A few weeks ago I found myself sitting in a local park, amongst a mixed-age, somewhat scruffy group of locals, at an Extinction Rebellion-organised ‘community assembly’. At some point, sitting in breakout groups, we were tasked with coming up with actions which we could approach the local council with and ask them to ‘co-create’ with us. Surprising to me from the outset was how radical the ideas of my group were, given how inherently conservative the task was. Free public transport was the first idea that the group endorsed, which was complicated slightly by the fact the councils don’t run the public transport here. At that point, when even the moderator was suggesting perhaps the second could be a little more of an easy win, one of the middle-aged members of the group started talking. She explained that we had all learned how lovely it was during the pandemic to not have the noise and pollution of cars and how disappointing that they had come back. So the council should ban cars but – twist – only every second day. Everyone would have to develop alternatives but would have alternate days to do essential car things in the meantime! Nobody should be driving their kids to school every day anyway! Of course there would be all the necessary exceptions, for disabilities and so on.

Weird, I thought but didn’t say, how we’d all learned that we hated cars and yet the cars were still persistently there. Because implicit in her statement was a connection between the actor (driving the car) and the we that had learned something. She at least wanted to believe that we were all the same people, that this wasn’t, as some listeners might have uncharitably been thinking, a simple classist us vs. them thing (where we might have learned that we didn’t like what they were now doing). This was a model of belief in which we could know and not do (even when it was ostensibly within our power) and as a result, government needed to step in and solve the coordination problem. A radical proposal (no cars!) to be mediated neither by self-interest or rational thinking or community agreement but by totalising power. Then last night at a dinner, an old friend from our hometown said she’d struggled with dating men with alternative lifestyles, because ‘in certain circles’ anti-vax sentiment was rife.

When I think about ‘community’, this is what I think about: the left needs the individual and the group to be in harmony, and is uneasy but dependent on the ways that government mediates that relationship. When I think of the ‘certain circles’ you reference, subagents seem to be a way to understand broader influence on individuals without having to fall back on referencing things that are simply ‘in the water’. If the left struggles to understand misalignment of the conscious choices of individuals, then the rationalists will always favour agent-led models over the unconscious.