Community is corny

How images shape what feels possible

✨ Thank you for joining the community craft conga line that is GROUP HUG! I am so glad you are here.✨

What i think other people imagine when i talk about consensus

Consensus! Co-ops! Potlucks! Breakout circles! Icebreakers! Communes! Co-living! Collectives! Group agreements! Bonding! Nonviolent communication! 

Did those words make you feel anything? 

Did they conjure up any images? 

Did you roll your eyes or snort a little? 

Maybe you had no reaction at all. You might be a better person than me. I think of 1000-year-old rope sandals and body odor and infighting and disappointment and homemade hummus. Or explosive interpersonal tension and white people with dreadlocks and back massages you didn’t ask for. 

What I’m getting at is that my community symbolism has definitely been traumatized by hippies. 

I belong to a co-op where we use consensus and love potlucks and lead breakout circles using nonviolent communication and group agreements and still feel a small, bitter troll scowl inside of me every time I talk about one of these things in earnest. The troll looks like my uncle or Ronald Reagan. 

And it isn’t just me! If I mention the words “collective” or “consensus” to someone else, their reflexive response is usually “oh god” or “good luck with that” or “uh huh” while smiling politely, but sadly, at the sheer impossibility of those things.

CAN WE TALK ABOUT THIS???? Where did this come from?? What exactly is happening when that cynicism roils in us, or we back away slowly, or imagine the hemp necklaces? And if we don’t feel any of those things, what shaped our orientation to communal activities so differently?

Our associations with community are somehow both so magical that we long for them and so corny they feel impossible.

These images are powerful because they shape how seriously we take community and all the things it takes to make it happen. If our associations with collectivism are tinged with a sort of idealism or pollyanna-ness, or a cringiness or corniness, the community we all deserve might feel that much more out of reach. That much more for another era, or another type of person, or another town that isn’t our own. It becomes more like fiction than present possibility. 

Let’s explore this! 

I find that my strongest skeptical reflex comes up around group process: consensus, conflict mediation, decisionmaking, open dialogue, group voting – that sort of thing. I think about black-and-white photos of organizers from another era doing it better, or Sesame Street or murals of everyone holding hands, or dreamy liberal arts kids sitting on the quad, or, for some reason, a group of pre-schoolers deciding what game they might all play together. Idealism feels laced into the very fabric of these images. Like, oh, you really think you can agree with 20 people at once? Or bond with someone different than you over a prompt? Or listen and reflect back to everyone in the room, equally, without any baggage or interpersonal tension? 

Everyone who’s attempted this – me included – has trash bags bursting with stories of every time this process went terribly wrong. We tried consensus and everyone quit or even with all our values in place, white people still dominated the dialogue or we couldn’t even agree on what pizza to order, how could we agree on policy?

Those cautionary tales pile up, failed experiments only reinforcing the impossibility of it all.

But (for the most part) we (like, society) don’t feel this gut reactive skepticism when it comes to the hierarchical and individualistic structures that make our world. No one is like: Oh, you’re on a team? With a boss? And harm just happens every day and you have to absorb it forever? And you have very little agency in what you do? These structures are the default, even if we suffer greatly through them, and for clear reason: they are baked into the culture and economy of the west. (Of course, most of us do have skepticism about all of the above, thank god, but you get what I’m getting at.)

This is so implicit in our collective sense of possibility. I imagine all of the uncles of the world whispering: hierarchy and individualism might suck but it’s inevitable, but the kind of community you want is impossible so you shouldn’t even try. 

When we are bombarded with far more stories of the highly successful, but highly solo, visionary than we are stories of ordinary people coming together to do amazing things, our sense of possibility becomes underdeveloped. We simply lack the evidence of what it takes to build community. 

We don’t imagine any of these lone superstars having to go to a meeting or disagree with people sitting in a circle of chairs. 

It stokes a sort of cycle:

1. Receive lots of images of lone heroes carving out their own path and less images about groups of people coming together to do cool things

2. Only learn half the story of the community successes – maybe these lack the texture of what was also hard in those rooms, or awkward and painful and annoying, and their failures along the way

3. Cultivate an idealistic understanding of these half-stories and build them up in your mind as magical

And then, depending on how idealism sits with you, you might either:

1. Avoid any chance to build things with other people because you believe it was for another place, time, and people

2. Do your best to build community, inevitably stumble along the way, and take that as a failure because you are so let down that it didn’t go perfectly like all those stories you half-heard, it must not be possible at all

I trust there are people reading this who don’t have this experience, and have entire mental folders of stories of people doing things together and everything they felt along the way, whole epics of failure and success and bickering. There are people in my life who are great at this sort of thing and have bookshelves packed with alternative histories, or grew up in more communal living situations, or were just built with very low egos and very high quantities of hope (mostly I am this person on good days).

But if that isn’t you yet, I invite you to join me in reflecting on why that might be. To meditate on what comes to mind when we think about what it takes to build community, and how that does or doesn’t quietly shape our sense of what’s possible with other people, and our willingness to feel all the feelings that stokes along the way. To fill in the gaps in our learning: read more stories, ask the community organizers and volunteers and spacemakers in your life about what annoys them and how they get through it, and be a little easier on ourselves when the reality doesn’t exactly line up with the image in our minds, however corny.