Why Community Matters

By rusty Human reality is socially constructed. That is, most of the "facts" that determine our daily lives are socially constructed facts, which are true as long as enough people believe them to be true. The right to own property, the right to not be murdered, indeed the right to continue to live at all; all of these are socially constructed rights, which are true only as long as enough of us believe in them.

American society has created for itself a Mobius-like reality by privileging capital, or property rights, above all else. This has granted corporations the power to purchase the reality that best suits them, and corporations in turn recreate the reality that privileges money. Communities -- places, real or virtual, where people speak directly to each other, without corporate mediation -- are the only hope we have to reassert control over our own reality, and place it back in the hands of people, instead of the fictional entities we call corporations.

The United States Declaration of Independence reads, in part, as follows:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

While Jefferson ultimately attributes the source of humanity's "inalienable rights" to the "Creator," he recognizes that the only way for humanity to maintain these rights is by self-governance. That is, whether you are granted rights by God or not is essentially irrelevant, since the actual exercise of those rights is a social phenomenon.

"Human rights" are fundamentally a social construct. Your individual right to continue to live is maintained only as long as there is not a more powerful individual or group who wishes to cause your death. Humans have no natural predators -- that is, no species other than humanity itself supports its existence by killing humans.

This puts us in the unusual position of being able to determine a large proportion of "reality" as we experience it. Obviously, if I jump off a tall building, I will likely be killed on impact with the ground, no matter how many people believe I won't be. Reality, and existence, for me, is over. But what this event means to the people who didn't actually jump off the building with me has yet to be constructed. What the majority of others think about this event will determine the socially constructed reality of the event. That is, "what actually happened" is determined by common agreement.

If enough people believe I was pushed off that building, the individual they believe pushed me will go to jail. Buried in that sentence are a whole host of other socially constructed "truths", among which are that pushing someone off a building is murder, that murder is wrong, and that society may physically and behaviorally confine those who commit murder. None of these things are fundamentally "true" to any greater extent than that they are made true by enough people believing in them.

Take a different example. I die of pancreatic cancer. As with the first example, it makes no difference to me whatsoever what caused this event, since I am dead. But again, the larger meaning of this event, the "what actually happened" has yet to be determined, and in this case, it may become a lot more complex. You see, before I died of pancreatic cancer, I was a small farmer in Colorado. To save costs, I accepted cakes of processed sewage sludge from New York City, which I used to fertilize my tree farm. This was legal, because American society, acting through the EPA, has determined that "sludge farming" is an acceptable way to dispose of combined human and industrial wastes, despite the fact that these sludge cakes contain extremely high concentrations of heavy metals, petroleum byproducts, and carcinogenic chemicals.

An autopsy determines that my pancreatic cancer was the result of high concentrations of nickel and lead in my body. The concentrations of nickel and lead in the soil of my farm are hundreds of times the base levels in other soil in the area. It takes little imagination to conclude that my death was a result of the toxic sludge that I've been using to fertilize my farm.

The physical facts of my death are now known. But the social reality of the event still has not been determined. Seeing a potential disaster in the works, SludgeCo, who were my source of toxic farm sludge, will inevitably swing the PR machine into action. Company spokes-people will insist that I chose, of my own free will, to use their safe, inexpensive fertilizer. They will point to other possible explanations of my cancer, and produce "independent" company-paid scientists to cast doubt on the link between heavy metals and cancer. "Grassroots" organizations of farmers, funded by the company, will protest that limiting the flow of cheap SludgeCo fertilizer will harm their ability to compete in the market, and damage the competitiveness of Colorado's agriculture industry.

The point of all this public relations work is to create a socially accepted "reality" which does not make SludgeCo a murderer. This process is the bedrock on which American society creates its reality. Laws are made by representatives. Representatives act based upon what they believe are the opinions of their constituents. Constituents base their beliefs on information provided to them by media, such as television, radio, and newspapers. And at every level of this process, the public relations industry intervenes to create the "reality" that best suits their client.

American society is essentially capitalist. Capital is another one of those social fictions which has effaced its own socially-constructed nature to the point that most people accept it as "real," in and of itself, and beyond their ability to control. Like murder, though, money has no reality beyond that which we collectively grant it. In American capitalism, money is exchangeable for property, and vice versa. The reality of money is founded in our belief that the ownership of property is a fundamental right. Communist revolutions all over the world have proven that individual ownership of property is not a fact of nature, but is a socially constructed reality that holds true only as long as a sufficient number of people believe in it. If a sufficient number of people believe that they own the property you previously considered "yours," then that becomes true.

The base belief in individual ownership of property means that in order to continue to live, each of us must obtain money to purchase the basic things that enable that. That is, I have to get food, and in order to get food away from those who "own" it, I have to give them money. So life, in a capitalist society, is subordinate to property. My life, and yours, is sustained only at the pleasure of a social fiction. Because of our assent to this form of reality, those who hold the most property may dictate the views of the largest number of people, which in turn recreates and reinforces the reality which enables those property-holders to continue to hold property.

There's the rub. The individuals who control the largest amount of property are without exception corporations. Corporations, in the American legal reality, act in a limited sense as individuals. But unlike you or I, whose opinions are not mandated by law (but instead are codified into law), corporations are individuals who must value certain things in order to exist. Public companies must "maximize shareholder value" over all other things, or risk being destroyed by lawsuits. Like humans are biological organisms that must obtain food, water, and air to survive, corporations are social organisms that must obtain money to survive. Corporations live in a completely social reality -- a meta-world which we constructed for them to inhabit. But by making our belief in the right for humans to live subordinate to our belief in the right for humans to own property, we have made our ability to control the existence of corporations weaker than their ability to control us.

Belief in capitalism makes it a fact. Similarly, belief in the right of people to live would also make that a fact. American society privileges the former above the latter. Neither is more "real" than the other, indeed both are completely created and supported by the belief of people. But it will always be in capital's best interest to privilege property rights over any other socially constructed right, and if possible, to elevate that right to the status of "Natural Law" in order to maintain it as firmly as possible. The only way this can be reversed, the only way that people can reassert their control over the reality in which we exist, is by people speaking directly to each other, without capital mediating their voices.

Right now, the "voice of the people" is assumed to be the news media. American media is corporate -- that is, all major organs of media are corporations, without exception. Corporations, as seen above, will always privilege capital over all else, since it is the only way they can continue to exist. Therefore, media is in fact not the voice of the people at all, but the voice of corporate reality. Corporate media speaks to you, not for you, and cannot be trusted to reflect the views of humans. Instead, it is the organ with which corporations will continue to recreate the reality that allows them to exist at our expense.

This, finally, is why community matters. The only potential way out of this mousetrap we've created for ourselves is to actually speak directly to each other. Town meetings, open hearings, internet communities, places where people may actually speak as human individuals to other human individuals; these are the only places that we may examine what we have decided will be our reality, and the only places we may possibly decide to change that reality.

To take one example which is already happening: Peer-to-peer file sharing. The essence of P2P is the fact that large numbers of individuals have decided that their reality does not recognize the so-called "right" for corporations to own the files on their computer. Swapping MP3s, in their view, is not "stealing" because those who share their files don't consider themselves to be gaining or losing property. That is, they are challenging the assumption that music is an object that can be owned, by an artist, a record company, or indeed anyone. The socially constructed nature of this phenomenon is very evident in this case, as the record companies struggle to define file sharing as "piracy," while file-sharers counter that it is "fair use." Both of these terms are social constructs -- one defines the act as "wrong," the other as "acceptable." The battle is over whose reality will ultimately be stronger and become true.

What's striking about this struggle is that it is one of the few open battles directly waged by people against corporations. Few voices in corporate media have come out in defense of file-sharing, while the unfiltered voices of individuals have loudly and repeatedly, if not often eloquently, defended it. This is possibly the first time the internet has served as a means for individuals to attempt to change a basic social reality which was previously held to be unquestionably true.

What other "truths" do we hold to be self-evident? Which of them do we privilege over the lives of other humans, over even our own lives? Which of your opinions determines the reality in which you live, and from where did you derive that opinion? Are we, as a species, satisfied with the reality we've constructed for ourselves? It is only by asking and truthfully answering these questions, like Jefferson did, that we can begin to reassert control over the basic facts of our existence. Community matters because communities are people, and people create reality. What world do you want to create?

-- Rusty (geek@land.com), April 12, 2001

Answers

I'm sure Jefferson didn't sign up to become a revenue producing drone from cradle to grave.

We had a civil trial here yesterday to determine an award of monetary damages to a man who had been brutally beaten by the police, and acquitted on eluding a police officer.

The civil trial was a second seperate trial. The man was a poor musician who cared for his vegetative, invalid wife, and had very little income.

When the jury found that he had not filed an income tax form in ten years, they acquitted the cops, and awarded him zero.

Looks like his peers tried him instead.

-- KoFE (your@town.USSA), April 12, 2001.