Communities

In the middle of analysing data and while I should definitely be focusing more on writing my PhD, I started thinking about communities (which is relevant to my PhD, but not directly). I decided to put my thoughts about this here, as they make my head very tingly and they are distracting from what I should be doing. Also, I am trying to empower myself to write more to get used to writing my thoughts, rather that store them in my head and do nothing with them. Also also, I think I'd really like to chat to all of you about this.

So I started thinking of the role of communities and the pressure of individual success. And I started wondering, what is the reason that we, as a society, strive for and celebrate individual success? And for some reason, my mind went to Nobel prize winners (or any award ceremony for that matter). I need to preface that by saying that my knowledge on Nobel prize winners is very generic and I am in no mood to do a Google deep-dive to find out more about them (thus further distracting myself and thus completely defeating the point of writing this, which is to get it all out of my system and get my brain back on track with what I should be doing). What I was thinking, therefore, is why do we feel like we need to celebrate INDIVIDUAL success so much (Nobel prize being just an example)? Why do we, for example, need to celebrate the fact that 'so and so' did this, or discovered this or anything like that and not celebrate the fact that we, as a community, a global community of citizens, are now able to have access to -insert invention/discovery here- which will, hopefully, make our lives better? Because surely no invention was a single person's contribution. Many people helped and contributed in very many ways, even if just one person made the breakthrough that put it all together. And, by extension, isn't that logic what perpetuates social inequalities (to an extend)?

I was just thinking, we live in a world where validation is a commodity and not everybody gets to have it. And that makes us competitive, rather than working together. And of course any competition will always favour some sort of people more that others. And often the way we go about social inequalities, is to make certain groups of people 'more competitive' by stressing out why they are valid and why they are important and so on, instead of challenging the very notion of competition where in the end only one person gets the prize and everyone else is just... And for me, ultimately, that goes back to celebrating individuality. Because if we were working together as a community, why would it matter if one person is there to make coffees and another person is there to operate complex programs who can do a multitude of things (whilst drinking the coffee that the first person made)? Why is making coffee less important than -insert a complicated and highly valued skill example here-? How does that ultimately serve us as a society? Is that driving us forward?

Many people might argue that it is. You know, it's been 'working' so far, right? We managed to do so many things as humans because of this mentality. Or have we? Or are these just the sort of stories that we choose to discuss more so than community efforts (or even the same events sometimes we may frame as individual successes or failures, rather than community ones). And how far can that take us in the future, in a world where we are becoming increasingly aware of our impact on each other and the effect that our beliefs and ways of approaching the world may have on other people?

Because, ultimately, I think this cuts both ways. It's not only successes that we approach this way, but also failures and tragedies. You know, like Hitler more often that not being portrayed and talked about as the villain who single handedly caused WWII and the genocide of millions of Jewish people, homosexuals and disabled people, when in fact the western world as a whole let those people down and Hitler's regime was just the one who pulled the trigger. The ways in which we approach ideas like racial inequalties and slavery, violence against women and so on are also often similar to this. Yes of course there were/are some people who are perpetrators and who have in and of themselves caused incredible harm to many others, specifically because they might be people of colour, women or any other marginalised minority. But these people were/are part of a society too, and this society is perhaps as much (some might argue more) to blame for these events as the individuals who actually committed these atrocities.

And ultimately working on both the praise and the blame on a community level I think is a good thing. Singling out people and individualising either success or failure is, in my opinion, one of the major themes that divide us and create the polarisation in our society that we've seen recently. So many people feel invalidated and useless, like they don't contribute anything or gain anything from being part of a society where -insert thing they are angry about- happens. On any side of the political spectrum. And so many others are trying to single out the cause of -insert problem here- to individual humans or small groups of people. Trump supporters. Tories. Immigrants. Liberals/socialists (not the same, but not sure how many people meaningfully distinguish between the two). You name it. And they end up singling those people out and projecting everything they don't like about the world or everything that's going wrong with their lives on others. But they are not the only ones who created it. We all played a role, whether we like it or not. So we all have to have conversations with each other, as calmly as humanly possible (and it won't always be possible or even appropriate to discuss calmly) about these issues, as well as where we want to go as a society. And no, we probably won't agree on many of these things. But what I hope, is that maybe where we might be able to agree and ultimately what may be more healthy and more productive, if not more realistic, might be to admit that we all share the blame, and the praise, for where the world is today all the same, and maybe stop trying to quantify the unquantifiable. And, maybe, things will change as a result.