What is a community? Is it a just a bunch of people coming together? Or a group of the population, people belonging to one sect, religion, creed, gender etc? A community is a cluster of ideas put together. Does that mean, once formed, the community is linear and that there’s no acceptance of new thought? Does this community have a history? Of course, it will. But the very basis of history is that it consists of multiple narratives so what will community do? because it always stood for one ideology, represented a commonly agreed principle or single narrative? Does history defy the idea of community? How will identities be made if they don’t contribute to the formation of the community? It’s like bricks will fall apart if ‘center can’t hold it’
But people are made of personal histories and individual experiences so even if communities are a unifying view of singular and shared history, there will always be conflicts- because history consists of narratives and narratives consists of events and people respond to events individually. Left to its own discourse, communities will always have conflicts and may just disintegrate. What will bind them together is a reminder of why they came together in the first place. Communities need to be reminded how and who they were before the fight started before the conflict arose (among themselves) as Aristotle said that they who love in excess (the reason why communities were formed) hate in excess (same reasons why it can break).
Establishments, on the other hand, need to remind the communities so that it is able to re-establish them. On the contrary as per many philosophers including Gramsci and Marx have believed against it. Because it renders the establishment the power over many. Power over a community- power to generate truth, the power to kill and punish and power to rule, the power to divide countries, lynch minorities and subjugate gender.
So, is there hope? Are communities going disintegrate because the hegemony of power that the establishment will never let go?
The hope is democracy, hope is in letting communities realize the moment of unification, even if they come against the establishment through social media through films, through articles, through Free speech and become anti-establishment.
It’s important for them to safeguard their beliefs and function as individuals and realize that ideas are after all just ideas whether they are ideas of God or religion or caste or gender so that they can stay together as communities with an establishment that they have selected for themselves.
Maybe its time for us to accept that there is nothing like unity in diversity but unity in our multiverses called communities. It is possible for several to coexist only we know that the ideas that unify us or separate us are just ideas after all by acknowledging the point which led to the birth of that idea. Us, as humans, we are above them. We create ideas and then communities. We are as safely as I can say — tiny gods of our multiverses.
