Community is the fabric that weaves people together, providing us with a sense of belonging, support, and purpose. It is the foundation upon which we build relationships, share experiences, and collective growth.
Strong communities are essential for our emotional, mental, and physical well-being. They are also catalysts for a brighter future, providing a safety net, a medium for connection, and a sense of identity for their members.
Moreover, communities are the cornerstone of a healthy world, allowing diverse people (with diverse perspectives) to unite, promote social cohesion, and propel the world towards more positive changes (that serve the greater good).
In a world where increasing individualism, isolation, and division threaten to erode our collective foundation, we must prioritize community. By doing so, we invest in our (more equitable and inclusive) shared society, stability, and future.
The Effects of Competition
Community is the answer. However, our society’s values of competition, capitalism, and social hierarchies make this difficult (impossible).
We are trained from a young age to adopt an “us vs. them” mentality, starting in elementary school (or earlier), when we are indoctrinated into the world of “team sports” and school rivalries.
As we’re put against each other, there are winners and losers, medals and prizes.
Winners are praised, losers are scorned, and we learn, for the first time, how to rank ourselves above each other.
We learn that it feels good to be at the top and terrible to be at the bottom.
The winners are taught they have to “fight” to keep their position “on top,” and everyone below them is taught that “if they try hard enough, they might have a chance to climb the ranks.”
There is a focus on winning and being at the top (with little discussion of all the people you climb over to get there). Being at the top is praised, and winners are rewarded “for their hard work.”
We assume the winner is the person who worked the hardest, but we don’t know (and aren’t taught to care about) how much work people who don’t make the “top rankings” have put in.
If you make it to the top, you “must have earned it,” and if you’re at the bottom, you must “deserve that too” – so we internalize beliefs that “this is how the world works” and that “people who work hard will be rewarded” and everyone else is “just lazy” and not willing to work…. a lie I believed for many years.
It was disheartening to work so hard, doing my best, trying my hardest (often putting in more work than people around me), repeatedly, only to be told I needed to “try harder next time” (despite already giving my best).
Being undiagnosed as Autistic and ADHD, my best often was not “good enough” because it was constantly compared to the “bests” of other people with brains, unlike mine. I frequently found myself at the bottom of most rankings (without understanding why).
The Harm of Social Hierarchies
Social hierarchies refer to various societal systems that rank individuals or groups based on factors such as wealth, status, race, gender, and power.
Social hierarchies:
- Limit availability and access to resources and opportunities for people with marginalized identities.
- Perpetuate systemic injustices by maintaining power dynamics that favor those at the top of the hierarchy.
- Reinforce privilege and discrimination by perpetuating unequal distribution of resources and opportunities.
In short, social hierarchies create a ladder of inequality, where those at the top fight to hold power and privilege (at the expense of those at the bottom, who face additional barriers and discrimination). They also destroy communities.
How Social Hierarchies Destroy Communities
The values of social hierarchies (often based on competition and greed and using others to elevate oneself) are incompatible with building authentic communities.
Like crabs in a bucket, we desperately attempt to scramble to the top, pulling others down beneath us on our journey upward—instead of lifting each other up, we pull each other down.
When we see someone almost at the top, about to crawl over the edge to freedom, one of the stuck crabs will reach up and grab them, pulling them back to the bottom – keeping us all stuck.
Humans do this with each other, subjugating entire communities, and even within communities, individual members often do the same to each other.
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