This article on conceptualisations of community among young European far-right activists has been nagging at me ever since I read it a few weeks back.

Pasieka’s choice to open with the question of “community”, and the fetishisation of that concept by activist scenes on both the left and the right, resonated really hard for me thanks to that piece I wrote for Vector last year, the double review of Everything for Everyone and the original Citizen Sleeper game. The theme of the journal issue was “community”, and I wrestled with it for a long time because, as I noted in my opening, “community” has manifested in my life mostly in the form of deeply unpleasant and ultimately alienating in-group/out-group dynamics, and I’ve rarely come out well from it.

(This has been consistent enough a feature of my life that the basic fault must be in my own stars, but I doubt I’m unique in this experience.)

Pasieka puts her finger on the core dynamic. There are two sides to the whole thing: first of all, the sense of belonging, of “community”, is as much a function of a constructed Other as it is of a shared Us; secondly, an individual’s sustained belonging in the “community” is only secured by successive surrenders of autonomy and individual identity to the group. To simplify, we might sum these up as distinction and conformity, respectively.

(For the record, I assume the latter to be the thing that always results in me being pushed out, if I haven’t already wandered to the margins of my own accord. For various reasons, but perhaps primarily my time in the British public school system, escalating demands for submission and identity surrender do not sit at all well with me.)

If you were to go looking for theories to explain the conformity dynamic, Rene Girard’s notion of mimetic desire—currently very trendy, particularly on the right—seems, on the basis of my admittedly shallow engagement thus far, quite suitable: in a nutshell, people want to do and have the things they see others doing and having. Girard also provides the related idea of the scapegoat, which points toward the other half of the “community” dynamic: cohesion is maintained by loading all the badness into a sacrificial victim, who is either exiled or destroyed, whether symbolically or otherwise. (I’ve noted elsewhere that this, or something very close to it, is the core through-line of Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, though I don’t recall her referencing Girard.)

However, I think a fuller account of the Othering dynamic can be found in the notion of schismogenesis, an idea which has had something of a recent revival thanks to its being an important plank of Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. Again, to simplify hugely: groups of humans will quite deliberately change their behaviour and culture in an effort to further distinguish themselves from other groups. This is a more positive take than Girard’s scapegoat, it seems to me, because it implies the direction of at least some of the energy into the group rather than out of it.

Quite where the two theories overlap (or not) is besides the point, at least for now. What interests me currently is the idea that you have to have both of these seemingly opposite and contradictory dynamics in order for human culture to keep changing and developing. If you only had mimetic desire, “communities” would quickly ossify into narrow ritual observances, refusing to adopt new ideas for fear of contamination by outside influences. Meanwhile, if you only had schismogenesis, “communities” would change so quickly as to be unstable, replacing any sense of an enduring culture with something closer to a ubiquitous faddishness, always redefining itself in opposition to the out-group.

In other words, schismogenesis and mimetic desire are the yin and yang dynamics at the heart of “community”. Stable cultures must presumably therefore have a good balance of the two.

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Returning to Pasieka’s observations, and indeed to observations of the prevailing cultural and political dynamics—at least in the West, but perhaps more broadly also—it seems to me that the more macho mimesis and conformity has been in the ascendent for a while, and can be seen across the political spectrum; the gentler, yin-ish “you do you, we’ll do us” of schismogenesis has been less easily found.

It’s tempting to point the finger straight at social media as being a causal factor, here, not least because Girard’s theories seem so popular among the tech elite—but I’m no longer sure that the causality of these things is so strictly and simplistically linear. Besides, the grounding assumption of cyborg anthropology is that the separation between the social and the technical is an analytical artefact: our prostheses are part of us, and therefore anything you can say about social media’s effects upon “them”, upon the Other, must also be applied to yourself and your own tribe. Which is to say: yes, I strongly suspect that the conformism and scapegoating we see in rightist scenes is amplified and reflected by algorithmic social media, just as I strongly suspect the same applies on the other side of the spectrum.

What to do about it, then? I’m long since done with assuming it’s within my remit or my capacities to change the way the world works, but I think Pasieka’s analysis is useful: while the content of the various conceptualisations of “community” differ wildly, and involve beliefs and values with which we may be in fierce disagreement, the form of “community” is remarkably similar.

These are not easy times to find oneself on the other side of the paradox of tolerance, and I’m certainly not suggesting that bigotry and nationalism should get any sort of “free pass”. But if the last ten or fifteen years have taught us anything, it’s surely that scapegoating your defining Other as a moral monster serves only to deepen the trench of division.