Change Driven by Community Thinking & Collective Identity

I spend the majority of my time trying to find new and innovative ways to frame difficult issues in order to help folks like you and me make more sense of the world we live in.

These interventions have been, for the most part, focused on individual thought and behaviour.

How can I be more inclusive? How can I be kinder? How can I grow my capacity for empathy? How can I feel more driven and excited at work? Who am I and what are my values?

These questions and beyond are the lifeblood of what I do and what I think about. Furthermore, for the past several years, I’ve seen first-hand how much people can grow while asking and answering these questions for themselves.

Recently, though, I’ve identified some limitations to this methodology.

If I were to ask you what the single greatest determinant and influencer over human behaviour was, on a large societal scale, what would you say? 

You might say religion; perhaps love, or maybe even fear. For me, even these obvious and excellent answers beat around the bush. 

What they all hint at, but don’t directly speak to, is the innate human desire to belong to a community or group. 

Religion is arguably the easiest and oldest example of this. For many, it can be about the individual relationship with a God or deity, but religious membership and action is also driven by a desire to feel part of God’s plan, or to a community of worship that offers a sense of safety, inspiration, and identity. 

Love and fear also interestingly fit into the relationship we have to belonging, where loves drives us to become part of and sustain our place within loving relationships and communities, while fear keeps us from feeling we can leave the relationships or communities we see as harmful, because the alternative is isolation, and isolation is the ultimate consequence.

Belonging, here and all over, has a tremendous grip on human beings.

Beyond having power over us, the need to be part of communities is incredibly instructive of our methods of feeling, thinking, and acting. 

Social psychology educator & speaker Kendra Cherry says:

“The need to belong is an intrinsic motivation to affiliate with others and be socially accepted. This need plays a role in a number of social phenomena such as self-presentation and social comparison. The need to belong to a group also can lead to changes in behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes as people strive to conform to the standards and norms of the group."

While this might feel like rudimentary thinking that many will feel they already understand, analysis of what this knowledge really means has massive implications on how we approach social justice and progress.

Think for a moment of what happened a few weeks backs with Prime Minister Trudeau and the blackface scandal he went through.

While we were busy yelling into the void, back and forth, debating whether what he did was racist (it was) and if he himself is a racist person, the systemic institution of racism was laughing at us. 

While we were busy taking Justin Trudeau to court for being racist, the system that helped produce a seemingly affable, progressive man, readily able to do what he did, went entirely unexamined. 

While we were focused on the person, the system was permitted to carry on unchecked. 

Now, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold one another to account on an individual basis, especially when that person is the head of our government, but it can’t be the most important part of our response to oppression. 

Racism does not, nor sexism, nor ableism or transphobia, occur in a vacuum. These are embedded systems that are imbued into our collective conscience. They infiltrate our institutions, associations, relationships, and systems of faith.

They are the white supremacy and populist fuel that elect Donald Trump, while our inability to break away from individualized intervention is the force-field that keeps him in office.

People become impassioned members of toxic, hateful communities when they feel driven away from those communities that are embedded with a love ethic. 

This isn’t to say that those people aren’t still entirely to blame for the hatred they use to hurt other people, but to ensure that our communities prioritize a love ethic where we see and elevate each other’s values and truths will inadvertently mean that fewer folks slip through the cracks. 

And when it comes to advocacy, activism, and education that is focused on equity and anti-oppression, we must begin to prioritize community-oriented thinking. 

For example: rather than spending 100% of our energy trying to change the ways of an extended family member with problematic and racist views, perhaps 50% can be spent putting out that fire at the dinner table, and the other 50% can be spent building community with other folks.

Building communities where, together, we can seek to disrupt and alter the moral codex of the systems and communities that produced your uncle’s bigotry.

Rather than solely focusing on what each of us can do individually to facilitate the changes we wish to see, we must shift our focus towards disrupting problematic systems that devalue human lives.

These systems produce values that often define the communities we belong to. We need to start breaking them down.

Community-oriented thinking must be foregrounded in every social justice intervention. It is not enough to strive to merely “co-exist”; we have to focus more time and effort on building inclusive, values-driven communities where we are guided by acceptance, love, and collective accountability.

Communities of people, when driven by a commonly held commitment to love and growth, are more powerful than you or I alone will ever be. 

In my work, I am going to strive to build a community of folks who hold similar values to me. Who will challenge and support me, and to whom I can return the favour.

When I think of what I most want, I think of being surrounded by people and a society where I see myself and my values reflected every day. I want to step firmly into a collective love ethic, embrace a robust, compassionate social consciousness, and feel the infinite freedom of never-ending personal growth. 

And when I think of who I fundamentally am as a human being, I don’t think of just me.

I think of my family, my partner, my dog. 

I think of my academic community, my work community, my Kingston community. 

I think of the communities whose fabric I am woven into, and who are woven into me.

And I think I want people to be part of my communities, alongside us, as we make the world we want.