Community Within Community

An individual has no meaningful existence except in relationship to other individuals. I presented that thought in a previous article. You are free to disagree and imagine that the individual is the object of ultimate value while regarding the community as merely a threat to the autonomy of the individual. Well, it is what it is, and what we make of it is just what we make of it. 

We can make something more of it by noting that the individual-community dichotomy is repeated at every level of organization from the very small (atoms in molecules) to the very large (galaxies in clusters). If we advance through levels of organization, we see that just as the individual in one level is a part of a community, so that community looks much like an individual at a higher level of organization: an organ system within an organism, a country within the United Nations, a species within the biosphere. To be fully self-conscious is to know the self as belonging within this continuum, a community within community, so that our sense of individual entitlement is diluted and balanced by awareness of responsibility both to the members within and the collective of which we are members. 

Romans 12 NIV. 3 For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you. 4 For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, 5 so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.

This is an appeal to love and responsibility. Don't harm the members of self by destructive indulgence and carelessness. Don't harm the larger community by ignoring rules intended to keep us all safe. We are in this together. There is no me without us.

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Take a look at "A Brief History of Holons" for a more complete exposition of this theme.