Note: their definition of “community” is quite problematic in many ways…
I feel it’s unfair to be blaming phones, social media, and multiplayer video games for being the way teens get some peer socialization in a world that is so deeply unfriendly to teens having independence.
danah boyd spent a bunch of time studying teen use of earlier social media, and then for personal reasons moved on to help run teen crisis text hotline.
Her thought for why US teens are struggling are the lack of non-parent trusted adults in their lives.
“Struggling with a Moral Panic Once Again” https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2024/04/19/struggling-with-a-moral-panic-once-again.html
There’s also some evidence that it’s mostly teens on wealthy English speaking countries that are the most depressed.
“America’s Top Export May Be Anxiety: English-speaking teens are spreading their problems abroad.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/mental-health-crisis-anglosphere-depressed/678724/
I have long thought modern American kids have too little freedom to go places on their own.
“This article is more than 8 years old: The popsicle test: what makes a city good for children?” https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/21/city-good-children-popsicle-test-crime-property-play
Interesting article. I believe it makes sense what they are saying in the big picture. Certainly, people would benefit from creating and joining local non-online communities.
What in their definition of community do you find problematic?
Mainly the focus on authorities, religion and so on. I get that they mean stability, which is probably good for children, but it is a bit too much of a projection of the “good old times” that never really existed.
I agree. The study seems a bit biased. In the article (or the previous in the series, I forgot), a study claims that religious children say that they have trusted persons more often than secular children. I (don’t) wonder how this might change if the child in question wasn’t cisgender and/or heterosexual.
It is a very insightful article nonetheless. Thanks for sharing!
I (don’t) wonder how this might change if the child in question wasn’t cisgender and/or heterosexual.
Simple: non-cishet children quickly stop being part of religious communities, and so the religious community is very accepting to all its members. Classic survivorship bias.
@RobotZap10000
As an athiest, I’m an active member of a Unitarian Universalist church. It gives me a community without the theology baggage. It’s a win/win and super welcoming to LGBTQ+
@poVoq
Yeah, I guess this is written from a more conservative standpoint.
I believe the principal ideas from the article apply to other people as well. Like progressive people could join a local sports club for example. Keeps them healthy and fit, and provides social contacts. Or then a book club, painting club, you name it.
And well, parents can create communities around their kindergarten or school classes, or maybe also some children’s sports club.
I partially agree. The article does make the point and probably didn’t want to project “good old times”, but that’s what happens when the author probably attended these communities themselves.
Now it would suffice to include other communities like the other commenter has mentioned, to make it less biased. But I wouldn’t really call it problematic.
The root of the loss of community that everyone feels is capitalism’s total emphasis on institutional logics of exit that make everything extremely transactional while completely ignoring the dual institutional logic of commitment, cooperation and voice. Community emphasizes the latter. We need communities based around shared property, mutual aid and collective action. Incidentally, having such communities could help solve some public goods problems in a non-state manner and be more egalitarian
Ehh, in anarchism there’s a concept of nominated authority Vs compelled authority (not sure of the exact phrasing of either but you get the point). If a group of people voluntarily elect authority there isn’t really a problem with it.
“Down with all authority, except on a both figurative and literal anarchist plane/boat where the passengers all make the conscious informed and democratic* decision under no duress and a freedom of association that it’s in their best interests as a community to delegate decision making power for their community to the captain of said boat/plane as he has the knowledge and experience to navigate it.” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue does it? Nor does it fit on a poster.
But the same is true in communities. Humans are in their initial state very atomized and individual we are not like ant colonies or bee colonies where by default the welfare of others is even a known subject to us, but as we seek to accomplish tasks, we voluntarily commit to some degree of communal benefit and to ensure this community lasts long enough to yield said benefit we learn to keep the peace and abide by some social norms within this community.
It sounds like conservative hell, but the nuanced position between that and hyper-individualistic self-expression is that as long as said communities aren’t coercive and association is voluntary, it’s kind of okay.
However one flaw in this take is something like the Amish. Is it ethical for say, Amish or some other community that willingly foregoes the benefits of modern technology to have children, who may find that growing up not surrounded by tech has reduced their development in some ways?
The answer to that one is obvious - to create free facilities and let communities form themselves. Right now youth centres have disappeared, teens are hurried out of any gathering space, play areas are regimented out of any joy or priced to prohibition and you end up with young people being left with the activity options of isolation, or group activities that are antisocial or involve substance abuse
create free facilities and let communities form themselves.
They don’t form themselves (or at least that’s a rare exception), and I think by now the teenagers are so fixated on online interactions that they will have a hard time adapting to, let alone create such spaces themselves.
@poVoq
Have you ever seen a Makerspace or Hackerspace? Youth are just fine at creating community when they have the resources.
@Taleya @solarpunkThe very act of providing space and resources means that it didn’t create itself.
There are rare exceptions where the community came first and they managed to acquire the space and resources later, but most of these places were quite intentionally set up to foster a community around them.
@poVoq
That’s not how i3Detroit started. It began with a group having an idea and making it happen.
You seem to assume that they couldn’t achieve something unless someone gave them a handout. The commercial makerspaces showed up later.
Expecting them to create without resources is like expecting a crop without planting seeds.I explicitly said that there are rare exceptions 🤷♂️ And no one even mentioned commercial makerspaces.
Please don’t assume that others assume things they neither said nor implied.
@poVoq
Okay. You win the internet.
I have no idea what you’re implying, assuming or using as a metric for what is rare or not.
Communities don’t naturally form, they are a means to an end to a particular goal. Most people aren’t interested in being with like-minded folks “just because” these days, and very few people understand and relate to each other in general, due to atomized cultural backgrounds.
This has nothing to do with literally anything I said
Admittedly only read the headline but I thoroughly agree with that much. There’s no kids outside playing, no one calls anyone, no one talks to their neighbors, no one has time to spend with each other and everything costs money to partake in now anyways. There is no such thing as community in the USA in 2024. We’ve reached peak individualism and frankly it’s fucking miserable.
I don’t think the definition of community is necessarily problematic. It centers on hierarchy and authority, yes. But even most anarchists recognize natural hierarchies. Parents have authority over children because children are not able to govern themselves. Community elders have authority within a community because of their age, experience, and the respect they’ve earned through longstanding ties to the community. When you need specialized information, about law, or medicine, or how to repair a car, or the difference between right and wrong, you go to a specialist who studied that field and you defer to their authority derived from their study and knowledge. And so on.
Everyone in a community is, or should be, equal as human beings. But not everyone has served the community equally or earned equal respect. Voluntary hierarchies based on duty and respect are not the same as involuntary hierarchies based on coercion. And it’s those voluntary hierarchies that bind communities together.
Yes and no. There are people that earned respect and “natural authority” among their adult peers, but this does not apply to children/teenagers that did not yet have sufficient interactions with these people to agree.
It is thus hard to make this a fundamental basis of a community as you are basically imposing authority. Smaller children might accept this, but teenagers certainly don’t.
Just because someone has more skills, experience or information doesn’t mean that person has or should have authority over others. There are even situations where having more of those things can become a hindrance because it biases the person to doing things a certain way when someone from an outside perspective could handle the situation in a different, possibly better way.
It still should be on the individual to decide whether they want to defer to the experts depending on the situation. The reason why people can come to collective decisions and rely on other people’s knowledge is because they have shared purpose and trust each other to be working to similar goals. That is what makes people’s choices voluntary.
I don’t believe we should uphold hierarchies in any form instead we should help teach people to reason through when to trust other people’s judgements which doesn’t rely on defaulting to an authority.
You should learn the difference between deference and delegation, and then learn to delegate choices and research to experts rather than deferring to them. Where doctors are concerned, it could literally save your life and those of your loved ones.
Children, too, should learn to delegate rather than defer. Deference maintains a gap in someone’s understanding, and as soon as the parents stop providing that service the child becomes lost. A baby who cries when they feel uncomfortable is already choosing when to cry and when not to cry. They don’t defer the maintenance of their body to their parents, they delegate it, and as soon as they are able to control those bodily functions they rescind that delegation.
Deference is always archist. “Natural hierarchies” were an archist lie when it referred to racist and sexist hierarchies and it’s an archist lie when it refers to familial, professional, and social hierarchies. Respect is due to everyone, not just to the powerful or to your “natural superiors”. Every infant deserves respect, every wife, every teenager, every mentally disabled person. What the fuck is wrong with you that you think otherwise?
Please don’t make this a personal attack. They stated their opinion and it wasn’t something outlandish or hateful. Feel free to disagree with them, but not in a “what the fuck is wrong with you” way.
As for “respect” specifically. Definitions of that word differ widely. Yours is one that is commonly used, but I personally would rather use “human rights” for that. Of course the default should be to be respectful to each other (which you were not), but it is also a common understanding that respect can and should be earned.
I understand if you disagree on whether, by expecting children to go without respect and people to submit to the natural hierarchy, their comment promotes a form of child abuse. But do you disapprove of the methods or of the choice of target?
If it is the methods, do you want me to report everyone who makes similarly rude statements about fossil fuel companies so you can ask them to tone it down a little? Because fossil fuel companies too are neither outlandish nor hateful. Perhaps even about right-wing politicians? Many of them are hateful, but is it really right for us to act disrespectfully in turn?
If it is the choice of target, then would you please add a clarification to the rules where you outline what determines who is a valid target?
I’m frankly confused about your second paragraph. Do you have a different definition of “definition”? Because I didn’t give a definition, I did not mean human rights, and the notion that respect can and should be earned also isn’t a definition. I and your “common understanding” only give two different priors for who deserves respect.
Is it so hard to fathom the notion of actually respecting children? Because I mean actual respect. Feeling the same gravitas at your infant child who wants a cookie before bedtime as at a CEO who wants that report on their desk by tomorrow morning when you clock out in five minutes, and vice versa. Just two people who have their own unstated reasons for wanting something that from your perspective appears unreasonable. The only difference is that the state uses its monopoly on violence to enable you to abuse one and enable the other to abuse you.
People will often find themselves in the position where they’re forced to accept abuse from others, but that doesn’t make it right for them to pass it on, and it doesn’t make it right for them to claim that the abuse is fair or compatible with anarchism.
As far as I’ve seen, it’s rare to find someone for who “having earned their respect” isn’t code for someone having power over them, and for who “not having earned their respect” isn’t code for them having power over someone.
Hi @Tiresia, I have to admitt what I get from your response is a lot of anger over something basically quite simple:
Please don’t make this a personal attack.
It doesn’t seem to me like a matter of rules or whatever, and it looks like a good suggestion as well. Don’t you think?
When a moderator makes a request for moderation in someone’s conduct, it seems weird to ignore the aspect of them being a moderator. It’s not about the rules, per se, but if their request is done from the office of a moderator then that use of authority should be as fair as possible.
As for it being a good suggestion, personal attacks like this, where you’re only ‘personally’ attacking deep-rooted opinions (including ones someone personally identifies with), are valid. For example, you don’t need to have a civil debate about whether trans people deserve to pee with a transphobe. If you can win the peer pressure battle, a personal attack is better for everyone involved. Our liberal education has whitewashed history to make it seem like civil debate between neutral people had a much bigger part in progress than it did. Personal attacks are a form of peer pressure, getting people to re-examine deep-rooted beliefs that in a discussion they would cling to as axioms.
There are other valid ways to put on peer pressure, whether it’s inviting envy by having a happier life, whether it’s building friendship and rapport until they’re open to trying to something out, or whether it’s a reward in the form of bragging rights, prestige, or upvote karma. But this time this one felt right.
I was recently reading Emma Goldman’s account of her travels in post-revolutionary Russia. Something that stood out to me was her experience at a meeting where Bolsheviks dominated, and a non-Bolshevik asked for the floor.
Immediately pandemonium broke loose. Yells of “Traitor!” “Kolchak!” “Counter-Revolutionist!” came from all parts of the audience and even from the platform. It looked to me like an unworthy proceeding for a revolutionary assembly.
I think your intuitions about peer pressure are invariably true - it is a powerful tool for social and political change. But it is a very poor tool for ensuring that the achieved goals are worthy. I often wish civil debate between neutral people had a much bigger part in progress than was the case.
I don’t expect you to engage in good faith debates with transphobes or politely protest oil companies, but @solo is neither of those things. If you consider their post and comment history, I think you’ll find you have a lot more in common with them than you might expect. One of our goals here is to grow great things through cooperation, but each act of verbal abuse adds to the toxicity of the soil. When it comes to cooperation, often it is less important that people agree with you than it is that they like you and trust you - and being able to disagree with someone without unfriending them is a powerful skill to develop.
tl;dr: Peer pressure is a normal and healthy part of communication. You use it in this comment and it is baked into this website through the karma system. Using it for disagreement and not just conformity is important to keep groups attached to meaningful values. I don’t think “What the fuck is wrong with you” is unfriending, and I think that sort of harsh peer pressure can be and was justified by its context. I think you’re mistakenly arguing against peer pressure in general and absolute terms when your issue is specific and one of degrees.
Indeed it is a poor tool for determining whether the intended goals are worthy. That’s what the entire rest of the comment that people have been systematically ignoring is for. Condemnation is the sledgehammer in a suite of construction tools, itself unable to tell whether it is in the right place doing the right thing, but justified (or not) by it context.
And, like I said, upvote karma is peer pressure. People can see at a glance how many people will see something and how many people agree with it in a way that becomes a self-fulfilling Keynesian Beauty Contest. If you truly believe peer pressure is wrong, then the lemmy architecture is fundamentally hostile to you. If an invective adds toxicity to the soil, then the soil here is full of lead already.
But the reason civil debate between neutral people has so little part in progress is because nobody is truly neutral, not because so few people choose to be civil. Marxism works well as a model for society because people are by nature hypocritical. Philosophy, culture, and social groups are a layer of topsoil, vegetation, and human structures covering the mountains of what we think benefits us personally over the course of our lives. Argumentation can redirect superficial flows, which occasionally allows for a key watershed moment where your way of life is redirected onto another plausible course, and that course over time changes the geography. Sometimes that redirection means taking a sledgehammer to a wall.
I agree that it is easy to cooperate with people when you only care about liking and trusting them. That’s how you get social groups and movements that are entirely detached from reality, a bog of stagnant water. If you want a social group to have sensible, actionable beliefs rather than descend into circlejerk, you need the members of your group to be systematically willing to cause offense when it improves the group’s ability to interact with the outside world. And for them to be systematically willing, you need to react positively to them doing so. Otherwise, over time, the detritus and resistance builds up in that channel and it clogs up, and the flow becomes stagnant or goes elsewhere.
When you ask me to choose people liking and trusting each other over processing disagreement, you are not opting out of peer pressure. You’re simply using (soft) peer pressure to enforce group norms that are about cameraderie rather than beliefs.
I do not consider the application of peer pressure to be outside the scope of good faith argument, otherwise I would not be on this website with its karma system, I would not reply to you when you talk about whether or not people will like me, and in fact I would not be able to communicate with anyone. I don’t feel like @solo is an enemy or an unfriend, just someone who needed a wake-up call.
I don’t see saying “what the fuck is wrong with you” after someone says something horrendous as abusive. I would personally genuinely appreciate that kind of clarity if I said something that revealed a fucked up underlying attitude, when accompanied with a sensible explanation. It’s an emotive way of saying that you’re noticing something deeply wrong with someone’s worldview, and opens up the talk in that context. And honestly, I doubt you or others on here are unfamiliar with that sort of usage and don’t partake in good-faith invectives yourselves on occasion.
Honestly, I think that maybe y’all have talked yourselves into a corner arguing against peer pressure and invectives in general when you really only disagree with how (and whether) it was applied in this instance. I could be wrong, but that’s my impression.
According to your sayings, you appreciate personal attacks.
The way I see things, pseudo-rational arguments don’t make a position justifiable.
The thing is, I used constructive arguments to build up to the invective. If you just use an invective without context you’re just yelling at people. But if you think using invectives/personal attacks is not justifiable, good job stooping to what you perceive to be my level, I guess?
As we can see from this list, a community requires a commitment to a certain social order—and usually to a place—that, by definition, must constrain some choices. In return for security, support, and belonging, members surrender some of their freedom. This explains why creating community in America today is so difficult—few want to compromise their ability to make choices. This is especially true among those with the resources and/or capacity to relocate as soon as a better opportunity beckons—the very people whose leadership and role-modeling communities can ill afford to lose.
Quoting this because it’s vital for anyone who wants to create or join any kind of intentional community. A lot of punks talk about starting intentional communities, because they want the kind of close community organization that this post talks about. But the problem is, when interpersonal relationships within the community get hard, and they will, inevitably, get hard, if people are free to leave, people will leave. And then your community collapses from lack of members.
You see a lot of anarchist organizational principles among mutual aid groups for homeless people and poor people in America. And I think that’s because in those cases poverty itself supplies the coercion that keeps the group together - they make peace with one another because they can’t afford to leave the group and live separately.
You also see anarchist organizational principles in organizations centered on shared religious, philosophical, or cultic beliefs. Same idea. People are unwilling to leave the group because they believe it’s morally wrong to abandon the community of believers, or they fear being spiritually and culturally isolated among non-believers, so they work harder to solve interpersonal problems and keep the group together.
But if people are free to leave a community and suffer no consequences for it, and staying in the community does have a consequence - accepting abusive behavior by other community members, for instance - people will leave. It’s normal, it’s understandable, and it inevitably breaks down communities. And that’s why I don’t think the authors’ understanding of community is at all wrong. In the long run everybody finds themselves in situations where they have to submit to their community’s authority in order to remain in the community. And when people leave instead of submitting, that breaks community, and everyone, especially the children, suffer for it.
It’s a balance. Communities are to some extend fluid. Creating coercive conditions that make people stay even if they don’t want to is just as bad for a community as people abandoning them.
A community that is attractive to outside newcomers can manage a certain amount of attrition of their original members and it is probably healthy for the overall community to allow such replacement to happen.
I think your depiction of community requiring people to accept abuse from “the community’s authority” comes from growing up in a legal and cultural framework where abusers are systematically protected and rewarded. Where being able to cheat colleagues out of their fair share because the contract is written in just the right way gets you more money than you can ever spend; where victims of rape aren’t allowed to warn each other because the community will judge them for making accusations, or find them guilty of libel.
How could a community in a statist society end up with any other choice than between falling apart or accepting the abuse of the guy the police will protect? But that’s not an inherent property of community, it’s just an inherent property of statism.
That is not to say we have to wait for the end of states for communities to be more egalitarian. The bylaws of a community organization can do a lot of work towards making it more pleasant for its members, similarly to how the democratic Separation of Powers doesn’t solve tyranny but does make it a lot more mild. Ultimately sufficiently dogged abusers will find a gap, but it’s nice for the time that it lasts.
For the more general insight that a community needs some pressure to prevent it from falling apart under internal forces even if those internal forces are neither assisted by outside forces nor empowered through crappy internal bylaws, you’re conflating coersion and incentive. Coersion is typically violent and based on positive punishment. But there are also negative punishment, positive reinforcement, and negative reinforcement. Poor people cooperating to survive is an example of negative reinforcement: their cooperation allows them to use their resources more effectively to avoid harm.
In short, when an authority is abusive: you have three options. Leave, submit, or remove them from power. It is not the fault of communities that states make this last option difficult.
But community is community-ism.
