Community guidance

Yesterday was an interesting lecture on communities. It is a great pity that community feeling seems to be dwindling in some places and I agree that many people must be very isolated. I think that its really materialism that has brought about individualism sometimes leading to isolation. There's a notion that if we surround ourselves with material things then we simply don't need other people beyond our immediate families. If anything happens - kids grow up and move away, or if a couple split up then often isolation can result, and the realisation that material goods don't make up for everything.
In my last job I did a some overseas work, mainly in Kazakhstan where I stayed with a family for quite a few weeks. People had very little materially there but there was a very strong sense of community, people really helped each other so much, and who you knew was really everything. On the surface it was quite inspiring but once I looked a bit more deeply into it big problems were noticeable - we would go to a restaurants with the Dean of the university and no money changed hands. We then learnt that the deal was that the restaurant owner's son would get good marks at university that year in return for the meal. All sort of things like that went on. The black market and corruption were huge. People didn't rely on the state for things but in turn they didn't support the state by paying taxes - the result was that all sorts of things were crumbling apart - power cuts and water cuts (grim grim grim!) every day, rubbish never collected and women terrified of giving birth in hospital. Also people at the bottom of the pile in the community really did have absolutely nothing - there was no state to fall back on for people without human capital within the community.
I think we just have to be careful in not going too far down this line of community. Whilst I see caring for others as a very legitimate form of work and don't think its right that everyone should be encouraged to enter the labour market, in general I think people should be encouraged to be economically active and contribute to the state. That may well involve moving away from home. There are advantages to that - of not repeating cycles of deprivaton through the generations and of not becoming very parochial in your outlook. The sad thing of course that there aren't always obvious new communitites to join for people who move away from home, especially if they're not very socially confident.