Should Communities be Large or Small? Fuzzy or Defined?

Today, we're going to be talking about communities, the benefits of a very large, wide, undefined community and the specific benefits of a much smaller and very clearly defined community, both in regular, everyday life, but also emergencies. Welcome to another T-Rex talk. We've talked about community quite a bit in the past, but it's been a while since we had an episode on community itself. And generally speaking, we've been talking about two separate things, and not always really defining what they are. One is the gun community, just this bigger, wider blob of people who appreciate guns, or maybe they appreciate the second amendment, hopefully they appreciate both, and they just kind of follow one another on Instagram and YouTube and are generally aware of various similar things and have cultural overlap. We've also talked about the idea of building smaller communities, communities that are local, and people can look after one another and meet each other's needs in other ways. So for example, we've also talked a little bit about alternative economies. So here in Hickman County, there are a number of small alternative economies that exist, little farmers markets and things like that. So that if you would like to extract yourself from the larger, massive, centralized, processed food economy, there are ways to do that. You can buy grass-fed beef directly from local farmers, and a lot of us that are listening to this podcast and part of this larger gun community probably really like the idea of small communities that offer these decentralized economies, where you can go to local folks to get stuff as opposed to being a part of a gigantic bloated system. It's not that hard to buy bootleg, totally illegal raw milk. It's not that hard to pull your kids out of the giant government school system, but there are things that are a little bit trickier. Let's talk about some edge cases. Now a statement that I've made in the past that will continue to be true is that edge cases don't make for good laws, but they are often good for revealing the strength or weaknesses of some different ideas. So a great example of this would be there was an edge case, an extremely rare event that in my understanding has only happened once in the United States. This was several years ago, a woman who owns a pet chimpanzee was attacked by that chimpanzee and horribly injured and disfigured. And people in Congress immediately said there ought to be a law against this, and they've been trying to pass a law banning the private ownership of chimpanzees ever since, purely on the grounds that they are dangerous. And obviously chimpanzees are very dangerous, and the best way for you to learn that chimpanzees are dangerous is from stories like people being horribly mauled by them, not from Richard Blumenthal passing laws saying that we can't own them. Richard Blumenthal, by the way, also a hard-core gun control activist. He doesn't believe that people should be allowed to privately own weapons because they are also dangerous. But Blumenthal sees chimpanzees and firearms as basically the same thing. A chimpanzee and an Air 15 equally dangerous, and the people of the United States equally unfit to make decisions about what it is that they should be able to own and use for home defense. Spoiler alert, Air 15s are the superior solution. Before I was actually going to go is more of that medical emergency side. When you're extracting yourself from large centralized systems like the food industry and you're eating more naturally and you're eating healthier, there's going to be some health benefits. And there's a lot of natural medicines that are really good to use when you have the sniffles. It's good to be outside getting your vitamin D and taking vitamin C and building up your immune system. These things are great. But if a chimpanzee attacks you or you're farming and your combine harvester pulls both of your arms off or some terrible thing defaults you, that's when you actually want to get back into the big centralized modern medical system pronto. You want to be on a helicopter going to Vanderbilt University soon. I don't think anyone would really argue with that. Medical emergencies are really best cared for by highly skilled and expensive medical professionals. The problem is that now this unplanned event has thrown you into this highly regulated environment again. You've tried to extract yourself and you've tried to build alternative economies and you've tried to build your community. But now you have to go to Vanderbilt University so that you can survive. And you're now part of a very regulated and expensive thing. You're part of a system that expects you to be part of every other system. You are now expected to be part of the medical insurance system and the Affordable Care Act and all these other things that you would prefer to extract yourself from. This is why these edge cases are really useful for figuring out how good your plans or your systems are, especially as a thought experiment. Far better to have a medical emergency as a thought experiment so that you can figure out how to avoid certain things than in real life. But medical emergencies do happen really, really often in real life and living in middle Tennessee and being involved with first responders and doing various things. I've actually seen how alternative communities and alternative economies have worked around really big super regulated central things like the medical industry, the medical industrial complex so to speak. And it's kind of interesting. In many ways I think that the Amish community is the best set up to deal with the medical community. And the reason for that is not because the Amish community is large and expansive and they have churches all over Pennsylvania stretching all the way down through middle Tennessee. It's actually because they have small and really well-defined churches and parishes and bishops. And so when there is a medical emergency and these Amish farmers that do not have medical insurance and are not part of this large organized system and haven't signed up for Obamacare. When they actually have a medical emergencies and to be honest it happens more often than for a lot of people because they're dealing with animals and they're dealing with agriculture when this happens. Things actually run relatively smoothly with some of the biggest most expensive and most centralized hospitals in the country. And here's how a random Amish farmer will show up with a grievous injury but he won't show up alone. He'll show up with some other guys from his community. And because this happens not infrequently the hospital chief of medicine who are building officers or whoever have actually seen this happen before and they're able to figure out which parish which bishop this Amish farmer is under. They actually know that this community is going to handle things. They know that this community is going to pay its debts. This community is large enough that they can actually support what is going on. And they also know that this community has established itself as being the weird outsiders that Amish people are. They're not going to be surprised when the Amish farmer doesn't have insurance. They're not going to look at him like he's from Mars at that point. They already have this expectation and this understanding. And while they think that Amish people are weird in some ways, they certainly don't think that it's weird that people with the belief system of the Amish who have been coming in with various horse and oxen and buggy related injuries for the last few decades. They don't think it's weird that they didn't jump on Obamacare. But again, more important than that is the fact that these guys show up not just as generic Amish folks but as members of a specific parish, a parish that is known to pay its bills. They actually know this guy belongs to this specific group. They will pay their bills. This is who we talk to and we've talked to him before. That kind of really defined community is actually extremely, extremely helpful. And in the context of a medical emergency, I'd like to just take a second to rant about how ridiculously overly regulated the medical industry is. How incredibly intertwined it is with the government, with these giant insurance companies that have lobbied for rules and regulations. Everybody has really messed with the medical system so that it is not in any way shape or form a free market institution. Pharmacological companies and the insurance companies and the United States government and various other groups have just really affected the medical industry so that when you go in to do a procedure in one hospital, they may charge you what is basically a fair market rate. Like this guy's hourly rate, plus the cost of the machine depreciated over so many years, like you may get that rate and it's a couple hundred bucks. And then you go to another hospital, assuming to pay a couple hundred bucks for exactly the same scan or exactly the same procedure. And it's like $30,000 because of the way that the insurance billing codes work for that particular system that that particular hospital is in. Now the good news is that if you talk to these guys and you negotiate and you're able to explain to them that you're outside of the system, you're not part of the gigantic insurance mess that created the billing codes that inflated that thing to $30,000. And you don't have the insurance because you've extracted yourself from that system, then oftentimes you can actually negotiate that rate down. And it's very difficult to do this if you're just a random guy who walks in and you have to talk and you have to explain and you have to negotiate and it's difficult and it's uncomfortable and they think it's weird and they don't enjoy doing it either, but eventually oftentimes you can come to some sort of agreement. If you can explain and I think this is becoming more common that you're not part of the affordable healthcare scam and you do medical sharing or you do community sharing or you're paying with cash or something like that. You can often get the gigantic medical industrial complex surcharge removed from your medical bill and it becomes, you know, not cheap, but at least not insanely expensive. And that is why a lot of hospitals actually have something called benevolence funds for people who are not part of those big overarching systems and can't pay the incredibly large massive charges attached to medical procedures that the insurance companies will actually not pay. The insurance companies have pre-negotiated these rates down in really shady backroom deals and that's why you are supposed to engage in the insurance company scam, which is also kind of orchestrated and run by various government lobbyists. It's a whole thing. Anyway, you probably understand how this works or why this doesn't work. The cost of running a hospital is very high, the equipment is very expensive, the people are not cheap and yet the regulations have made things just ridiculously convoluted and expensive. And if you talk directly to the people as if you are also a human being who is not part of that scam, oftentimes there's actually ways to handle things. And one of the advantages that the Amish community has developed in being a defined community and existing for decades is that they have built relationships and understandings even within some of these huge complicated centralized systems where people come in and hotel administrators immediately understand this guy is A, not part of the system, and B, he has his own system which is a very tight-knit community that's going to cover his bills even if he doesn't have the money in his pocket right now. And of course, I will point out that I have some pretty significant theological differences with the Amish communities, but I think that this way of taking care of their own but also having really clear ideas of who their own are is extremely helpful. Let's go back to the gun community just for a moment. The gun community has actually done a pretty good job of taking care of its own in several cases. There are a number of examples that I can think of, I'm sure you can think of some two, some of them are low profile, some of them are high profile like when Kentucky Ballistics was seriously injured by a 50 caliber round going off and pieces of it and the gun going straight through his neck. The medical community knew how to fix him and the gun community gathered around with GoFundMe and various other fundraising efforts and got him the cash necessary to pay those bills. And in no way do I want to get away from that, although actually yes, we should get away from GoFundMe because they're politically not as helpful and switch over to gives and go because they're a lot more likeminded and helpful and I think they take a smaller percentage as well. But this kind of community assistance even in the wider community is good and I don't want to throw cold water on that. But imagine if you showed up at a hospital with your thumb holding all of your blood in and you tell the ER docs, don't worry, I'm part of the gun industry, they will take care of me. The doctor is not going to say, oh yeah, the gun industry, something that is almost entirely financially propped up by selling stickers of skeletons wearing night vision and riding on skateboards. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sure that your bills will be paid in full. No, the doctors don't really have a great way of gauging the size and financial support of the gun industry. Any more than the guys selling the stickers inside of the gun industry do. So I think that you can see that there's tremendous value in having an extremely large and fuzzy community. But there's also tremendous value in having small and clearly defined communities. Communities who can say, we are the such and such area community and we are exactly these people and we are expecting that we take care of each other in exactly these ways. And as cool as the larger wider gun community is for things like t-shirts and stickers and actually I should not be so flipping about that. It is very cool that the larger gun community is largely coalesced around not just content but commerce. There are a huge number of people selling not just cats and stickers but also holsters and nylon gear. They're not just mass produced nylon gear but there's a whole bunch of people doing little tiny runs of specific nylon gear for specific uses and people. People assembling night vision with special housings, people doing 3D printed stuff that is extremely cool on an extremely small scale across a huge wide community. I think again is great. But if you want to build alternative economic systems in a specific physical region, you're going to need a lot more definition than that. If you're going to build alternatives to say education and financial systems and food systems in a small area where people can reliably depend upon one another and do the division of labor thing, you're going to need really clear definitions of who's actually doing what and who's actually in the community. This isn't to exclude people and keep them out but this is just to know that if someone so gets kicked by a horse, these are the guys who are actually going to help him pay the bill. When the Bishop of that particular Amish group goes into Vanderbilt University and says this is our guy, he belongs to our group and our group is going to take care of him. We're not part of the big government and insurance system so we're not going to be able to pay big government and insurance money but we will make you whole. You make our guy whole, we will make you whole. We will pay for your equipment, we will pay for the materials that you use and we will pay for your time. Our community identifies this guy as one of us and we're going to take care of him and if you take care of him, we're going to take care of you. That kind of very clear defined community is really important and necessary for certain things like medical emergencies and and other kinds of emergencies too. When there has been civil unrest, you don't want the random gun community to just show up to support you, random folks that you can't identify. You want to have your neighborhood actually say no, this is Bob, this is Joe, this is Mrs Smith, these are the people who live on this neighborhood. These are the people who we know are us and who we trust. These are the guys who are actually going to do the security detail. Not just random people who show up and we identify them by the stickers that dropped last week. I should probably not make fun of stickers because we have stickers at 2x2. So the point of this podcast is not so much to tell you exactly what to do but that you should be thinking about both. And I realize that there is a lot of very individualistic individuals in the wider undefined gun community. And one of the great things about the wider undefined gun community is that it is undefined. You can be an individualist and you can be a part of it and you can be free and you don't really saddle yourself with a whole bunch of obligations when you just start following people on Instagram. And I think that we can all see that there are significant dangers when it comes to definitions and obligations. The other is an opportunity cost. Once you are locked into group A, you may not be able to be part of group B. You may not have the time to continue to do all of the group B activities because of your group A obligations. But then there is also the fact that once you are clearly defined as being part of group A, other people are just going to think you are weird. Not maybe not Amish weird, but there is that. And once you make yourself a part of this particular group and it has serious obligations, there is going to be some kind of authority structure. And you are going to have to put yourself under that authority. And that is something that is not cool. If you are an average individualistic American, particularly one that wants to extract himself from large authoritarian systems so that he can go build alternatives, this idea of placing yourself under authority is not cool. But just because something isn't cool doesn't mean that it may not be the right thing to do or the necessary thing to do. There is a really strong push in the late 20th century and now in the 21st century, not to have any authority except the government. Because the government has lethal power, it has the monopoly on violence. So obviously it has authority, but nobody else needs to have authority. Churches don't need to have authority, families don't need to have authority. Nothing needs to have authority except the civil government itself. And even the federal government does not believe that state governments or county governments really need to have any authority either. And when we look at the federal government, we see massive, massive, massive misuses of authority all the time. And so when I say to you that the way that you build strong, local, defined communities is going to involve placing yourself voluntarily under authority. Well, I understand that that maybe causes you to turn off the podcast at this point. But there's really no getting around that. If you want the kind of alternative systems that require teamwork, then the teamwork is going to require organization. An organization is going to require dependability and authority. Now the good news is the more self-governing you are, the less government you require from other people. But you still need to place yourself under some level of authority so that when so and so gets kicked by a horse or run through a combine or has his face torn off by a chimpanzee, your group of guys takes him to the hospital and you say, yeah, I am going to help pay the bill. I told him that having a chimpanzee was dumb. But you are going to have the self-discipline to say, we decided as a group that we were going to cover his medical bills. And so I'm going to place myself under that authority and I will do it. This is ridiculous premise. This group has a really good track record of always paying our medical bills. That's going to require that you place yourself under the authority of the group, whether it's, you know, a distributed sort of vote-based thing or whether there's a single Amish bishop or whatever. And I realized that deep down in your own selfishness, you don't like this idea. In my selfishness, I don't like this idea. But to build these kind of systems, there has to be some level of participation and clearly defining yourself as part of this or part of that, and then sticking with it and placing yourself under whatever level of authority is required. And part of the reason that we have such gigantic, powerful centralized systems now is because people have been less and less willing to place themselves under the authority of the smaller decentralized systems. And I would say that this is true across the board, but I would point some pretty significant fingers at the American Church. The American Church has gone over the last few hundred years from being very clearly defined communities with very clearly defined responsibilities and authority structures to not that. I mean, obviously there are church buildings. You know the name of the church. This is right out front. And you know who the preachers and the assistant pastors and everybody are. But you don't really know who the members are. People can just sort of come and go. People don't like to be locked into a specific church and they don't like to be locked into specific obligations to a specific church. And they also don't really like church discipline. This fact church disciplines like a really dirty word in the 21st century. But this used to be a very important key part of small local communities, the fact that you would be a member of a church and identified as such. And being removed from that church because you wouldn't do what was right because you were mistreating the people around you. This used to be a very, very significant thing in the past because church association was not just a vague thing, but a very specific part of your identity. And it was a system that you were a part of. These people were your medical support structure. These people were your financial emergency support structure. And so being removed from that because you couldn't be dependent on was a very, very, very big deal. And now that the federal government and state governments have taken over all of the education system and medical and financial systems to a very large extent, churches have really abandoned a lot of their responsibilities to take care of one another. And once you get rid of that, then you kind of don't really need to keep very good track of who your members are. And you really don't need to hold them to account and a whole bunch of other things have just kind of fallen apart at the same time. Like for example, marriage. Marriage used to be a really strong local community of two people. And then they would have children. And people still swear oaths till death to us part in sickness and health, no matter what we're going to stick together. And now we also have the no fault divorce. You can just walk away. I think it's really obvious to all of us if we just think about it that the only way that you can build really strong marriages is if you actually mean what you say and you actually stick to your oath and you don't walk away. And the only way that you can build strong, vibrant, powerful churches that take care of one another is when people don't walk away. And strong local communities that can replace some of these large centralized systems, they're going to require the same thing. So homework assignment for this episode is not to go out and swear fealty to a specific group or organization. Do not do that. Do not even go out and get married unless you are already planning to. I want you to just think about these things because we absolutely positively need more commitment and more definition and more clarity in a lot of these communities. But we also need to do this very slowly. You cannot go from a zero commitment culture to a total commitment culture overnight. You have to slowly make some of these commitments and decide that this is actually what you want to do for those to be the right decision. Don't go join an Amish parish, but do look around and see what strong communities that are succeeding are doing. We're going to have to build a lot of these small pillars of local communities which require definitions and responsibilities and self governance so that these little pillars can hold people up when they're really big systems keep crumbling. So like many T-Rex podcasts, this is the beginning of a conversation that you need to have with yourself and other people. Not something that we're just throwing out there for you to go do tomorrow.