S1 Ep4 - Community
Welcome to the Rebrand Revolution. In this episode Sidonie explores the multifaceted nature of community, acknowledging its positive aspects such as safety, belonging, and connection, while also addressing the complexities and challenges that arise within communal dynamics. She emphasises the importance of understanding both the good and the bad sides of community, including the pressures of conformity and the dangers of otherness, ultimately highlighting the need for a balance between individual identity and group belonging.
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In this episode, I reference the following:
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This podcast is recorded on Kaurna Country we acknowledge and pay our respects to the Kaurna people as the traditional owners and custodians of this land.
You're listening to Rebrand Revolution where we take today's pop culture cliches and turn them into tomorrow's empowered call to action. My name is Sidonie Henbest, and I'm your host. Each episode unpacks one of the buzzwords of our time that come at us through every channel of media, 24/7, and in 15 short minutes, we'll look at the good, the bad and the ugly of these terms, see where they started out and where we find them now, and propose some kind of refresh or rebrand that allows us to move forward In an empowered way in whatever we do every day.
Welcome to episode four of Rebrand Revolution. If this is the first time you're joining us, a big welcome from me. And if this is not your first rodeo, well, welcome back. It's great to be here. In this episode, we're looking at one of those words that no matter who you are on the planet, you have some relationship with it. I'm talking about Community. It is, without a doubt, one of the most commonly heard of the buzzwords, because it has a place in our everyday language. And full disclosure, I think this episode is in no small part, influenced by the fact that I attended a school reunion, and aren't they an experience and a half goodness me, one of the things that's emerging as Rebrand Revolution starts to get its legs and record more and more episodes is that none of these words that we discuss in Rebrand Revolution are inherently bad, right? They all start out simply as the application of language to a phenomena, naming what humans do and why, helping us understand aspects of self, or the way we relate to those around us, or the way we all act together. And somewhere in there, this goes from being simply language used to describe something to being far more evocative, far more dangerous, far more powerful than a description alone.
Whilst organisms of all kinds can be described as being part of a community or part of an ecosystem, human beings and the way that we relate to each other means that we form community uniquely, even more so than some of our primate cousins. It turns out I may not be the only person who thinks the idea of community might be a little bit hashtag "It's complicated". There are 23 meanings listed in the Oxford English Dictionary under the noun community, only seven of which are considered obsolete in modern English. That's pretty staggering for the purpose of today's conversation. I'm going to divide this into two main definitions, so that we do not spend the entire time having to reference ourselves in some circular catastrophe, the first of which is "a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common", and the second is "the condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common". So basically, community is the recognition of a group of human beings who have certain qualities in common that allow us to collectively label them, whether it's where they live, what they believe in, and even in our most contemporary sense, the idea of Internet communities group by sort of virtual proximity. So we have people living in one particular area, or people who are considered as a unit because they have certain common interests, they or nationality or religious beliefs or sexuality. We have many, many ways that we apply the word community, but effectively it is a label for a group of people. Great. Now I'm glad we've got that sorted.
So why does community pique my interest? You may well ask. Well, partly, it's because I see the high volume of its use around me every day. I think we not just I think, as I said, the OED tells me as well that community, as a word is in is in much higher rotation now than it ever has been. So what is it that makes community worthy of unpacking on Rebrand Revolution because of our need to label other human beings and our need to contextualize and understand the world we live in. I need to label that and call it something, what community is going to persist and therefore, I think it's worth understanding it, unpacking it, and hopefully reminding us of what is at its heart. So what's good about community? Well, the great news is. It's a lot of wonderful things. One of the single most powerful things about community that matters to us is that it is a place of safety, or it can be a place of safety. This is about staying alive people. You know, if we are part of a collective, we are safer. We are part of a tribe. We are less likely to fall prey to wild creatures or marauding humans by association. Not only can we stay alive, but we can make staying alive easier. We can resource things collectively. There are many, many reasons why safety is accentuated and made all the more available to every human being by being part of community, then we get into things like recognition, belonging, connection and even context. Human beings are incredibly social creatures. We are drawn to each other. We gravitate towards making connections and maintaining connections. And so communities can be both the physically proximal groups, as we've described in the definitions, but it can also involve groups that can't be together, but share qualities. And by that, I mean, for example, a diaspora, a group of people who may be in exile around the world, but still identify as being part of an ethnic group or from a particular region, and what's more, that they use that that definition of themselves to find and connect with other people somewhere else. It's incredibly important. Part of human recognition is also something I think that's extraordinarily important in here, the idea that we can look at someone else and say, I see you, but also experience that for ourselves, have other people say, Hello, you're like us. Welcome. Come in. And this is because the idea of belonging again is critical to human beings, not only at a survival level, but at a thriving level as well.
So acceptance and welcomeness and connection and the context of shared meaning, of shared values and critically, of shared experiences, these are some of the things that are not only good, but they are brilliant, and they are the best things about being alive. In fact, there is no doubt that in so many ways, community represents the very, very best aspects of humanity. So how on earth is it that in the next breath, we can cite umpteen examples of where community doesn't feel good, or community is missing or somehow lacking, lost less than it used to be. What it is about community that alters it from that beautiful, vibrant, alive, connected space that we've been talking about. And I think in part, it comes from the idea that there is and there will always be a difference between the group and the individual. Once we as an individual, gain acceptance by a group, then starts the pressure to remain part of that group, to remain part of the community. I think the transition from good to bad in terms of how this feels for us, shows up in three areas, first of which is the idea of rules. Every community has them. The second is the idea of otherness, the inevitable separation and distinction between us and them, between self and other that occurs within communities. And the third is what I label the oversimplification of identity. And by that I mean that if we are defined by a certain quality, it does not necessarily leave room for the idea that other parts of us might be different. So every community has to have rules, right, but it is the application of rules and the nature of rules, rules that prevent us from being ourselves, or rules that say, if you are yourself, you're not welcome, or rules that say You're welcome, but this person who you love is not. These are all ways that rules belong in the bad category. For me, let's talk about the otherness, the us and them, because I think this is actually really probably what's at the heart of where community goes from being the greatest aspects of humanity to its least great parts in one fell swoop.
The moment we recognize people as being like us, we are also unconsciously deciding that someone else is not like us, and it's this inevitable separation, the us and them, the distinction, that says we are the same, you are different. And as soon as we have separateness and otherness, we have the ability to drive a bigger and bigger wedge between us and them, so that when. Becomes a question or a risk around resources or around safety. We say, Well, this community, we're safe, we're okay. We trust each other, but perhaps we don't trust those other people, or perhaps we think those other people are a risk to us. It feels like by the moment, I'm getting into uglier and uglier territory. We've discussed the good and the bad. What about the ugly? Community becomes ugly when it tells us that we are not okay to be ourself just the way we are. That puts pressure on us to conform to a certain type of behavior, when community prioritizes groupthink over individual.
When communities protect powerful people and don't protect those who are victims or are trying to speak up, those who are trying to tell a truth that might be uncomfortable or awkward for those in places of power, when otherness becomes a reason to persecute, to reject. And when we allow our participation in a community to be an acceptable way to distinguish ourselves from others and even to justify either inaction or hostility towards others, as we discuss this, I realize that we have transitioned from at the good - a set of really higher, altruistic, alive, connected, centered qualities of humanity, and they have become something that's outside of us. I recognize, as I'm talking about this, that there is a strange phenomena that occurs in this language and these ways of being when we're talking about what is good about community, I notice with myself, a deep sense of connection, a centering, an aliveness, even a sense of joy. And then when we start to look at what goes wrong with community, start to see rules or conditions for belonging, separateness and distinction, oversimplification and arbitrary rules around identity and belonging, and as soon as we start to talk about that, I realize that I can't feel that same aliveness within me that I felt before. By the time we move towards the things that make community truly ugly, I realize that I'm completely outside of my own body. In fact, it's like it's somewhere over there, I have rejected myself.
So the pitch for a rebrand. Community, in some ways, feels quite a lot harder than some of the other words I've tackled so far, because there is such an inevitability to humans and their instinctive need to group people together by either literal or philosophical labels. It is a thing that humans will always do, and I don't want us to pretend that that's not the case. It is that is absolutely so. So what am I proposing? Well, I'm going to go kind of back to the beginning of this. I selected the word community because I think it's one of the biggest buzzwords of modern times, human beings need collective experiences, belonging, connection and kindness, and these things are more vital now than arguably, ever before in the history of the human race. It seems, in some part at least, that the trouble with communities starts when the idea of collectivism takes over from connection, when the agenda of the many or of the whole disallows the individual. And there's no doubt that higher agendas are sometimes a really important thing, and they are also innate. Humans are very capable of acting for the benefit of others, contrary to what lots of pop culture will tell you, but this is something else. This is about remembering.
If good community is about seeing people about respectful connection and kindness, then perhaps the solution, and the suggestion that I'm making around community is to ask whether or not it might be possible for us to try and show up to the table with our personal accountability, and ask ourselves to try and remember what being excluded might feel like. The regulation or balance of community perhaps lies in the remembering of self and the respect for the individual. You see, I think it's our diversity. I think it's our differences, even within communities, that arguably serves as the fuel for the engine. Our sameness is not a catalyst. It's our friction, our separateness, our individuality, our differences, that make for vibrant community. Communities can only be the kind of alive life giving and generating places that policy makers, politicians, leaders like to talk about if we allow them to live and breathe, and that living and breathing comes from the recognition that we are different, even though we may share some qualities the same. We may live in the same place, but we are not the same person. We may operate using the same philosophies or religious beliefs, but it does not make us one person. And just because someone is different from us doesn't mean that they don't belong.
It seems so simple. But what if the secret sauce of community is actually the individual? Not in a nasty, selfish way, but in a "hey, I'm me. I'm showing up. I'm bringing you this. I'd love to join you". Community is such an evocative topic that no doubt you have your own thoughts and your own conclusions that are wearing round in your head right now. I'd love to hear them. You can chat to us via Instagram, Facebook or our website and let me know if there are other aspects of community that you see, the good, the bad, the ugly. I'd love to hear it all. It's all food for thought, isn't it, and that is the purpose of this podcast. Hopefully chatting about community today has stirred something in your soul. Has made you think about how you belong, what you want to belong to, groups and identities you may have walked away from, but it gets you thinking. And I invite you to get other people thinking too. So start a conversation with a friend, with a colleague over a dinner table, a bar on the street, wherever you do it, but start a conversation. Invite other people to consider the words that they use, the way that they use them, and the way that we show up for ourselves and each other. My name's Sidonie Henbest. You've been listening to Rebrand Revolution, and until next time, stay curious.
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