Last week I left the essay on a cliffhanger (a very lame one… but a cliffhanger nonetheless):
…community members and creators are members. But they are a different kind of members, and to protect the community we need to protect each kind of membership to consolidate the attainment of their common good.
Another way to address this issue is by asking ourselves if differences are actually good for communities.
I think the great majority of us would argue that indeed it is: diversity enriches a community… but if differences separate (discriminate) what cannot be aligned to a common agreement and common good, how can they be beneficial at all?
How?!
I hinted that “subsidiarity” was the answer… now I’ll elaborate on that.
The first thing I want to tackle is the definition of “subsidiarity”. And although it has a political and economical weight, that is not the primary meaning I pursue here. I want to focus on its community meaning.
It is worth turning back to the unbearable Aristotle and recall that “a community must […] be deemed to exist for the sake of noble actions, not merely for living in common”1.
Just being together is not enough to create a community. A simple group of people needs the organized or harmonic actions towards common goals to become a community.
Of course we join groups because we have a gregarious nature as human beings. For example, we become audience of a given pop group. But that is not a community, and it does not feel like that, either.
A community is the optimal space we have to make good deeds that bring value to all its members. When the audience or the network start producing value by having active members, then the community emerges.
This is the underlying principle of any community: organized people doing good deeds based on a common agreement of what creates common good.
(A sharp eye may have seen what I did there: I brought together the elements I’ve been developing on my past essays: harmony & order + partnership & ownership)
These good deeds done by different people are key to understand the meaning of subsidiarity.
When a community is formed, the members are always a set of diverse people. Remembering the question placed lines above: how can these strange and different individuals organize and agree and pursue common goods?
It seems strange, isn’t it? If differences tend to separate, to divide, how on Heracles name do communities are a thing?!
Well, the answer lies in a peculiarity of us human beings: we are not only egotistical individuals; our differences do not constitute a moat but all the contrary: our differences are the support that allows our cooperation, they open the very possibility of being gregarious.
This “difference as a condition of possibility” for creating communities can be expressed in two ways:
“The possibility of taking care of myself as person surges from the relationship to an other: only the other ‘hetero-ascribes’ to me the ability to make decisions” (Alejandro Vigo2)
“Everything that the individual can assume under they own responsibility, is not part of the function of superior instances” (Marcelo Resico3)
Let me zoom in first into Alejandro Vigo’s approach.
We identify ourselves as free and with the ability to pursue goals and goods, and also we discover in others these qualities. More precisely, we assume that the strange blob we have in front of us is also a free, good-pursuing being. And then we ascribe to them the ability to harmonize with me in the given case our goals happen to be close enough.
This ‘hetero-ascription’ of freedom and alignment to the other, forces me to align myself to them. And the ‘hetero-ascription’ I receive from the others, forces me to know myself as able to freely align to them as well.
Then, each member of the community is the cause of the alignment of the other different members-- insofar each member assumes each other as a peer in terms of freedom and alignment.
In simpler terms: I can only recognize myself as a community agent able to do good deeds for and in the community because I have been recognized like so by others.
This mutual recognition fuels the dynamic of community building among their members.
The fabric of our relationship and our mutual ownership of the community strengthens as we assume the other wants and will align to our common agreement and common goals.
These assumptions drive the expectations inside the community. We do not expect other members to behave poorly according to our inner rules because we ascribe to them the ability to behave properly, i.e. to walk with us towards our common good.
Now let me focus on Marcelo Resico’s statement.
While we identify ourselves and the other as free and capable beings, we must treat them and us accordingly.
A free and capable being should never be deprived of the exercise of their capabilities by anybody, but especially not by a superior instance, like a boss, moderator, governor, admin, etc.
Some thinkers have expressed this idea in a simple and beautiful formula: “as much authority activity as needed, as much members’ participation as possible”. Not more, but not less.
Some examples of this could be:
As much members engagement as possible, as much moderation as needed
As much free participation as possible, as much guidelines enforcement as needed.
By understanding these two statements we are now able to fathom what subsidiarity in terms of community really means: subsidiarity is the practical recognition of the different other as free and aligned in their actions to the common agreements and goals of my/our community.
Different actions from different people align to a common goal and that is what creates communities and their roles.
As there are different members with diverse specific conditions, the community tends to organize them in clusters of similar characteristics: roles. Members that share a set of identifiers behave in particular ways that add value to the harmony.
These roles can be set based on externalities (a subgroup of members that pay a Patreon membership; geographic location, etc.), on engagement levels (consumers, remixers, etc.), on responsibilities (admins, moderators, etc.), and more.
How the community define and nurture their roles will impact how the relationships develop. But all these relationships must ensure subsidiarity in order to keep the health of the community.
Too much of the “control” roles may asphyxiate the free actions of the other members and push the community into a frozen stage. Too little of them and we will see the rise of haters, bullies and worse fauna.
Again: if communities need harmony, their roles need it as well. Everything must be ordered to allow a common, seamless ownership.
A quick note on diversity and inclusion.
I believe diversity is key in the communities. But diversity should not be thought of as a magic potion that grows value per see. It must be intentional and harmonic too.
Diversity for the sake of diversity may produce stupid scenarios such as “oh… we do not have a serial killer on our family, let’s find one!”… or less loony “we should bring a musician to our Bitcoin community, we do not have one”.
The challenge of diversity is to make it sensible.
Sensible in the way that we must accept our biases and structures may blind us from valuable, critical members that are usually underrepresented. But also sensible in the way that the different others must align to our agreement to attain common goals. Subsidiarity, again.
As I said in one interview a couple of weeks ago: some medieval pals understood this really clearly. We need to be one-in-the-diversity. Communities are diversity unified.
Di-versity. Uni-fied. Communities are UniVersal. And the quintessence of the community is the UniVersity: a space of diverse people united by actions towards a common good.
With this essay I close the first cycle of reflections around community and community building.
If I would highlight some ideas they would be:
The success of a community is determined by the harmony of its parts
A community is configured by how harmonic are their immanent relationships
The people that have relationships inside a community owns the community
A community is co-owned by those that “walk together” towards a shared goal
The underlying principle of any community is: organized people doing good deeds based on a common agreement of what creates common good
Communities are uni-versal
For the next weeks I’ll try to address other related topics like the economics of communities (membership economy).
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Aristotle, Politics III, 1281a
Sadly, I do not have the original text by Professor Vigo 💔 — it was a lecture he gave at Universidad Panamericana back in 2015, 2016 or 2017
Resico, Marcelo: http://www.kas.de/wf/doc/kas_29112-1522-4-30.pdf?111103181357