The Poison of Community

Is “community” the right word? Or should it be “society” or “culture”? Whatever the right word is to describe a group of people governed by any sort of set of rules, government, laws, or religion, it’s poison.

Poison? Yeah, poison. Well, maybe that’s too strong a word. But it seems that any large group of people governed by some central committee or even by a single person, as in a monarchy, is bound for trouble. We’ve just not known any other form of human group that hasn’t ended up whacked. What other way could we have done it?

Surely, there are communities throughout the ancient world that worked better than what we’re seeing today. Take the !Kung San people of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa, for starters. Anthropologists like Marshall Sahlins have described them as part of the “original affluent society”—hunter-gatherers who worked only a few hours a day, shared resources equally without much hierarchy, and resolved conflicts through consensus and humour (!) rather than force. No kings, no cops, just a tight-knit group where everyone pitched in, and jealousy or hoarding was kept in check by social norms. It worked because the groups were small, maybe 20–50 people, fostering real accountability.