Cohesion and Resilience
So what does community mean in practical terms? How are we to build healthier communities that respect natural human bonds while avoiding the pitfalls of Victimentality as described in Your Fight? True community begins with emotional resonance and common understandings, empathising with those around you which is obviously difficult to fake. This is easier if you know the people or share common backgrounds, goals, and struggles.
We must strive to see the world through each other’s eyes, and it comes easiest with those closest, and more difficult when those are distant and more alien to you. In genuine and natural community we get to literally feel their joys, their pains, and their aspirations as our own in many very real ways. Common empathy, commiseration, and mutual respect are the basic price of admission for all meaningful relationships. Communication is key, we must be willing to engage with ideas that challenge our own, but then also establish firm barriers elsewhere. Our neighbours don’t become our family, residing in our homes, and our national neighbours don’t move next to us or down the street unless they are compatible as far as is possible, and with good reason that has nothing to do with imperialism.
Most important for community are the first four honesty virtues of Magnanimity in awareness (which has everything to do with identity), Honour in morality, Temperance in propriety, and Loyalty in spirit (divine love). These are the essences composite to strengths of both individuals and communities as hosts to the spirit. Recent events stand to reason here, in both Gaza and Ukraine.
Nation is about honouring humanity’s ideal communal states, to respect tribal bonds and autonomy but also promote the higher freedoms to do with faith and doing greater works. Victimentality is an insidious creed that weakens, divides, and it is something we can never submit ourselves to. The unity beyond nationalism is in the reality of the necessity for it, and the common needs of all peoples in progress, which only comes through the fruits of the spirit.