“Apart from authority, as even the great anarchists have insisted, there can be no freedom, no individuality.” – Robert Nisbet.
Community health has declined drastically in the U.S. since the 1950s. More people live alone and suffer from addiction, anxiety, and depression, than in any other time in US history. Even though the country has seen dramatic advancements in technology, particularly in health care technology, and a reversal of the institutionalized racism present in the government and public and private sectors since the 1950s, American society itself has never been so divided, fragmented, and atomized. We live with road rage, mass shootings, depression and suicides, drug addiction and overdoses, multi-generational poverty, ever-declining schools, lowering social trust, disintegrating and non-existent family life, political polarization, and social isolation and alienation on a scale unlike anything we’ve known historically as a nation, or even as human beings throughout 1000s of years of history. Despite the challenges of earlier eras, human beings have always lived in community. To be human is to be communal.
Community health is just as important as nutrition, fitness, health care, sleep, or any other aspect of health, as it’s the one aspect of health that binds the others together. A person who eats right and exercises, but who lives in an atomized community or a dying culture is likely not healthy or thriving. Healthy communities build healthy citizens, people who feel both a sense of belonging and a sense that their lives have meaning and are worth living.
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Read next: https://www.scottgodwin.net/blog/djokovic-and-ideals/
