Critical thinking on theory and practice of Community Psychology

Communitarian life is the human condition. In it human beings find mutuality, affection and identity – three of the fundamental resources they require to fulfill their existence. Because of the span of resources communitarian life brings about it has not only proved along human history to be a condition that grants better quality of life but has also rooted the strategy of manufacturing cells (the main tool enterprises manage to face the fierce economic competition in the beginning of the XXI century). The structure of manufacturing cells is a technique which replaces the logic of the assembly lines by the logic of the communitarian life. Notwithstanding this revival of community by the enterprises, the present day society has not spread the community model as its pattern of existence. Conversely, that kind of use of the community model was neutralized by several factors, being one of them the steady production and innovation of all sorts of gadgets, which can and have been used to solve people’s problems and satisfy their needs, thus an stimulus for an individualistic culture. The dependence of those gadgets has created a culture in which communitarian life is not required because people learn to depend on gadgets rather than on other people. Apparently, people do not need the community any more because being able to live alone, the other turns to be less important than the gadgets. That culture has been characterized by traits which being the social pattern of human life imposes hurdles to the development of the communitarian life. The first of these traits is the value given to and the dependence of sensations. This cultural trait has been an obstacle to community which is strongly dependent of affection. It is hard to think of a community grounded on sensations because the latter has to do with individuality. The second cultural trait is the loss of sensitiveness for the causality of things. The gradual but steady loss of confidence in the economic and political systems fuels the disappointment with the real word, a condition which according to Desbarats (2009) fuels in its turn “the bulimia” of work and of causality. Surrounded by technologies people have the perception of power and therefore become result directed rather than building of textures of causalities directed. Community implies the sharing of work on the causes of both the events and targets. The third cultural trait is the cult of the urgency, a kind of recreation of the non-temporal time. The conditions created by the economic competition within the context produced by technologies which shrink the time and the space impose the dependence of the flow of conjunctures. These conditions are easily seen in the “zappings”, “fast”, “spots”, “clips” and “just-in-time” patterns of social and individual behavior. The “24 hours” services confirm the non temporal time. Today to be busy all the time gives meaning to the existence. How is it possible to build communitarian life when the prevailing cultural logic is the one of the flow of the conjunctures? The individual profile fueled by that culture discloses a person flexible, always rushing, with short term focus, reactive, authoritative, intolerant to frustration and to failure, unable to delegate and unmotivated to communitarian life. As such, that individual may be master of his/her time but is turned into slave of his/her desires. These conditions nourish the social sedentarization and the individualization. Through the communitarian life people can learn that the mobile phone is a powerful weapon in the war to fight the economic competition as they can also learn that it is fragile as an instrument of emancipation. In the war people face with their own conscience the most powerful weapon is reflexivity and affection, two resources they can find easily in the communitarian life, not in the gadgets.