Business entities, from single proprietorships to giant corporations, are made accountable to the public through the mechanism of competition from other companies, as well as through scrutiny by media and law. The government entities are made accountable to the public through the mechanism of electoral system sustained by active and involved media and electorate. A corrupt corporation like Enron or WorldCom, like the corrupt officials in the government, are exposed and either lose their market, their status as legal entities, their electoral base, or their official position. But communal organs of power have no checks upon them and therefore have the potential to get away with far greater abuses than either of the preceding. Communitarianism - the belief that community is more important than individual and deserves to have power in itself - may sound appealing until one runs into reality of what communitarianism means. Community organizations such as tribal separatists, the KKK, militias, gangs, mafias, Muslim terrorists, old-boy networks, and religious cults, are the real-world manifestation of communitarianism - and none of them are benign. In all cases these are entities that arrogate for themselves life-and-death power over the lives of others and commit horrible violations of human rights, both within the community and without. These entities are not accountable to the consumer through the market, and they are not accountable to the voter through the elections. And that means, they become tyrannical, seeing it their right to control everyone in the community and to commit horrible violations to that effect. When communitarianism began developing, I foresaw the creation of effective totalitarianism. I recognized that the unofficial local organs of power are capable of at least as great abuses as are the official ones, and lacking the constitutional principles and accountability to the public that keep the official government from becoming despotic, they could, and would, perform greater abuses than the official democratic governments can under Constitutional law. And I recognized that those communities and organizations, lacking either the human rights and civil rights principles that these governments or the mechanisms of check and balance upon them, could, and would, do graver damage to people's life, liberty and existence than the governments that they were seeking to supplant. I foresaw this in America; and now I am finding it in Australia. A rural small town that prides itself on being a model traditional community shows exactly what the term means. An older lady from an urban background, a lady who has achieved great professional success and raised a family of highly effective people, fell for the pretense of the town and married a man from this community. When her husband had a stroke, his family, that wielded significant influence in the town, repeatedly claimed that she was not competent to take care of him even though she was a registered nurse. Unable to take custody over him, they poisoned the entire town against her, until she had to beg for an hour for cabs to come to her home in order that she could go shopping. They finally had their way when she had to go to a hospital for an operation, and her husband was placed in the town nursing home for a week. He entered the nursing home alive; he came out in a vase. During that week, he was not properly fed or given medicine, and nurses gave conflicting accounts of his death. When a relative of the lady asked for an autopsy, his body was cremated before such could be performed. On the Internet, communities become so arrogant that they decide it’s rightful to commit real crimes. Forgery, harassment, slander and defamation are common; as are such actions as mailing someone a piece of manure; pursuing someone to career networks in order to damage their job prospects and reputation; sending viruses to people’s workplaces, web pages and home computers; and making credible threats of death. The community mindset takes over and deems itself more powerful than the law. And anything that is seen as threat by the communal mindset, is deemed to be exterminated by any means possible. This means illegal action and violation of human rights. And while the potential for abuses of power in government and business are checked by media, consumer, voter and other branches and levels of government, the abuse of power in communities - unofficial organs of power - goes on unchecked. More at https://sites.google.com/site/ilyashambatthought/communitarianism-and-corruption
I'm finding myself rather confused over exactly who you're talking about. When I read about Communitarianism on wikipedia, I get a rather different view than when I read your lists of the KKK, Mafia, terrorists and cults. If you're taking aim at the former, you seem to have a pretty misguided view, if it's the latter, you seem to have chosen a pretty easy target, I doubt you'll find many people defending the organisational integrity of the Mafia here, or anywhere. You foresaw? I don't know how old you are, but you have to be pretty old today to have foreseen the evolution of the KKK, militias, Mafias, gangs or cults.
Yes, but it leaves us wondering whether your words apply to any other group, or if you're just using the fallacy of guilt by association (and a tenuous association at that).
Once again, I use the most obvious example, then list organizations that have similar qualities without them being so blatant.
