popular than community pitching together to get a park built.
Since 1980s the computer, the internet and thereafter the social media channels have opened various opportunities to monetize what traditionally were community mechanisms. (For example, finding a babysitter). The small-value transactions were critical for building community trust as served to create small interactions that eventually built trust. Trust is the bedrock of community action. Thus, as community trust-building activities were lost, community action took a back seat.
The expansion of the private enterprise has also reduced the reliance on community coordination by monetizing the low-value transactions within communities. In the process, private enterprises amassed unreasonable power unto themselves through the collection of private data and networks for this.
The private enterprise invented new mechanisms to take over some of the government's responsibilities. Thus mega-projects now came into the corporate realm. (E.g. loan syndication, REITS, infra financing methods)
There is no effective community redressal mechanism against the corporates. The corporates can outlast and outfight any community group.
We ask the government to fill the gap.
The above factors have pushed the community members to demand government intervention. The communities are therefore compelled to seek assistance from the government to level out the bargaining power disparity.
The government is not explicitly designed for that, but it has appropriated this role for itself. The rest can self-govern within the broad field laid down by the national government. The communities did not need government by design. The government came into the communities as an arbiter for operational convenience and efficiency.
In dealing with community issues, Government bring along its inefficiencies, the vote-bank appeasement with politicians as the arbiters. It allows for more divisive engagements. Allows for ghettos - physical and mental. Those actions increase costs and compliance requirements and INCREASE the distrust rather than decrease it. The politicians have the last laugh, and the people are the ultimate losers.
Even the corporate innovations that take over government functions create a need for more regulations and interventions, socialising the losses while privatising the profits and cordoning off the rights. This sets in motion a spiral that enhances the need for government.
Government is ill-equipped to counter corporate influence. The reliance on those very corporates for political funding has obfuscated the responsibility of the corporates. The corporates, and more so their billionaire owners, can get away with almost anything.
But it can attempt to control communities. Communities are already weakened by Government arbitration and are vulnerable.
Government - Community adversity is not surprising.
Communities are the fundamental element of political organisation. (Others include unions, common-interest groups, etc., which are forms of communities). These elements feed into political parties. Government is at the pinnacle of political hierarchy, being the powerful group among the chosen political party.
The influence OVER the communities allows the ruling political party to exert influence over voting patterns INSIDE the communities. But for this, fissures and distrust within communities that can be exploited are essential.
If every government decision was evaluated, we will find the bulk of government action is detrimental to community strength. It is the result of government action that our cities are designed to reduce interactions, public spaces are under attack, and economic demands on time crowd out community involvement. Excessive taxation drains out the surplus from communities - the energy that can drive and finance community initiatives. In effect, the solutions proposed by the government subvert communities.
As you may conclude that this is a downward spiral. The mechanisms for getting things done are extremely reliant on the government, which is wasteful, and the private sector, which is extractive. Communities are under attack both from the Corporates and the government.
The decline of communities has also imposed personal costs, people becoming lonely,
We need to revive the communities.
If we want to limit the size of the government, if we want to limit the influence of corporates over our lives, we need communities to thrive and become more assertive.
Building communities requires two essential elements - a space for serendipitous interaction and engagement between members AND activities and events that bring people together in such places. Jane Jacobs’ work on cities is more an ode to communities rather than urban planning of cities.
However, the role of communities is not simply to restore the bargaining power of citizens against the corporates and the government but to truly substitute some of the functions performed by these entities.
But there is more to this. Keep a look out for your own community interactions. How have they changed? How can we make them better? Let me know.