Welcome back to CityXcape, You are viewing the ten elements of community series. In the last episode, we covered the first element: ritual.
We had defined ritual as an activity that members of a community perform. This activity is the gravitational centerpoint that brings the community together. Ritual is also the measuring stick that marks the status of each member. The better someone is at a ritual, the higher their status. Archetypes are masters of a certain ritual. If you have not seen one, I highly recommend you doing so. In this episode, we will cover Contribution.
There are very few elements that are as important as ritual but contribution is one of them. So much so that when a member consistently fails to contribute, he or she will inevitably be expelled from that community.
This is because a community is an organism. And the priority of every organism is to survive. Not having contributing members means death. So a community can tolerate only a small number of non-contributors.
But what is contribution? In the context of community, contribution can be seen as non profit seeking transactions. It is very different from the transactions we witness in the free market which are usually self seeking and involve profit.
This is an important point. Community transactions cannot behave like market transactions. They run very opposite from one another. One of the major problems of today, is that people often try to run a business like a community or a community like a business. Those are two separate entities, governed by different laws, and should therefore not be fused.
A community member can contribute in many ways. They can give money, time, or volunteer their labor. They can pass on wisdom, patronize other members, etc. Contributing can even go as far as making the ultimate sacrifice- giving one’s life for the sake of the community.
Soldiers dying in combat represent the ultimate contribution.
Again, a community is a higher level organism, in which its members are the units. Each of these units are prepared to make contributions that run counter to their self interest in order to preserve the community. The stronger that sense of contribution, the stronger the community.
Crowds are known to commit great atrocities and to display an almost unlimited level of stupidity. But what most people fail to see is that when a crowd is a community, it can commit great acts of charity and display ingenuity that dwarfs the brightest genius.
In fact, the men and women who achieved the great works of the world were not driven by profit but by their sense of duty to a community. Think about that!
