Community = Survival
An excerpt from the Morning Tinto podcast #8
Here is an excerpt from the podcast episode (number 8) of Morning Tinto that I recorded with
Writing about his new book, Organisation, Continuity, Community, Peter Gelderloos says that it's not a community unless your survival depends on it. And he puts a comma there and says, Unless you wouldn't be who you are outside of that context. So he says a community is not a group of friends, and maybe we could say it's also not a group of colleagues. And, nonetheless, he says friendship is wonderful.
And I just want to stop there with this idea of community and the challenge that he poses to us, because I woke up this morning to a breaking news alert about Israel continuing its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. And then, within the last two hours, there was another Al Jazeera alert saying that Israel's renewed strikes have killed 183 children in Gaza. And before I connect that to community, I mean, how is this kind of news being normalised?
I've been in contact with people who are from Gaza and had to evacuate or flee within the past year. I've been talking to them in the past two weeks, and I'm remembering all the news footage of people walking back to Gaza when the cease fire was announced, and now 183 children are dead just in the past 24 hours.
And how I connect this to what Peter Gelderloos says about how community isn't community unless your survival depends on it. That is so literal when we're talking about Gaza and people trying to survive a genocide. How you take care of one another, find food, find medicine, make the gofundmes, get people to hospitals. Being a foreign doctor living there and helping people—they're part of the community, too, because they're a human being who's living in a genocide zone, and, even if they're not Palestinian, their survival depends on the people around them and depends on information and shelter and food.
When we take this conversation into our context, (Chris lives in New York City and I live in a small town outside of Bogotá in Colombia), it's very peaceful here, even though there is a lot of violence happening in other parts of Colombia right now, including grenades in Bogotá between gangs and things like that.
But our need for survival, it just feels like a completely different level.
When Peter says, “unless you wouldn't be who you are outside of that context”, it really gives me pause, because I live a lot of my life online. And I guess a thought experiment would be, what would happen if the internet went out, would I still be who I am and under what circumstances does it feel like my survival depends on the community around me? Are we talking about shops, the pharmacist that gets me my medicine, the people who take the rubbish away, the people who maintain sewage systems? I mean, all of these people I rely upon for my survival, but they're not part of my community. I'm not in community with these people. I don't know their names. And so to think about what would I need to lose in order to not be who I am? Those are two things that I'm thinking about. What it means to survive, and, like, physically survive, and then what it would mean in terms of my identity to survive.
A lot of what I do, in my work, in my livelihood, I've learnt from a community (a Gelderloos-defined community), called the Nonviolent Global Liberation community. Their work is based on nonviolent communication, which is a Marshall Rosenberg methodology. From their perspective, needs include things like friendship. There are the physical needs, and then there's the not-so-physical needs. We know that if a baby is just left and only given food but no physical contact, they actually don't survive. When people feel isolated and lonely, that can lead to health problems, which connects to actual survival, survivability, be they mental health or physical health issues.
Returning to the challenge posed by why am I not in community with the people that keep me healthy, the people who deal with sewage and things like that. Why aren't I in community with those people?
Moving away from that and thinking in terms of the survival of my identity, I understand that, if I suddenly didn't have any people around, that would challenge my identity, because my work is very social. I'm talking to people all day. I'm coaching, I'm giving workshops, I'm talking to you (co-host Chris). We're in meetings. It's very social. If I suddenly didn't have that, if I were to be in prison, in solitary confinement, sometimes I think I would be okay, because I really do enjoy my mind. I'd need paper. I'd need to be able to write, but at some point I'd want that interaction with another brain. Either reading their books or their letters.
I'm a mother, but I don't feel like, if suddenly she disappeared, I’d experience empty nest syndrome. I just don't have a sense of identity that is so tied into being a mother.
I think it's a great challenge that Peter posed in the article, because he does go on to give some roles that he says that people have in communities. I think it is important to notice what I get and give in particular relationships, like, with you, doing the podcast and working with you, Chris. What are you and I doing for each other that makes it so that we get to grow our capacity to be who we want to be? And I'll refer back to the book Joyful Militancy, and say, I want everyone to read it. It's such a beautiful book about why we need each other to have joy, and that joy is increasing our capacity to do more in the world.
I would love people to go away thinking about these questions:
Why aren't we in community with the people that we depend on for our physical survival?
Where are our identities tied up with our relationships, and are some of these online? And does this make us vulnerable? (It does. It does make us vulnerable when we're relying on like a global technology to ensure that our relationships continue.)
What are our identities? Where are they vulnerable? Who do they depend upon?
If I wasn't able to be in this conversation with you, Chris, I wouldn't have even thought about these things. Part of what I love about thinking and understanding more and increasing my own capacity is, I do need these conversations with other people. So, yeah, I'm counting on you for my survival, Chris.