Caring Community (pleasure)

What brings us the most amount of pleasurable life experience?

Is it drugs?

No.

Party?

Nope.

Travel?

Meh.

Money?

Definitely not — just take a closer look at materially wealthy successful people and you'll find countless stories of depression, stagnation, and isolation.

Epicurus (300 years BC) in ancient Greece identified that friendship is a full 33% of what brings us the most pleasure in life.

The Art of Community

In ‘The Art of Community’ Chris Vogl defines a community as a group of people who care about each other.

It’s not a social media discussion group with a common theme.

It’s not a company where the boss says ‘we are family’ and then lays off hordes of employees when profit margins drop during an economic downturn.

Community is about care.

Community is about collaborating with people to achieve something of mutual interest with the caveat that you know each other well enough, and actively go out of your way to support each other, based on an empathic sense of togetherness.

Consider this quintet of values for a caring community:

• Individual Sovereignty — Respectfully, what’s yours is yours and what’s mine is mine. Together we decide how much we share.

• Productive Bliss — The best feeling is when we enjoy our work together because the work is right and good.

• Human Vitality — Life feels better when we’re healthy together.

• Intellectual Honesty — Keeping thoughts pure and clear gives us the best way to communicate, relate and collaborate.

• Universal Justice — Small injustices lead to big injustices. Exposing corruption and blocking coercion must be done at every opportunity to maintain integrity for everyone.

This level of caring community arrives when each person is an autonomous sovereign, which creates two fundamental experiences:

First… Sovereign Communication

A new mindset beyond 'tolerance' where the quirky individuality of each person is celebrated without any sense of judgement whatsoever.

Individual perspectives become cherished as a form of artful self-expression without the need to 'correct' the other person.

A 'live and let live' mentality far beyond simple 'tolerance'.

Recognizing that each person approaches life, belief and habits entirely out of their own stage of unique background experiences and psychological/emotional integrations. A lot of ‘disagreement’ and 'conflict' comes from valid differences of experience, personal needs, and information.

The use of 'clear language' and 'non violent communication' solves for those differences.

Second… Autonomous Collaboration

Each person rightfully does whatever they wish to do, so long as it does'n't harm another, or risk harm to a mutually agreed shared system, community or organization.

Free from 'bosses', collaboration then becomes entirely autonomous. Each person their own self-leader in purusing their bliss and sharing overlap through mutual synergy.

This eliminates egoic conflicts of one-upmanship that tends to result from agenda-driven influence and immature ‘leadership’.

(see research on team coordination and business management via the sister site www.cyclicmedia.com) To the extent that the loudest, most expressive, most dominant personality in the room gains the authoritative power of delegation, whether indirectly or explicitly, is a failure of governance.

Overbearingness should never be a determinant of governance.