A Communitarian thought

To live is to live with others. From birth, we are not thrown into the void but into relationships — of care, language, memory, and meaning. We do not choose to be born into a culture, into a way of life, into the rhythms of a shared world. This belonging is not an accident. It is our first condition of being.

It is in this sense that living in society is natural — not as a biological law, but as an existential fact. We grow by reflecting others, negotiating norms, finding shelter in shared rituals and stories. There is no self that stands before society; rather, the self is formed through it.

And yet, this truth — that we are communitarian beings — must not be confused with the illusion that our communities or identities are fixed, pure, or eternal. Cultures are not sealed containers. They are not singular essences that define us once and for all. Cultures evolve, split, remix, and interact. People migrate across them, reinterpret them, and sometimes reject them altogether.

To defend the dignity of community life is not to defend closed essentialism. It is to recognize that we inherit social forms, but we also transform them. That we are born into stories, but we can rewrite their endings. We are not condemned to mimic what came before. We are entrusted with shaping what comes next.

A healthy communitarian vision must be open to this tension. It must affirm that society matters — that local belonging, shared languages, mutual responsibilities, and intergenerational care are crucial for human flourishing. But it must also reject the temptation to turn belonging into a prison, or to use community as a weapon against outsiders, dissenters, or the newly different.

What emerges is a relational way of life: one that neither isolates the individual nor freezes the community into an unchanging idol. In this vision, identity is not a cage but a platform — a starting point for deeper dialogue, creativity, and political negotiation. The village matters, but so does the road that leaves it. Tradition matters, but so does the choice to reinterpret or depart from it.

The greatest danger is when power seizes the language of community to enforce conformity or erase difference. When those in charge claim to speak for “the culture” or “the nation” as if they are divine truths, they turn living traditions into tools of control. They suppress complexity, ignore change, and punish autonomy. That is not community. That is command.

True community is not afraid of difference. It adapts. It listens. It makes room for evolution. It understands that authentic belonging is not coerced — it is cultivated. And it honors that while we may not choose where we begin, we must be free to shape where we go.
This is why the task is not to abandon communities, but to humanize them. Not to burn down cultures, but to open them to their own richness. Not to romanticize the past, but to co-create a shared future that respects both roots and wings.

We need a politics that supports this vision — not by imposing a centralized model of society, but by enabling local agency, cultural resilience, and pluralist experimentation. By designing institutions that protect the right to belong without enforcing sameness. By balancing the memory of who we have been with the possibility of who we may become.

To live communally and yet reject fixed identities is not a contradiction. It is a mature politics of freedom — one grounded in the real conditions of human life, but never resigned to their limits. It is to say: we are born into togetherness, and we are responsible for making that togetherness just.