Don't Mistake Alienation for Freedom: Reclaiming Community

In western culture , we are taught to equate freedom with individualism. To live autonomously, to pursue your personal goals, to not depend on anyone. This is what we’re told liberation looks like.

But it's a lie.

Hyper-individualism is not a universal human value. It’s a settler colonial one. It’s the logic that justified the seizure of land, the erasure of Indigenous kinship systems, and the replacement of communal economies with extractive markets. It tells us that needing others is weakness, that isolation is strength, and that freedom means disconnection. But that’s not freedom. That’s alienation.

Capitalism has sold us a version of freedom that’s empty at its core:

Own more. Rely on no one. Compete, outperform, produce. Die with the most toys.

Michael Parenti put it plainly: “In the name of individual freedom, the corporate class demands the unregulated right to accumulate, to exploit, and to dominate.”

This kind of “freedom” is a shield. It protects systems of power by fragmenting resistance. Because when we are isolated, we are easier to control. When we see each other as competition rather than kin, the status quo goes unchallenged.

Now, to be clear: not all collectives are safe. Many of us have experienced coercion, codependence, and erasure in the name of “community.” Patriarchy, nationalism, and religious authoritarianism have weaponized belonging. That harm is real and it certainly is in the healing community.

But that harm is not inherent in community. It’s a distortion of it.

At its best, community is not about conformity. It’s about interdependence. It’s about being known and seen as you are, not as you perform. It’s about shared care, mutual responsibility, and the radical act of showing up for one another even when it’s inconvenient.

Freedom isn’t the absence of others.

Freedom is having a say in the conditions of your life.

And no one gains that alone.

Healing, too, is communal. We do not heal in isolation. We heal in spaces where we are held, witnessed, and reminded that our pain is not a personal failure but that it is a response to a world that has forgotten its relational roots.

If you feel lonely, numb, or estranged, know that you are not broken. You’re responding, wisely, to a culture that severed you from the very thing you were designed for: connection.

So don’t mistake capitalist alienation for freedom. Don’t confuse self-sufficiency with sovereignty. And don’t give up on community just because the systems you’ve known called themselves community and then betrayed you.

Something else is possible.

We remember it every time we choose to show up for each other, to ask for help, to offer care, and to build lives woven with reciprocity.

Real community is not the opposite of freedom.

It’s how we become free...together.