Obstacles to Community

Speaking of community, it is fitting to ask the following question: What is the opposite of community?  What are the primary obstacles of community?  Let us name a few.

Lies (including denial which is a conscious decision to reject facts).  If the “proper objects of the heart are truth and justice,” as Thomas Aquinas tells us, then the gathering of hearts and minds and bodies that we call community requires a search for truth as well as justice.  There is no justice without truth.  All this is implied in his statement that truth and justice go together and are part of our hearts as well as our minds.

Greed. Greed can take over the human soul (as can any of what are called the “capital sins” or “sins of the spirit”).  “The greed for gain,” as Aquinas warns us, “”tends to infinity.”  In other words, there is no built-in limit to greed and avarice.  Without restrictions, it just goes on.  Community is not possible in a context of greed.  “There is room for everyone’s need, not for everyone’s greed,” observed Gandhi.

Structures of Greed.  Greed is more than a personal sin, a missing of the mark–it can be readily baked into an entire economic system.  What other word is there for a “tax relief” law passed a few years ago that gives gross breaks to billionaires and giant corporations including presidents?  Incorporation of greed and avarice into a system is clearly very possible.

Guess where the highest percentage of IRS investigators is concentrated in America at this time?  Is it investigators examining the taxes of billionaires and millionaires and corporations that pay no taxes?  No, it is not.  The highest percentage of IRS investigators operating in American today are investigating poor black people in Mississippi and other southern states.*  This is a blatant example of Greed + Racism.  What a powerful mix that makes.  And to bake it into a system of tax investigation is a stunning example of a corrupted political system. 

This is what it means to talk about “institutionalized racism.”  It is also bad economics since the tiny bit of taxes to be collected from the poor and middle class pales in comparison to what could be garnered from cheating and greedy billionaires and giant corporations and their cheating and greedy lawyers.

Greed is not just about the quest for money that “tends to infinity”—it is also about power decision making itself.  Consider the ongoing scandal of how 700,000 citizens in the state of Montana have equal representation in the US Senate to the 40 million citizens in the state of California (where I live).  My vote in the senate is 1/430^th worth the vote of a Montanan citizen.  This clearly unjust system of greed was born in racism—it was part of defending slave states privileges (as was the electoral college). 

How can community possibly result from such unjust travesties of a so-called democracy?  

*https://therealnews.com/irs-audits-poor-more-often-than-wealthy

See Matthew Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil and Soul in Society, pp. 315-348, xxiii-xxvii.

See also: Matthew Fox, Sheer Joy: Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality, pp. 488-493. 

Banner Image: “Feudalism is very much alive Is feudalism, marketing itself as democracy, the underlying operating system for modern civilization’s social, economic and political systems?If such assumption were true, it would help to explain why, for over 2,000 years, Western civilizations have perpetuated certain distinct characteristics — such as class systems, extreme wealth inequality, power elites, racism, militarism, prison systems and human trafficking.” Photo by Judite B on Flickr.

Do you agree that these obstacles to community are important?  What other obstacles would you add?

Sheer Joy: Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality

Matthew Fox renders Thomas Aquinas accessible by interviewing him and thus descholasticizing him.  He also translated many of his works such as Biblical commentaries never before in English (or Italian or German of French).  He  gives Aquinas a forum so that he can be heard in our own time. He presents Thomas Aquinas entirely in his own words, but in a form designed to allow late 20th-century minds and hearts to hear him in a fresh way. 
“The teaching of Aquinas comes through will a fullness and an insight that has never been present in English before and [with] a vital message for the world today.” ~ Fr. Bede Griffiths (Afterword).
Foreword by Rupert Sheldrake