A year or so ago, I was helping a friend with a project in one of Columbia’s homeless camps, and we talked to one of the residents who was angry about thefts that had been happening in the camp — residents stealing from other residents. The thing that he said that really stuck with me was something to the effect of, “There’s no community here.” I instantly understood what he meant; there’s more to a community than just a bunch of people living in the same place. Yet, it is hard to explain exactly what a community is — perhaps because few of us have ever lived in one.
America doesn’t really have communities. We have bunches of people living geographically close together, but they are people that are not really connected to one another. For any home in American, the odds are that the occupants don’t even know the names of all the people living in adjacent homes. We are a people that have been perfectly atomized. When we call an area a “community” we are usually using the word in an aspirational sense.
We used to believe that wolf packs were organized in a strict hierarchy, with an “alpha wolf” at the top of that hierarchy. This term came out of Rudolph Schenkel’s 1947 study of a group of captive wolves; since then, we’ve learned that there are no “alpha wolves” in a naturally-occurring wolf pack, but they do exist in captive wolf packs.
Wolves are not supposed to exist in captivity. This is an unnatural condition for a wolf pack. In fact, the process of captivity is a traumatic, even apocalyptic, event for the pack, which likely doesn’t even represent a complete pack, but rather individuals captured from multiple packs and shoved together. A captive wolf pack is essentially a group of strangers, all with post-traumatic stress, and no real connection to one another. They live in a container that is dramatically smaller than what a naturally-occurring pack requires. They’ve been made permanently afraid; they are pathological. They are also very good analogs to the perfectly atomized people that live in America.
No, most Americans are not held in a container; however, wherever we go, our survival is uncertain and we are surrounded by strangers. Moreover, we are forced through economic pressure to choose containers to occupy on a recurring basis, and this economic pressure may seem subtle (and even normal), but is truly a threat to our very existence. If we don’t go to work — and occupy that authoritarian container of the workplace — we will not have enough money for food, a home, medical care, or — ironically — transportation to a workplace. Moreover, it is always possible that a damaged human being will snap from the combination of their personal trauma and the irrationality of modern life, and go on a murder spree (there were over 600 such events in the US in 2022). We live in constant fear just like a wolf in a cage.
If you take a traumatized wolf and free it, it isn’t going to do well. It is no longer equipped for real freedom and you can’t just shove it into an existing, healthy pack. The pack will not simply accept it, and the newly-freed wolf won’t behave in a way that ingratiates it to the pack. Freeing a captive wolf requires a very long process of naturally rebuilding the pack from scratch and is only possible because of the strength of instinctual behavior in wolves.
Related: How to teach wolves to be wild
The situation is much more difficult with humans. One of humanity’s strengths is that we can adapt to anything, and that adaption is a product of our behaviors being more learned than instinctual. A human being raised in a horrific environment internalizes that horror as normal — even good. Yet our instinct to build community still exists; the result is small, toxic communities that are transient, with “alpha” individuals that take advantage of the “omegas” and “betas” that serve the alpha and facilitate abuse. Any sincere attempt to build a healthy community will almost instantly attract toxic people yearning to find followers to worship them.
Ever wonder why it seems like the US has so many cults? It’s a direct result of how broken Americans are and their innate, human need for community. In a Venn diagram, the place where “abused people” and “need for community” overlaps is marked as “cults”. Some cults have gotten so big in the US that they are now officially religions. Cults build community but also purposefully separate individual members from the larger society. A cult leans on the need for community, while simultaneously abusing members to maintain the normalized culture of abuse that they experienced before joining — often through denying other basic human needs, but also through direct psychological and physical abuse. It seems irrational, but a human being raised under horrific conditions will often view some forms of abuse as good, nurturing, or as an expression of love.
Neoliberalism promotes atomization of the individual down to a single person who lives in a physically separate home, with only transactional relationships connecting them to other human beings, usually through the intermediary of a corporation. The corporation usually has an app. Here, conservativism, with it’s culture of toxicity, at least provides some semblance of family and community, though rife with abuse. In my experience, most leftists are people that understand that community is not only good but necessary, but who have also realized that conservative communities are toxic (because the only thing they really care about conserving is an oppressive hierarchy); in my experience, those people usually come from conservative backgrounds. Again, this is just what I’ve seen, but it seems like people who grow up in “liberal” homes simply do not care about community at all and usually don’t appreciate how abusive conservativism really is.