Strong Communities

The most essential unit in HoloWorld is the community. For that matter, we could just as well call the whole thing CommunityWorld.

An easy misunderstanding when first hearing about a society that is based on freedom and that has few laws and no all-powerful central government, is that it would be a free-for-all Mad Max chaos and carnage. That would only be the case in a society with no communities, or only few and weak communities.

What makes HoloWorld work is its communities and its communities of communities.

A community is not just a generality. It is not just about a vague concept of "doing something for one's community".

A community has specific members. Those members are individuals or family units. Not just random individuals, but individuals who are attracted to the principles of the community, or individuals who have been selected and accepted to be members.

A community has boundaries. There is an inside and an outside. The community decides how rigid those boundaries are and who is allowed inside those boundaries.

A community has rules, it has some kind of agenda, it has mechanisms for deciding on common matters and it has ways of resolving conflicts between members.

The stronger a community is, the better. That is, the more the community is self-sufficient and stable, and the less it depends on outside resources and outside intervention, the more likely it is to work and to become a valuable building block of a bigger socity.

A community is small enough to allow its members to have meaningful roles and consistent relationships with each other. It is big enough to contain means for the livelyhood of its members.

Communities with something in common form clusters of communities. These serve to share resources on a bigger scale, to provide means for conflict resolution between communities, and to protect and assist the individual communities.

Strong communities associating cooperatively with each other make for quite the opposite of chaos. Each community provides a clear and meaningful environment that would stay in operation even if other parts of society didn't.

The enemies of strong communities are rarely individuals. A strong community has little trouble dealing with individuals who wish to harm the community or some of its members. Rather, the enemy of strong communities would be the monopolization of power and resources outside the communities and the external presence of overwhelming force that is allowed to strike against members of the community without consulting it.

It is for a great deal the dynamics of a well-functioning community that spread accross all of society and makes HoloWorld an exciting and pleasant place to be. Caring, sharing, friendship, support, common goals and interests, having history together, building something together, staying together through ups and downs, laughing and learning together.