Community

RICHARD: The basic premise lying behind the legality of the existence of ‘the community’ is its designated role of acting ‘for the good of the whole’. Instinctually believing one’s well-being to be assured, nobody calls the community to account. Has anyone fully realised that the community does not exist for the good of the individual?

http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/richard/selectedcorrespondence/sc-socialidentity2.htm

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The phrase ‘good of the whole’ seems to imply this, but closer examination reveals that ‘the whole’ exists only in bombast and blather … it is a concept, an ideology. Only an individual person – a flesh-and-blood body – actually exists. Where people have no integrity – which is the case in order for the ‘whole’ to exist – they have no genuine individuality. They are invisible … as if a non-person, a statistic, a number. They may complain about the ‘dehumanisation’ process, little realising that they are but a social identity … a fictitious entity having only psychological existence. This social identity has taken up residence in the body and rules the roost in an autocratic manner. Nevertheless, it is itself subject to the commands of the community, for it is a loyal member, having been created by the community – the ‘whole’ – in the first place. This loyalty thrives on the moral investment that the social identity has made in the community; one’s very ‘well-being’ depends upon receiving a continuous supply of moral dividends.

One’s psychological existence is so precarious that one needs constant endorsement, so as to feel that ‘I’ am alive, that ‘I’ still exist. When the ‘whole’ accuses one of being selfish – which it relentlessly does by extolling the virtues of duty, obligation and responsibility – one can then chastise oneself, thus maintaining one’s sense of being a social identity. With suitable remorse, one has then been coerced, cajoled and shamed into having one’s usefulness to the community restored … and one feels needed again. Nonetheless, one is actually crazy to chastise oneself because ‘I’ am selfish by ‘my’ very created nature … and ‘I’ will always be self-centred. Self-castigation only serves to crystallise ‘me’. It is essential to the community’s ‘well-being’ that ‘I’ remain selfish. Because the ‘whole’, having created ‘me’ so as to perpetuate its own existence – and being utterly selfish itself – desperately needs self-centred members. ‘I’ readily invest, morally, in the community for there one recognises one’s ilk … ‘I’ am a lonely soul and it is essential that ‘I’ have a sense of belonging to the like-minded ‘whole’. It is an illusion of togetherness designed to assuage the feeling of aloneness that both oneself and the community experiences … ‘I’ and ‘humanity’ feel lost and lonely in what is perceived to be the vast reaches of space and time that make up an empty universe. The search for extra-terrestrial life is but one outcome of this feeling of separation.

This desolate coping-mechanism also has the unfortunate result of creating resentful citizens. The ‘whole’, being bigger and more selfish than ‘me’, has its own – perceived to be serious – communal needs that take precedence over ‘my’ – perceived to be insignificant – personal needs. Because of a continuous supply of citizens, the ‘whole’ does not need ‘me’ as much as ‘I’ need it. Thus the community always has the upper hand and can do with ‘me’, virtually, whatever it wants. There is a constant power-battle going on between ‘me’ and the ‘whole’ … which one must invariably lose, in order to cultivate and nurture one’s invisible Spirit. The community dangerously wants one to have a Spirit, for it requires a consistent reserve of supplicating selves prepared to sacrifice themselves in the name of the ‘Good of the whole’. The community coopts the word ‘we’ and turns it back into the ‘whole’ to serve its own nefarious purposes.

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