The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom

A Meditation on a Book by Robert Nisbet

Welcome to the second edition of Underlined Sentences. If you missed the inaugural edition about the legendary and Nobel Prize-winning French writer, Albert Camus, and his “Create Dangerously” essay and how it changed and inspired my life—and how it might change and inspire yours—you can read it here.

My goal with this series is to offer thoroughly researched, informative, and insightful observations on the “underlined sentences” of both timely and timeless books or other written documents that I feature. And, most importantly, how they have challenged me to think about my life and how I can tap into their wisdom to get to the heart of the difficult matters that increasingly plague us, and to help guide us through them, if only by holding each other’s hands in the tumult. Please comment, share, and subscribe (see link below). And, as always, thank you for reading.

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“The quest for community will not be denied, for it springs from some of the powerful needs of human nature—needs for a clear sense of cultural purpose, membership, status, and continuity. Without these, no amount of mere material welfare will serve to arrest the developing sense of alienation in our society, and the mounting preoccupation with the imperatives of community.”

—Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom

One day almost two years ago in October of 2022, I sat down in my reading chair in the small, old house I have lived in (at that point) for 23 years and opened a book I’d just received from Amazon called The Quest for Community by political philosopher Robert Nisbet. Published in 1953, it was the first of the 18 books Nesbit would write, and remains his masterpiece and the book for which he is best known. The book is a study of our shared, if not instinctive, drive to be with others and an indictment of governments the world over, particularly authoritarian governments, in their attempts throughout history to keep us apart. They do this because it is easier to control people who are isolated and lonely.

In one of the many sentences that I underlined in The Quest for Community and that might sum up this entire magnum opus, Nisbet writes: “The prime object of totalitarian government thus becomes the incessant destruction of all evidences of spontaneous, autonomous association.”

If there was ever a time when we suffered a gale force blow of totalitarianism, it was during the government-imposed lockdowns and mandates—social distancing, masking, and so-called vaccines—and the weaponized propaganda and increasing surveillance and invasion of privacy that were thrown into the toxic soup we’d all been force-fed. It not only happened here in America, but also throughout much of the world. It was the most widespread attack on freedom in human history. And all for no reason but for governments nearly everywhere to demolish the lives billions of us had built up and long enjoyed, individually and collectively, and then to claim their control over us. We were told it was all to “stop the spread” of a mysterious and supposedly lethal virus and to “flatten the curve” of rising cases of illness. That was just a ruse, a massive, well-orchestrated, and demonic sleight of hand.

The aftershocks are still with us. And what we experienced during the peak of the so-called pandemic may well come around again. And the next time, it may even be worse. As the billionaire psychopath Bill Gates said (smirking) a few years back, it “will get our attention.” So, I thought it would be a good idea to read about our quest for community and how governments often cleverly and, sometimes, brutally seek to destroy those natural communities while rounding us up into contrived communities of their own making.

At the outset of this essay, I will say this about the quest for community: it never made much sense to me. I love solitude and am very much a loner. Except for 10 years of marriage from 1984 to 1994, I’ve lived by myself. At school, I never joined a team sport nor attended any games or homecoming celebrations or pep rallies. In college, I went to plenty of keg parties in the dank basements of fraternities, but I never even thought of pledging one. More often than not, I’ve traveled alone to places near and far, from the Himalayan mountains in Nepal; to a remote, off-the-grid cabin on the coast of Maine; to the 500-mile Camino de Santiago pilgrimage across Spain; to a motorcycle trip to the end of the road where northern Ontario’s James Bay meets the southern end of the Arctic Ocean. And in all my life, no matter where I’ve been in this big world of ours, I’ve rarely been lonely.

I also wanted to read The Quest for Community because I was curious to find out exactly what this quest was all about. I approached it almost from an outsider’s point of view, as if it were a kind of anthropological study of another culture. But as I got deeper into the book, it prompted me to look at the ways that I sought out community; community that I had not really noticed because it was all around me. For years, I was like those proverbial fish that do not know they’re in the water that sustains their very existence. Nor did I notice how much I had immersed myself in one particular community and had counted on it for emotional and spiritual sustenance, until it was taken away from me. I found, as Joni Mitchell once so famously sang in her hit, “Big Yellow Taxi,”…“you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.”

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Because I had the good sense not to get injected with a bioweapon (aka, the COVID vaccine), I was not allowed to set foot on the sprawling, countryside campus of the nation’s largest retreat center in the Hudson Valley of New York, where I’d spent some 20 years working in executive positions of marketing and program development. When it reopened in 2022 after the New York State government had shut it down for all of 2020, and then partially for 2021 and 2022, only those who had been fully jabbed and had the papers to prove it were welcome to return to the office and attend programs there. It was as if the unjabbed, like me, had become instant outcasts, like lepers of the days of old. Or, even worse, scapegoats for the world’s ills, as not-my-president Joe Biden declared in the fall of 2021 by pronouncing that there was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” sweeping o’er the land. Which was a lie; a lie that was turned into a soundbyte and then into sacrosanct truth flogged by the true believers of the COVID cult. I know plenty of other people who did not get jabbed and we never even came down with the sniffles.

A few years before covidmania hit, I had reduced my commitment to the place by becoming a consultant. In that role, I continued to manage a large program with a popular Buddhist teacher who attracted several hundred devotees to her annual retreat on the campus. I was among those devotees. What’s more, I had the enviable pleasure—and the immense responsibility—of overseeing that program for more than two decades. I’d grown fond of the teacher, of her assistants, and of the hundreds—many who returned year after year—who came to be in her wise yet lighthearted presence. And they had grown fond of me. It was always a beautiful community—a kind of joyous but introspective celebration—while we were all gathered there for a weekend. A weekend that gave us fond memories and much food for thought that we took home with us and remembered long after it was over.

But during her annual program there in the spring of 2022, not only was I banned from setting foot on the campus, I also could not even visit with the teacher. I watched the program in sort of sustained state of disbelief, at home and online. It felt like an out-of-body experience. The strangest thing of all was that the only thing said about me during the on-stage welcoming comments that I had facilitated and enjoyed for 23 years and were now being delivered for the first time by someone other than me, was that I “could not be here.” It seemed to me that it was said as an after-thought, a parenthetical note to rush through, like those rapid-fire warnings that you hear on television advertisements about the side effects for whatever pharmaceutical is being pushed. No reason was given for my absence. Had I died? Had I been fired? Did I quit? Had I fled the country? Was I in a coma? Was I in jail?

What was also strange was that no one on the staff, some of whom I’d worked with shoulder-to-shoulder in the trenches for several years, emailed or texted or phoned me to ask me why I “could not be here.” Or even to find out how I felt about being ostracized in this way. For more than two, sometimes difficult yet mostly splendid and fulfilling decades of my existence, this was a community to which I had given all of my professional and much of my personal life. This was my tribe. And now it had spit me out. And all because I’d chosen to draw a line in the sand about what I wanted to do with my own body and not inject myself with a toxin that was known then, if you knew where to look, to be completely useless in protecting anyone from contracting COVID or spreading it.

I did not know until all of this unfolded as I watched the weekend program on my laptop at the breakfast bar in my kitchen, feeling millions of miles away from an event that was geographically only a few miles away, how much I missed being there, missed seeing a teacher I adored and respected. My girlfriend took a photo of me. I look like a person who had just found out that someone close to him had died.

What I also missed was the thrill of hanging onto the teacher’s every word, feverishly taking notes so as not to forget her secrets to living a good and meaningful and, above all, compassionate life. I missed that because now her words rang hollow to me. Here was a teacher whose core teaching, grounded in centuries of Buddhist wisdom, was all about being fearless in the face of life’s uncertainties—even in the face of death. Now I felt betrayed by this same teacher who had succumbed to the very same fears she was teaching the world to face with fearlessness and had willingly taken the jab (which she had to have done to teach there). I also felt betrayed by the organization itself whose foundational mission claims to promote well-being, enlightened living, and community. Suddenly, to me, it was none of those things. Something close to me had died, after all; my faith in a teacher and a group of people with whom I had long aligned myself to “walk the talk.”

Indeed, this organization, which for decades had proudly stood above the fray with its alternative and holistic approaches to healthy living—and for which in its early days was mocked by mainstream American culture—had now become the very thing it scorned. It had now thrown itself into the ring of compliant sycophants; handmaidens to a compromised coalition of alphabet agencies—the FDA, the CDC, the DOH—which, working in cahoots with the pharmaceutical mafia and a shadowy alliance of neo-Marxist globalists, want to maim and kill us. Instead of doing what it was scolded into doing “what you’re told” by another psychopath, Anthony Fauci, the center could have taken the lead and stood up against the toxic jabs and the inhumane mandates just as it had taken the lead in offering alternative and holistic healing modalities upon which it had been founded. But it had chosen to enforce those depraved mandates and divisions. I was devastated.

The incomprehensible hypocrisy I witnessed that day in my kitchen must have shorted the bunch of neurons in my brain that govern reason and logic because, to this day, I still feel the bile simmering in the fortress of my soul and hear a strange hissing in my mind. I walk around feeling slightly off-balance, as if I’d taken a hard whack to the back of my head from which I have not recovered. On my laptop, I watched several hundred masked hopefuls dutifully sitting six feet apart, looking so isolated and, I couldn’t help but think, so sad. There was none of the cheerful talking to each other among the participants. There were none of the warm, lingering hugs, God forbid. Everyone was just sitting there like in a time-out in grade school. I’ll never forget it. Because I thought they must be surely killing their souls in such passive compliance to vicious mandates and agreeing to live with this lack of genuine human contact. Isn’t this genuine human contact precisely what the organization had long claimed to offer people who went there seeking respite and solace from the suffering of their isolated lives? From what I saw of that retreat, I might as well have been watching a live reenactment of one of Dante’s circles of hell.

“Contemporary prophets of the totalitarian community seek, with all the techniques of modern science at their disposal, to transmute popular cravings for community into a millennia sense of participation in heavenly power of earth,” Nisbet writes. “When suffused by popular spiritual devotions, the political party becomes more than a party. It becomes a moral community of almost religious intensity, a deeply evocative symbol of collective, redemptive purpose, a passion that implicates every element of belief and behavior in the individual’s existence.”

To be sure, the center was still a community of “religious intensity,” but one that had found itself worshipping the wrong gods. For it had become a community of obedience rather than boldness, of fear rather than fearlessness, of sickness rather than health. A place that had long regarded itself as a safe haven in an unpredictable, stormy world, as a lighthouse in a dark sea, had had its beacon of light snuffed out by the very people who manned it. Where was the place where people were welcomed to step into their true selves—their divinity, if you will—unfettered by personal and professional constraints? The place where, annually, thousands of hungry souls journeyed in search of healing and happiness and where they said they felt “at home?”

Now, overnight, this “home” looked like it had turned into a prison no different than the prison people normally come this place to escape from. Wherever you go, there you are, we say in the retreat business. Meaning, there is no escape from the self, from what we carry with us in our hearts and minds no matter where we are. In this way, we build around us the world that we habitually see unless we are willing to change, to open up to new ways of seeing and being. There were a lot of new ways of seeing and being happening at the center in the years before the scamdemic.

Now, I saw a room full of fearful people supposedly learning how to be fearless. But it appeared as if they had brought their fear with them and wrapped it tightly around themselves, making sure not to make contact with anyone else or even acknowledge the absurdity of the situation in which they’d found themselves. They remained as armored as they might have been at home, cowering before the same diktats they had come here to leave behind. And all in the name of a “collective, redemptive purpose” of stopping the spread of a virus that was no more of a threat to any healthy person than the seasonal flu. What a wicked shell game.

I now feel that all that I had willingly given to that place, that community of like-minded beings striving to enhance the psychological and spiritual lives of all who attended, all those nights I had spent sleeping on the floor of my office when faced with a deadline because I had no time to go home, was now all for naught. I feel that I had watched an unsinkable boat, built by a dedicated team that had ceaselessly toiled on for years, go down in the first waves of a storm. And now I gaze over a becalmed ocean and wonder what went wrong.

I’m sure financial considerations and arm-twisting were involved. If the organization wanted to receive government loans, such as those from the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program or Paycheck Protection Program, to keep the place and its employees afloat for the year they had to close in 2020, they must have had to abide by the government vaccine and masking mandates when they reopened in 2021. But I also wonder if there was something else. Something severely lacking in what I can only call integrity. Perhaps some kind of structural flaw deep in the organizational thinking that contributed to its abdication. Maybe it was the loss of faith in its original mission, which, beyond guiding people to leading healthier and happier lives, aspired to the awakening in each of us to the divinely created and interconnected spiritual truths that govern the universe. I know that’s what attracted me to the place and its people and kept me happily employed there for so long. And I know others there who felt the same. Where were they now?

If there had been a clear reaffirmation of, and steadfast trust in, the higher, unseen, mystical orders of the universe and truth in the face of mind-manipulation, state-imposed censorship, and malicious lies that had befallen us all, the organization might have found the necessary discernment to recognize the evil moving over the earth and might not have so readily caved to the decrees mandated by the state over and against not only good, common sense and genuine science (the jabs never worked except to injure and kill millions of unsuspecting victims, whose numbers are still climbing to this day), but also in contradiction to the very mission of the organization. Rather than surrender like it did, the organization could have just said no to all of that and closed its doors for a year and not taken any blood money from the government. Several dozen people would have lost their jobs or at least been laid off, I know. But at what cost do you keep a place open if the mandates to keep it open violate the very principles on which you supposedly stand and claim to uphold? And, even worse, violate the very essence of the unique qualities of life that make us human? Because there was nothing human in those inhumane mandates. Of that, I am certain.

When I look back on seeing all those masked people sitting six feet apart—not talking, not hugging, not viscerally acknowledging the human in each other on account of the distancing and the masks—I wonder with dread if I might have been watching some kind of unconscious mass suicide right before my eyes. Not a physical death—except for the slow asphyxiation from the masks—but the death of individual souls to the cult of mass compliance, which is clearly a kind of death or even a fate worse than death. For, when you comply to something so fundamentally appalling, when you allow yourself to be so humiliated and degraded and subjugated by those who claim to sit above you—whom you allow to sit above you and put their boot on your face—if you allow them to do something like that to you, you slowly die inside, spiritually and physically. And any claims anyone made during the so-called pandemic of having done the right thing—getting jabbed and wearing masks and social distancing and self-isolating—all to protect others and for the “common good,” become just empty words, the parroting of the incessant, droning, demonic voices that claim to have our best interests in mind, but actually want us spiritually and literally dead.

I wonder if, in the years ahead, the place can even survive this willful abdication of its ideals. In the retreat world we often speak of karma, the idea that you reap what you sow. In other words, what goes around comes around. In the karmic world, everything we do is inscribed in the record of our lives and ripples over and pours into the lives of others and the world around us. I wonder if the world can support what this place did to itself. I wonder how the place can survive its karmic fate, given the depth of its betrayal of its founding principles. Because to me it can no longer genuinely claim to be what it has long claimed to be.

If I’d had the chance to ask Nisbet how we got here, he may have read from his own book: “The modern release of the individual from traditional ties of class, religion, and kinship has made him free; but, on the testimony of innumerable works in our age, this freedom is accompanied not by the sense of creative release but by the sense of disenchantment and alienation. The alienation of man from historical moral certitudes has been followed by the sense of man’s alienation from his fellow man.” Then, flipping a few pages, he would read, “Man’s alienation from man must lead in time to man’s alienation from God.” And, again, flipping through a few more pages, he would put his finger on this line: “Totalitarian power is unsupportable unless it is clothed in the garments of deep spiritual belief.”

In his introduction to the 2010 reprinted edition of The Quest for Community, Ross Douthat writes: “Man is a social being, and his desire for community will not be denied. The liberated individual is just as likely to become the alienated individual, the paranoid individual, the lonely and desperately seeking community individual. And if he can’t find that community on a human scale, then he’ll look for it on an inhuman scale—in the total community of the totalizing state.

“Thus, liberalism can beget totalitarianism.”

Nisbet was a prescient thinker and I wonder if he had happened to be sitting by my side watching that retreat on my laptop what he would have made of it all. Perhaps he would have nudged me with an elbow as if to say, I told you so.

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Nisbet did not live long enough to witness any of this. He died in 1996 at the age of 82. But I am still here and trying to live as true to myself as I can in the divided world that he envisioned. Over the past couple of years, I’ve tiptoed back to some true friends of that old community, my former tribe, that I had not met up with during those dark years of 2020 and 2021 and 2022, those who did not attack me during the pandemonium or push the jabs or the masks in any way, shape, or form. From what I gather, they simply complied just to keep their jobs, and that’s the extent of it. No hard feelings there. A little disappointment, true. But it is not my place to hold something like this against anyone who lives paycheck to paycheck, especially those with families to support. Yet, when I see these few remaining friends, I feel something is missing between us. Maybe that disappointment is deeper than I am allowing myself to really feel and forgive. The easy camaraderie and honesty we had before has slightly dimmed, at least by my lights. It has dimmed because the thing that had separated us during that dark time—the thing that more than anything needs to be talked about—cannot be talked about.

The divide in this cultural war is wide and unfathomable and stacked with trip-wired truth bombs that would decimate these friendships, even if I spoke in carefully measured tones about what I believe has happened, even if these friends only complied to keep their jobs. There’s a depth to the depravity of what happened—and still is happening—that can only be broached among those who have understood it from the start and have seen it for what it is: a control, destruction, and depopulation program. Where do I even begin to talk about this with people who don’t suspect that anything in our world has gone seriously awry? So, I’ve chosen with words unspoken to let sleeping dogs lie, although perhaps at the cost of a deeper emotional connection we might have been able to forge as we aged together. Much of what I see now is this monstrous, yet invisible, monolith of what cannot be said standing between us.

Among the ruins of the older, former communities people like me still look back on with almost nostalgic fondness, new communities are arising, new friendships are being made. I know I am not alone in discovering, both in person and online, a new community of courageous but forsaken people through whom I find support and courage. A woman commenting on a Naomi Wolf Substack column writes: “I now have lost even the beginnings of being able to talk about the burning issue of our times with my former friends and even with my closest sister. I have found some new friends but sometimes I feel so marooned and so alone because I can't seem to attach the close relationships from the past into the now…. This, I find, is a very painful way to live…. And often I wish I could figure out how to come out of concealment in so much of my former world. I no longer can bear to go to my Quaker meeting. I tried to come out of concealment there and was greeted by a Wall of Silence, one of the worst sorts of walls, I now believe.”

Something has died between so many of us. Something has died in the American culture. We have all lost so very much. I find myself mentally, if not physically, withdrawing from that old world, the world that had traumatized so many of us. It is not easy. Old habits die hard. As I do this, I am mourning. Because the larger community to which I had once belonged, and which I had treasured so much—a wide circle of office colleagues and friends and acquaintances, and even the vast, wide world I once knew—feels like it’s dead to me, nothing more than a fond memory, a country from which I have been exiled and to which there is no going back. There is no going back because it is gone.

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Bibliography

Nisbet, Robert. The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom. Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2019

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