It’s a familiar refrain in discord servers and tiktoks, youtube videos, and even real life conversations with friends, “you don’t owe anyone anything.”
But I wonder: do we? Do I owe you anything? Do you owe me something?
I recently moved. Well, I’m still technically in the process of moving, since we still have a few boxes worth of stuff over at the old place. But since both places are right on the train line a mere seven stops from each other, it feels as if we are basically moved in. But the point is, about a week and a half ago we asked our friends to help us move. We were renting a U-Haul van, and since my spouse doesn’t drive and I don’t feel comfortable driving something that big, we asked a friend to drive it for us. Then we asked more friends to help with carrying the boxes around. We asked my mom to drive down to help with furniture placement (she’s a genius at furniture placement). I posted on my seminary’s facebook page and asked if anyone else was around this summer to help. In the end we had four people come and help us day of, and a few friends pop by before or after to help with packing or unpacking. This is significant, because I have a stress fracture, and was on crutches the day of the move. We needed all the help we could get. We needed care from our community.
Yes, that’s right, we needed help. Which brings to mind this tweet that lives rent-free in my brain:
What do you do when you need help? You ask. And I would posit, if you have good friends who are able and willing, they will help. They don’t even have to be good friends: some of the people who came and helped us were merely members of our community. One of them we had never met in real/brick life before, despite the fact that they had been in online community with us for well over a year. But the part that matters here is that they wanted to help, because they are in community with us.
Roberto Esposito writes about communitas and immunitas in his political philosophy work. You’ve probably never heard of him. That’s ok, I hadn’t either. And his book on this subject Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community is written like a typical philosophy book, which is to say, it’s a little tricky to get through. But as I understand his argument, he traces the etymology of community to the word communitas and its subsequent roots to describe community not as the common property of a group, but as the decentering of the self as subject altogether, ultimately altering the self in pursuit of the gift which is owed, the gift of community. In other words, community quite actually voids property, indeed, the very idea of the self, so that that which is given to the common is actually held outside the self.
It’s “a circuit of mutual gift giving.” Esposito goes on to say that community is not a “corporation” of individuals coming together in a larger body, nor is it “mutual, intersubjective recognition” wherein the mirror of community reflects back at us our shared identities.1 Another way of conceiving of community is looking at the boundaries which mark who is “in” and “out” of a particular group of people. But no, community as conceived by Esposito is the inversion of these boundaries so as to not exist at all. Community is “the hole into which the common thing continually risks falling, a sort of landslide produced laterally and within.”2
Well all that philosophizing is fine and good, but what does it have to do with moving? With whether or not you should “cook someone a meal just because” (as per the tweet above)?
I think we need a fundamentally different understanding of what it means to exist in community, and I think Esposito provides that, albeit in language that is difficult at best to understand. What does it mean to exist in community? I think it means to allow for a blurriness which you may not be ready for. Existing in community is about blurring the borders between self and other, because what we owe to each other is exactly what crosses this blurry boundary. A person who doesn’t owe anyone anything has a diamond-hard border up between themself and the people around them. And frankly, that’s not realistic. Because as Martin Luther King Jr noted “Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half the world. This is the way our universe is structured. It is its interrelated quality.”3 We rely on others for so much. So to pretend that we do not is to live a lie.
When you drink your coffee you rely on a supply chain so long you cannot see its beginning. When you help your friend, your acquaintance, a stranger move from one dwelling to another, you cross the blurry border between selves. You exist in the hole that is community, the space where I spill over into you.
One of my favorite writers on this here substack app released a piece recently that gets at this very thing. Lyndsey is talking about the ways that the village around her are raising her son along with her:
“Who can tell where the so-called boundaries between us lie, where any one person ends and another begins?”
We are incredibly interrelated and interconnected. The ideas which pass between us, the words and metaphors which shape our consciousness, the care you provide for me when I move from one apartment down the street to the next: all these show me that I do not exist in some individual vacuum of self.
You must recognize this about community, about what it means to be a human, a creature that exists in an ecology bigger than you. When you say you don’t owe anyone anything you are denying your place in this system, in the many interrelated systems which make up life on this planet.
It is not that you owe me an apology or a text message catching up. It is not that we must reciprocate every action, or keep track of the transactions of our relationship. It is that we must allow the borders of ourselves to blur. We must recognize the ways that I am already full of you and you are already full of my spouse, who is already full of the person riding the train next to him. We don’t owe anyone anything because no one deserves anything, whatsoever, good or bad, punishment or reward. But at the same time we must show reverence for the people around us by blurring the borders of our own desires and mingling our common wish for the good.
What we hold in common is not a plot of land in the center of Harvard Square where the cows go to graze. The tragedy of such commons is a myth created by economists to account for greed and personal interest. But when you and I mingle our shared wish for the good, we do just that: we share. We blur the borders between your land and my land, because the commons is an obligatory gift we offer each other: “a circuit of mutual gift-giving” as Esposito says. And yet the tragedy of the commons is a real risk that humans undertake when we share, when we put things in common.
What I’m saying is that to live in community is to risk having your feelings hurt. It’s to risk failure and loss and being wrong. Because that’s the risk of caring, and what is caring but blurring the borders of yourself and stretching them across the expanse between us. We can’t solve anything on our own. But our mingled wish for the good? That’s something that exists somewhere beyond the inside or outside of ourselves.
When I show reverence for another person I am recognizing their personhood, some innate core of their being that makes them, them. I am saying you exist and you matter, you are worthy.
When you say you don’t owe anyone anything, what you are saying is that the person does not matter. They are not worthy of care. They exist off on their own, unconnected from the rest of us who are in this thing called community together.
Look, I get it: I was socialized female, like the majority of the people shouting this line across the internet and into my phone screen. People socialized as female tend to be told that they owe men sex and service and love. We are told that we must perform duties of motherhood and sisterhood and marriage. I am not advocating for you to shrink yourself.
I grew up evangelical Christian, I know that the popular conception of self-sacrifice is one that comes from Christ’s death on the cross and the Christian saying that you must die to self is where the societal demand for owing anyone anything comes from. I am not saying you must be Christian and I am not saying that the self you inhabit is anything less than worthy of love and care. I am not advocating for you to yoke yourself to patriarchy or racism or ableism, or any of the other innumerable interlocking systems of oppression that make up Empire.
But this fight we are in? It is communal. We are in an ecological crisis, and you don’t need to be told that. What it means to care for the earth is inextricably linked to what it means to care for your fellow human beings. And I would argue that if you are in the business of fighting climate catastrophe, you do care for other human beings.
My friends, you do not show it when you say that you owe nothing to anyone.
You have been hurt. I have been hurt too. Forgiveness is a balm to both parties and it is one that is applied with great difficulty. But when I say that I care about the people who have hurt me, I live into the promise of community. I live into the blurring of borders between myself and others.
I am not saying that you must forsake your boundaries. I am drawing a careful distinction here between borders and boundaries, synonyms though they may be. Your boundaries are what make you, you. They are the things you cannot, will not do, the things you won’t accept. Your borders are the lines which prevent care from coming through.
We put up borders all the time. When we see people whom we vehemently disagree with online spouting what we see as political nonsense, we put up a border that cloaks those people in “not like us.” Whether we disagree with them from the right or the left (or even the center), we refuse to engage in a way that imagines people as the complex beings they are; we refuse to offer them care.
What I am saying, is that to live in community is to acknowledge the borders and the boundaries, to draw distinctions between them and to make sure that what we want to be a boundary is just that, and that the things which are borders are areas we are actively trying to blur the lines on so that we can let care through.
These same people spouting the line about not owing anyone anything are the same to suggest therapy first when anyone mentions a crisis. “If you have access to it, therapy is probably a good option…” they say, simultaneously acknowledging the systems that keep people out of therapy and treating therapy like the only solution to crises.
There is something insidious about the individualism alongside reference to systems which affect whole communities here. Therapy is an individual bandaid to many societal problems. It can help you personally, but it cannot heal the underlying causes of so much of our pain.
The world, this beautiful world we live in, the societies and the ecosystems: it is broken. There is so much brokenness all around us. The systems, legal or social, that greed and unfeelingness have put into place and continue to enact, they are wrecking us. I used to wonder why so many more people had depression now than a century ago: it’s the combined effects of a century of interlocking oppressions. The planet is warming and climate is creating chaos. The problems of greed and unfeelingness are only exacerbated when we put up borders that keep out the care.
We are each shaped by these systems just as much as we are shaped by the people we are in community with. The difference between borders and boundaries is crucial here: a boundary prevents a lack of care from harming you, or at least tries to. A blurred border allows care to move freely between people, healing harms that have been perpetuated by people whose borders are made of diamond.
What you owe to any other person is an examination of the borders and boundaries you have set up between you. Are you treating them with care? Are you allowing empathy through? Are you telling them they matter? Or are you refusing to engage? Refusing to see their humanity? Do you announce your boundary to them, so that they may respect it and respect you as a person? Or do you ghost them, putting up a border that treats them as if they didn’t exist?
I believe in love. I believe in care. And most of all, I believe in community.
That’s all for now folks,
Laurel
Roberto Esposito, Communitas, “Introduction: Nothing in Common,” pg. 7.
Ibid, 8.
Martin Luther King Jr, “Christmas Sermon on Peace,” 1967.
This is beautiful, Laurel. Thank you for sharing it.
I love your conceptualization of what community means. Reading this felt like sitting in the grass in the sun. Thank you for sharing. 🫶🏻