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Sparks + Embers Episode No. 018 - Community Series Prologue: The 9 Problems Undermining Community Foundations
70 Plays1 month ago
The patterns that destroy community aren't random failures or unfortunate side effects. They're the logical result of certain assumptions about value, scale, efficiency, and human nature – assumptions so embedded in modern life that they're nearly invisible. We've built systems that systematically undermine the very conditions that make community possible, all while telling ourselves we're optimizing for human flourishing.
Before we can explore what makes community possible – the gift circulation, the appropriate scale, the life movement, the wisdom that sustains human connection across generations – we must name what makes it impossible. Not to dwell in critique, but to face honestly: these aren't problems that need tweaking. They're violations of community's fundamental architecture, and they require us to see clearly what we're up against.
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Transcript
Introduction to Sparks and Embers
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There's something about a campfire. We gather around it, stare into the flames, and find ourselves in conversations we never planned to have. I'm Tiffany. And I'm Tyler. And this is Sparks and Embers, 10 minutes of what sticks when we step back from the fire.
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Each week, we distill insights from our Kindling newsletter, sharing the questions that won't let go, and the connections that surprised us. We hope this creates space for whatever wants to emerge around your own fires.
Defining Community Challenges
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Before we kick off our series on community next week, we're doing something different than what we did in the first two series. In our series on contemplation and reflection and then following up on leadership and the apprenticeship model, we gave positive pictures of what we were aspiring to and what we were building towards, of what mature leadership, of what mature contemplation reflection looked like, and how we cultivate those things.
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We're going to do the same thing with our series on community. We feel this week a prologue piece is important. We need to define what it is that we are facing in the current day and in the future ahead regarding community and what that means.
Essence of Community Lost
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For us, community emerges out of an understanding and a musculature for sharing the intensities of life here, of understanding our own subjective experiences and how they bump into other people's subjective experiences and how we collaborate in order to come together and share and take care of one another.
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And from that, community emerges. But we've forgotten that. And nine problems have now emerged that are going to be the very things that remind us and call us back to what we're going to discuss in the remainder of the series starting next week.
Framework for Problem Definition
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But before we explore what makes community possible, we need to name what makes it impossible. not to dwell in critique, but to recognize the patterns that work against the very reasons we come together in the first place.
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This article that we're releasing today with the Kindling newsletter uses a specific problem definition framework, and it's made up of two parts. And the first part is a situation statement. We want to start with what we agree on.
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It's a premise that 95% of people would agree to, something that seems obvious, even unassailable. The second part of the statement, the part that complicates the situation, is the oh no statement.
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It's the complication that reveals why this situation should deeply concern us or what is being added to the situation that should wake us up.
Transactional Nature of Survival Needs
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Each problem identified here represents a violation of community's fundamental architecture, the patterns of gift circulation, appropriate scale, life movement, and wisdom that sustains human flourishing across generations.
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So let's start with problem one, which we call the commodification of survival needs. In this problem, we first start with the situation.
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Everyone needs food, water, shelter, health care, and the capabilities for managing those resources with education and governance. We all agree on this.
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So what? Why should we care? Well, when someone gains control over these needs, an entity can dictate who gets food at what price, who receives health care and under what conditions.
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And they can hold entire populations hostage, not through violence, through necessity, We formed communities to share the weight of survival.
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That's not a sentiment. That's not nostalgia. It's the reason we come together. It's the reason we find ourselves where we are in a society. The burden of meeting basic needs is too much to carry all on our own.
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This is too unpredictable. All of us are going to endure uncertainty and unpredictability during our time here. And so we say we're going to distribute you that burden together.
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We create resilience through reciprocity. But when survival becomes a commodity controlled by distant entities, something breaks. The circulation stops.
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Relationships become transactions. And the gift economy that sustains community gets replaced by a market economy that fragments it. And that has nothing to do with whether market economies are good or bad. It's that they have a specific place in society, but not all of society.
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When survival itself requires purchasing from those who have consolidated it, We're no longer free participants in community. We're dependent subjects in an extractive system.
Impact of Centralization on Relationships
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Problem two is the idolatry of gigantism. Complex societies need coordinated systems, infrastructure, logistics, scale.
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These seem to demand large organizations with centralized management. The modern world requires bigness, right? Right. The problem is that centralization at scale destroys the conditions that make services work.
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What looks like efficiency becomes harm. Scale destroys relationship. Face-to-face accountability disappears. Providers become portfolio managers living across the country and recipients become data points.
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The knowledge required for service becomes impossible and feedback breaks down. Centralization destroys local adaptation. Standardized solutions ignore variation.
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One size fits all creates waste. Local knowledge gets suppressed. Communities lose agency. And these are all important things when we're talking about teachers that need to have direct relationships with students, doctors that need to have direct relationships with their patients. That can only happen at a local scale.
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Gigantism destroys that wisdom. Decisions get made by those furthest from the consequences. Partial knowledge gets applied at vast scale, and the smallness and patchiness of human knowledge gets ignored.
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Experimentation becomes impossible, and cleverness replaces wisdom. As organizations, institutions, and governments grow beyond human scale, they favor rigid order over creative freedom.
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Efficiency over meaning, extraction over reciprocity, people become small cogs in vast machines where human relationships become increasingly dehumanized.
Gift vs. Commodity Exchanges
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Problem three is is that the conversion of gifts to capital emerges.
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Communities have always engaged in exchange. We share resources, knowledge, skills, and labor. Exchange is fundamental. So what?
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When gift exchange gets replaced by commodity exchange, the bonds that create community dissolve. We're left with isolation despite constant transaction.
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Gifts create relationship. Commodities create boundaries. When I give to you, you give to another. It returns to me transformed. This creates a network of mutual obligation.
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When I sell to you, we're done. The exchange establishes separation. Gift circulation creates what Lewis Hyde calls anarchist stability through relationship.
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Commodity accumulation creates stratification through power. In gift economy, value increases through circulation, moving, flow, keep the resources moving.
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The whole grows. In commodity economy, value accumulates through hoarding. Scarcity gets manufactured. Wealth loses motion and gathers in isolated pools.
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When all exchange becomes transactional, faithfulness and gratitude disappear. Legal contract must replace natural cohesion. A skeleton of law and police appears to replace the structure that comes from gift relationships.
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What remains is the bustle of trade, not the bustle of life.
Consumption and Community Degradation
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Problem four is the cultivation of greed and envy. Modern economies rely on continuous growth driven by consumer demand and competitive markets.
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Economic health gets measured by consumption, expanded markets, and rising GDP. Growth seems essential, absolutely necessary. So what? The systemic cultivation of greed and envy as economic drivers creates what E.F. Schumacher calls a collapse of intelligence.
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Communities become incapable of solving basic problems. Frustration, alienation, and creeping paralysis of non-cooperation follows. Greed and envy must be actively cultivated to drive consumption.
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Advertising it exists to create dissatisfaction with what we have. Economic health requires that people constantly want more. Status gets determined by comparative consumption.
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An economy built on greed and envy cannot make wise choices because wisdom would undermine its fundamental driver. True peace and permanence cannot be laid by universal prosperity if that prosperity requires cultivating destructive drives.
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Healthcare costs spiral because healthcare care becomes an industry that must grow for shareholders. Education costs explode because education becomes a commodity extracting maximum value.
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Housing becomes unaffordable because shelter becomes speculative investment. Each transformation makes community less possible.
Mobility and Community Stability
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Problem five is the footloose society.
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Modern technology enables unprecedented mobility. We can live anywhere. We can work remotely. We can maintain relationships across distances. And this mobility appears to increase freedom and opportunity.
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So what? The marvelous mobility celebrated by economists destroys the rootedness that community requires, that allows for the duration of relationships to cultivate and grow and deepen.
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Mass migrations produce pathological growth in some areas and abandonment in others. Everyone becomes increasingly vulnerable and insecure. Technology that appears to increase freedom destroys it by making everything vulnerable and insecure.
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When communities lose stability from rootedness, they become subject to forces beyond control.
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The mobile individual gains options but loses belonging. Footlooseness destroys structure. Without structure, community cannot form.
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When people can leave at any time, long-term investment in place becomes irrational. Why improve the local school if you'll move before children graduate? Why protect the local environment if you won't face consequences?
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Why build relationships if they're temporary?
Privatization of Shared Resources
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Problem six is the loss of the commons, and the commons is something we discussed in our last series around the apprenticeship model. And we bring it up again here. Historically, many resources existed as commons.
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These were shared resources managed by communities for collective benefit. Land, water, forests, knowledge. Access governed by community norms rather than individual property rights.
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So what? Systematic privatization of commons transforms shared resources into individual property. This destroys collective management that prevented overuse while creating conditions where controllers can extract wealth without limit. Okay. The famous tragedy of the commons gets it backward.
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Commons were managed for millennia through community norms. Their destruction came not from overuse by communities, but from enclosure by private interests who could extract without facing community accountability.
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Why preserve a forest for future generations when you can harvest now and invest proceeds elsewhere? Why protect a fishery when you can maximize catch? Why maintain soil health when you can extract short-term yield and sell before degradation appears?
Technical Solutions vs. Wisdom
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Problem seven, the substitution of technique for wisdom. Complex societies require sophisticated management. Decision making needs data, analysis, planning, coordination, and modern governance relies on technical expertise, scientific management, and rational planning.
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The problem is that the elevation of technique over wisdom transforms governance into optimization. Moral reasoning gets replaced by calculation.
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The questions that matter become impossible to ask. What makes life worth living? What obligations do we have to future generations? What constitutes genuine wealth?
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What is enough? Technical questions replace wisdom questions. Instead, it's how can we maximize GDP? And it replaces what is the good life?
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The most important questions cannot be answered by technique. What scale is appropriate for human dignity? How do we balance order and freedom? What constitutes real wealth versus mere monetary wealth?
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What do we owe those seven generations from now?
Loss of Rituals and Community Fragmentation
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Problem eight is the destruction of ritual. Modern societies prioritize efficiency, productivity, and a rational organization.
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Time in activities that don't produce measurable outputs appear wasteful. Gathering requires... Modern societies prioritize efficiency, productivity, and rational organizations.
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Time and activities that don't produce measurable outputs appears wasteful. Gatherings require clear agendas. Repetitive ceremonies seem outdated. This is a problem because when ritual is eliminated, it destroys the mechanisms that create and sustain community across time, beyond the horizons of our own lifetime.
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The embodied practices that make invisible bonds visible disappear. The rituals that transform scattered individuals into coherent wholes and that render time not just chronologically but meaningfully start to come under assault.
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What gets lost? It's community without communication. What that means is that it's connection through symbolic recognition rather than information exchange. Without ritual, time becomes merely chronological, one thing after another.
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With ritual, time becomes meaningful, structured by ceremonies marking transitions, honoring seasons, and acknowledging passages. The result, when we destroy ritual, is an atomization despite our apparent constant connectivity.
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The result is isolation despite busy schedules. And the result is meaninglessness despite productive efficiency.
Efficiency vs. Community Growth
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The final problem is the tyranny of efficiency.
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Time is finite and should be used wisely. Efficiency, meaning accomplishing more with less, appears self-evidently good, and wasting time seems self-evidently bad, right?
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The problem is this obsession with efficiency destroys the contemplative time. What Byung Chul Han, the philosopher, calls the art of lingering. The seasonal rhythms of rest and activity that are necessary for community health, personal wisdom, and genuine productivity itself.
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Natural systems operate on seasonal rhythms, intensive growth, then maintenance phases, storage times, and dormancy or rest. We need time for contemplation, particularly involving suffering, failure, loss, or other transition periods. And it is often the deepest form of community preparation.
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These experiences shatter the illusion of separateness and reveal necessary reliance on others. We need to be able to process those things. Without the required time to process, integrate, and learn from them, efficiency thinking only treats them as interruptions and that you should minimize those interruptions rather than experience them with the honor that we feel we must experience them.
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Communities operating at constant speed exhaust themselves without rhythms of rest, without permission for dormancy. Communities collapse from their own busyness.
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We cannot build when there are blockers that we refuse to name, that we refuse to confront, that we refuse to reflect on. These nine problems persist not because we lack solutions, because we haven't fully faced how profoundly our current arrangements violate the principles that make community possible.
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There is good news. recognition itself begins to undo the damage once we see how commodification fragments how gigantism destroys accountability how efficiency thinking eliminates wisdom' space we can begin to choose Differently, the rest of the series explores the positive architecture, not as opposites to these problems, but as the actual patterns that create community when we stop actively destroying it.
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Gift circulation, appropriate scale, life movement across stages, ritual and rhythm, wisdom over cleverness. But first we had to name what we're up against.
00:19:06
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Not to dwell on the critique, but to face it honestly. These patterns didn't happen by accident. They're the logical result of certain assumptions about value, scale, efficiency, and human nature.
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And they are killing the very thing, community, that makes life worth living. The question is, are we ready to choose differently? Thanks for sitting around the fire with us.
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If these conversations sparked something, subscribe to Sparks Numbers and all our shows on Apple and Spotify. And if you're moved to, please leave us a review or share this episode with your friends. Both help us build this community.
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For the longer material that feeds these episodes, subscribe to the Kindling newsletter at goodpainco.com backslash kindling. That's goodpainco.com backslash kindling.
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We release it weekly with the kind of content that keeps these unexpected conversations going. We provide the kindling, you bring the fire. Until next time, keep the questions burning.