The Problem With Community: A Letter to Andrew
A letter exchange between Andrew Perlot and Sara Ness on collective values in a self-maxing world
Andrew and I met way back in 2013 at acroyoga in Austin, where I did acrobatics on his feet and we played Authentic Relating Games in my community. We lost track for many years, until he popped up last year with a phenomenal Substack on Stoicism. We’ve been enjoying having spirited debates since about collectivism vs individualism, utilitarian vs Stoic morality, what makes a good relationship, and many more topics tumbled through our considerate brains. We’re starting to exchange letters to make our discussions public, since we think you’ll enjoy eavesdropping on the nerdiness. Let us know what you think!
Hey Andrew,
The center of our exchanges seems to be this quandary:
Today, no one wants to be the prosocial “martyr” who’s taken advantage of while everyone else “self-maxes”. So, we end up struggling to create collectives where we are willing to give up some of our needs for the whole.
In your article, you bring up several routes that culture and history have taken to address this. I’ll summarize in my own terms:
A systemic solution of continuous mutual monitoring, like the US and Soviet Union did in the Cold War.
A morals solution of “clostrophobic” countries and towns, where norms of collectivism and the possibility of social consequences keep people contributory.
A mission solution of places like Israel’s kibbutzim, where, as you say, “Little monitoring is necessary because they know it’s right, so they willingly put themselves in harness and pull.”
You also name that you personally question the value of heavily interdependent community because, to quote George Carlin, we should “never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups”.
So, you ask,
“Is there something beyond the individual, but short of a top-down imposition where local-level communalism can sprout up and thrive, despite differences and our individualist culture? What does that look like?”
I’m excited to get into all of this!
First of all,
What creates and sustains collective values?
To build on and expand the points you mention, I see there being several sources for creating a mindset that puts the good of a group before (or at least equal to) the good of an individual.
Cultural values and norms
Systemic oversight
Personal values and norms
Personal benefits
Negative consequence
Interpersonal contact
I’ll speak a little about each of these. First,
Cultural Values and Norms
Cultural values and norms show up in places where the family, state, or country are traditionally highly valued. Think of China’s emphasis on children doing well in school so that their family can thrive - or, Jews’ pursuit of a similar scholastic end so that their culture could survive.
Often, these values come from historical needs for resilience. In ancient China, the Yellow River constantly changed its course, and farmers were required to mobilize quickly and collectively to save their fields. This, along with other geological and political factors, pushed China towards a strong hierarchy and sense of collective values.
For the Jews, an itinerant population by necessity, an emphasis on scholarship kept their ancient cultural/religious texts alive even when they were forced to move from place to place.
The benefit of culture-based norms is that when disaster strikes, those countries and cultures are more resilient. Asian countries such as Taiwan, for instance, were able to implement universal masking policies during the COVID-19 pandemic far more easily than individualist America did.
The downside of culture-based norms is that the survival of the culture can take precedence over the thrival of the people that make it up. For instance, foot-binding in ancient China was pretty shitty for the women who got their feet bound, even if it raised the family’s possibility of acquiring a good wedding match. And not all Jewish children want to be doctors and lawyers, whatever our parents think.*
*I am very grateful to my Jewish doctor parents for not caring if my brother and I followed in their footsteps, even when he became a farmer and me a broke pseudo-therapist. Hi Mom!
Culture-based norms can also lead to the possibility of groupthink, aka “the stupidity of people in large groups”. They can also lead to stronger bonds within a subgroup, but stronger resistance and lack of empathy for people outside of it.
Next,
Systemic Oversight
You talked about this in your article:
The cold warriors [Russia and US] didn’t want to unilaterally disarm — the risk of being obliterated by a better armed opponent was real. The solution…started from very modest beginnings…It only worked because each country agreed to open up to an almost claustrophobic level of military monitoring by the other side. Inspectors were sent in to make sure each side kept their side of the bargain.
A system with strong bureaucratic control can provide checks against our natural selfish or nationalist desires.
Personal Values and Norms
You choose the personal Stoic value of Virtue as your guiding compass - the measuring stick for what matters to you. Some people choose the guiding value of Community. They follow it because they believe in it inherently, beyond its benefit to themselves or their culture.
The benefit to this is that we get “white knights” that want to live in a world where everyone lives by collective norms, and they set this example for others. In the process, they create good for a much larger number of people. These are our community leaders, benefactors, and volunteers. Groups can reinforce this value, as I talk about in another article:
The problem is that these white knights are easily hurt when their values are not shared by others. Rationalist writer Duncan Sabien brilliantly describes a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma where he puts this in terms of “stag hunts” vs “rabbit hunts”.
Imagine a scenario where you’re hunting with a group. If all of you choose to hunt a stag, you’ll catch a stag. If any of you choose to hunt rabbits, the people who chose rabbit will catch rabbits and the people who chose stag will catch…nothing.
Stag is more nutritious and larger than rabbit. So the best outcome is that everyone chooses to hunt stag. But, this requires that everyone follows collective values, and trusts each other. If only one person chooses to hunt rabbit, that person wins and the group loses. If the group isn’t sure whether they can all trust each other, it probably makes sense for everyone to choose rabbit.
The White Knight, the paragon of collective values, always chooses stag.
The White Knight wants others to choose stag as well. They either expect group members to do so of their own accord, or expect that in leading by example, they can convince others to eventually choose stag every time.
If the White Knight is hurt too many times by people choosing rabbit, they will become a Black Knight. The Black Knight knows that people are not trustable, and thus, their default choice is rabbit.
Then the Black Knight joins another group, and converts other White Knights, who eventually convert others in new groups to Black Knight…
The downside of holding a personal value of collectivism is getting burned when others don’t hold the same values. In your article, Andrew, you reference the work of Jonathan Haidt, one of the pre-eminent moral psychologists of our age:
“In “The Righteous Mind,” psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes a “red pill moment,” where he recognized the “possibility that there were alternative moral worlds in which reducing harm (by helping victims) and increasing fairness (by pursuing group-based equality) were not the main goals.”
Haidt and his partner Jesse Graham individuate seven moral values that cross cultures: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Purity, Equality, and Proportionality. For those interested in the polarization currently afflicting our society, Haidt’s book “The Righteous Mind” makes great suppositions about the different ways these values are divided between liberals and conservatives.
The point is: IMO, one of the biggest factors blocking collectivism in our society is a different distribution of these values.
Say that you live in a house with other people. You notice you’re getting resentful about the division of chores. You think that everyone should sign up for an equal number of house tasks each week, like sweeping the floors and watering the garden. You care about Equality and Fairness.
One of your housemates, however, says: “I pay more for a bigger room in the house. Thus, I shouldn’t have to do chores.” He cares about the value of Proportionality.
Another housemate, who holds a primary value of Care, says: “We have people in our house with different physical capacities. We should protect their needs by lessening the number of chores they have to do.
The last housemate, who cares about Loyalty, says: “I like living in and contributing to this house. I’m in to pick up a larger share of labor.” (You, who care about Equality, are likely to push back on this - the way things get done are as important as the fact that they do get done.)
Houses have fallen apart over lesser conflicts.
Let’s quickly run through the others:
Incentives and Consequences
Incentives of a communal mindset could include connection, love, support, housing, jobs, and respect.
Consequences of not having a communal mindset could be ostracism, judgment, or legal action.
Some sort of social contract and sense of altruism is necessary for us to co-exist. IMO this is one reason why unchecked capitalism has been harmful to societal connection: if we think of companies as organisms - a metaphor of Yuval Harrari’s that I have found useful - they have no innate sense of altruism. They live in order to grow. We are struggling with this same problem when it comes to AI: every organism wants to promote its own good, often at the expense of other populations and species.
Interpersonal Contact
The very fact of contact is one of the best ways to resolve, and prevent, conflict and polarization.
The more contact we have with others, the more we can feel them and empathize with their experience - the less likely we are to harm them. If we can’t envision the people we might be harming, we don’t care as much about them. Their pain has no emotional impact on us.
I think our decrease in collective mindset, at least in America, comes in large part from our lack of contact with others. As Robert Putnam’s brilliant book “Bowling Alone” showed, our level of connectivity has dropped steadily since the 1960s. We have few “great good places” or “great good groups” anymore - no churches or places to easily meet people, which is why so many people still rely on their friends from high school or college. Festivals and burns are some of the only places to get this contact now, which is why I think they’re so popular.
Even online, we tend to live in feed-based enclaves of people like us, who share the same history and the same views.
Okay, I’m a little ashamed of how long that got 😅 but even selfishly, it’s helpful for me to disambiguate these distinctions.
I would like everyone to have a communal mindset, if only because I want people to keep me in mind when they’re making decisions. The potentiators - and the barriers - to this are cultural values; systems; personal values and morals; benefits; consequences; and contact.
However, I think most human actions are inherently selfish. For most of us, our altruism doesn’t extend beyond us and our immediate circle of family and friends.
In times of sudden disaster we briefly expand our circle of concern to include our neighborhood, town, country, and world. With continuous stress we contract to ourselves and our closest loved ones.
These days, we’re under a *lot* of stress.
So, to return to your question:
Do you think there’s anything in the second spot, one that avoids the “nuclear disarmament problem”? Is there something beyond the individual, but short of a top-down imposition where local-level communalism can sprout up and thrive, despite differences and our individualist culture? What does that look like?
I think yes. Friend groups are one example of this, where increased contact can expand our sense of connection without requiring oversight. Simply creating more places to make friends - as I did through my Authentic Relating work - and especially diverse types of friends can potentiate our sense of altruism. Communal living also forces this type of empathetic development, since we can’t avoid seeing and feeling our effect on others.
We could create more places for people to encounter each other: volunteer opportunities, social clubs, neighborhoods, parties with good experience design (which I can consult on 😉). Instagram keeps marketing me dinner clubs, so there is definitely some movement in this direction, albeit for pay.
As to a development of communal or personal values…I’ve seen some interesting ideas here too. For example, my friend Jordan Allen is developing a social media platform called UpTrust where the best-contributing and most honest people gain more credibility, based on others’ votes.
Honestly this is the one I think about most, and I don’t have a lot of great ideas. Indoctrination in early school years would be the most useful tactic. Restorative justice practices and community-based social work initiatives also move the needle in a positive direction. Community governance practices like consensus-based decision making teach us to negotiate our needs. But so many systems in work, politics, and families are set up with competition and individual gain in mind. Once those patterns are calcified, they’re very hard to change.
Benefits and consequences have their own issues. As soon as you start basing action on reward, you decrease the possibility that the action will happen when the reward is removed. In fact, people are less likely to take pleasure or motivate themselves to action when rewards are involved. This is due to something called the overjustification effect. We can also see that laws, aka consequences, don’t always motivate prosocial action - in fact, they often detract from it.
So, I put this question back to you, Andrew. What systems, norms, contact opportunities, or other factors do you think we could put in place to potential collective values like altruism and empathy - if you think those are useful to cultivate?
Your Collaborative Thought-Dom,
Sara Ness
Thanks for sharing your exchange with Andrew. You both might find interest in the series on “Terrible Communities” by Peter Limberg of The Stoa.
https://open.substack.com/pub/lessfoolish/p/all-communities-are-terrible-communities?r=orjgn&utm_medium=ios