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title: Community
date: '23:53 04-01-2025'
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### Chapter Three

# Community

Community
The best way to run anything is to ensure that the people who are affected by decisions are as
closely involved in making those decisions as possible, and are not merely told what to do by
some remote
 official.
The Values Party is opposed to the development of impersonal, centralised, powerful
bureaucracies and as a general policy favours transferral of centralised governmental and
commercial activities to local communities - where this is made possible by the desire of the
local people to take them over. We believe that the local community, and not the many
government and corporate bodies and institutions, is the most important unit in society.
The Values Party believes in an alternative society made up of decentralised, self-sufficient
communities, in which people work near their homes, have the responsibility of governing
themselves, and of running their economic enterprises, schools, hospitals and welfare services.
These real communities would be much happier and healthier places in which to live. We
believe
 local community
 units should
 be the basis of social, welfare
 and support
 services
 and
be the basic units in economic and political decision-making procedures. Such units would
encourage individual liberty and enlarge personal choice.
At present there is considerable tension between an overly individualistic approach to
personal identity and freedom and the proliferation of controls and administrative regulations
laid down by large institutions and government bureaucracies. Our impersonal, centralised
mass society, in which important decisions affecting us are made by people very remote from
us, has little to recommend it as a type of human organisation.
In communities
 like these we would be able to develop an identity of our own, which many of
us have lost in the mass society we live in. We would tend, once more, to find an aim in life, to
develop a set of values, and take pride in our own achievements
 as well as those of our
community.
While this is a long run aim which obviously carinot be achieved overnight, a start must be
made.
68