No absolute human community encompassing everything and everyone exists, even if we belong to a single species. We have communities which come to mutually influence each other, which build or in given instances destroy each other. Insofar as we stand on the side of peaceful coexistence and innovative linkages, against violent impositions of will, it’s in our interest to investigate the forms of dialogue, the skills of understanding, the know-how of cooperation. (Perhaps one day we will bring into being a community for all the human race.)

First question: what kind of community do I belong to? There are those that reserve the right to chain me to themselves, and there are also those that do not let me join. How do I free myself from the former, how do I persuade the latter? There is thus a continual movement in the space, like the ‘space-filling’ game which theatre directors frequently use as the first step in community-building.

In general communities to be developed are those whose community awareness is low, whose members are unconscious of their belonging to a community, their shared values and interests. What kind of pre-communities are these? For instance the students of a school who, though they attend the same school day in day out, still don’t experience the sensation of belonging to the school community, and cannot achieve their individual or class goals, because they don’t possess to a greater degree cohesive force and the potential for advocacy. Community development is aimed at the recognition of shared interests, at living through a communal movement, at experiencing the practice of communality.

While in the internet’s virtual world we can experience the endlessness of space, in reality we experience space’s narrowness. Growing numbers of us share a shrinking space; the privatisation of public space advances at breakneck speed. I’ve personally experienced that a place where previously I could be part of some communal experience is now owned by some corporation or corporate director. Naturally the space itself remains public – countless people can have lasting experiences thanks to it or on it – but the fact itself that public property contracts, and with it the significance of the communal, is hard to deny.

How should we share ourselves? How should we share our spaces and possessions? How should we live together, from each other and for each other? How should we take part mindfully but nevertheless boldly in each other’s lives? How should we let the other close to us, the person who is different, who was differently socialised, arrived from a different culture, is used to a different community? How should I pull wide the curtain, open the door, break down the fence, the wall, the border, the barbed wire? How should I serve the great ancestors’ mission: the larger our successfully functioning community, the smaller the likelihood of terror, bloodshed, war?

How should I step out of the traditionally individualistic, well-compensated, easily defensible, and marketable comfort zone?

How?

When I first worked on the stage with laymen I was afraid I wouldn’t take them seriously. Because they’re too weak to be able to articulate real assertions, or the obedience bred into them overcomes the revolutionary possibilities latent in the situation. But that’s not how it happened: the enormous need for freedom overwhelmed habituation and brought the inherent desire to act to the fore. Laymen are good to watch on stage because they aren’t conventional, because they’re directionless: impossible to direct!

What do I help them with? With rules built on each other, following from each other. Good rule-making is the soil of creativity. Where I don’t smother the volunteer, they find their own story. The most important lesson is to try everything. Only he who has the chance to can choose. And if he can choose, he endeavours to decide, and after all that taking responsibility won’t seem so distant to him either.

The gesture of sharing is what’s most absent on first sight from our successfully functioning societies. It’s not only natives who lock away their belongings from immigrants, but also the fortunately enriched from the unfortunately impoverished, the strong from the weak, the clever from the inept, the skilled from the unskilled, the powerful from the powerless. More than half of earthly goods are in the hands of 85 private individuals! Without feeling shame or responsibility we crap imperturbably on each others heads.

I’m not speaking of aid, nor even of solidarity, but of sharing. Of humanity’s natural community.

Political parties once organised themselves around trade unions and social classes. But our life today is much more divided, both vertically and horizontally. Various policy, local, and ideological interests strain against each other. It’s impossible to speak of homogenous communities in Western civilisation. Everything is always related to everything else, everyone has an acquaintance who is in some way quite different from the others. Insofar as political parties want to attain significant support, a society so complicated can only be addressed in one way: with demagoguery. Demagoguery however can be neither eaten nor shared; demagoguery is enough for victory but insufficient for governance. Only authoritarian systems with significant gas- and/or oil-reserves can be maintained with demagoguery, and even those not for too long.

There is therefore a complicatedly-structured society which traditional, top-down parties no longer know what to do with. If slowly, thanks to the braking force of gigantic private corporations, we are unmistakably approaching direct democracy. In order however to make possible the realisation of a true popular democracy, which comes with incomparably more work but tangible rewards, we must develop ourselves. We must learn to live and behave in a communal way. We must learn to share ourselves!

What happens if we don’t learn to share? Very simply: they’ll devour us. They’ll devour us, those shunned for one reason or another, the despised, the humiliated, and the crippled; in a word, the majority! For the moment the majority is silent, because there remains to it some small glimmer of hope that Western civilisation will not let go the hand of the retired, those about to start work, the unemployed, the single mothers, the handicapped, the coloured-skinned, those without official papers, the alternative thinkers, and the drug addicts. But when the then current demagogue governing force one day crosses the line, someone will reach their boiling point. Those who have nothing, have nothing to lose; they share themselves easily. The riot spreads quickly because the wretched, stigmatised and disinherited by the state, have no calendar: they can light everything up at their leisure, having no task that were more important than legitimate self-defence… We need to learn to share ourselves because that’s how we can keep what we truly need. Unless we want the lifestyle change a more serious food riot might herald, we must endeavour to be present more mindfully in the everyday.

Naturally it isn’t only fear of the hungry that can compel us to better see reason, but also importantly our self-interest. As a professional working in the cultural sphere my basic experience is the EU’s uncertainty before culture. To this day culture appears in the domain of political discourse as a collective term for the high arts if it appears at all. For the current political class protecting culture means the same thing as more or less appeasing the demands of already existing state institutions. The customary high standards on the stage, in the concert hall, and on the film canvas must be maintained from diminishing sums of money. All that ‘culture’ currently means is “artists – create quietly and in peace, while you can”. It’s scandalous in itself that political science in the 21st century is still incapable of integrating the notion of culture into its toolkit. Our leaders still don’t see connections between cultural attitude and models of sustainable economy and society. Or if they do, they are unwilling to draw far-reaching conclusions from them, and even less willing to be concerned with the practical consequences of all this. We don’t see the EU or individual member states take truly seriously the topicality and importance of cultural policy in the wider sense. To all this is added the parochialism of cultural professionals, the protection of special interests over the recognition of broader relationships and articulation of long-term goals.

Space must be shared. Institutions must be opened. Young people must be involved. Culture and education treated as a single issue. We must not forget that by itself vocational training is not enough. If the labour market is not infused with the culture of sharing, if we continue to regard schooling and training many millions of young people as a merely technical problem, we might lose the essence of being European. This continent’s inhabitants struggled most for freedom; this is where most lost their lives for human rights, for useful knowledge, in the battle for a more liveable world. It were a pity to have gone to all this trouble! It were a pity to lose everything merely because a few corporate leaders and political speechifiers’ interests desire it!

Sharing space and time! Sharing ourselves in our own and others’ interests! Sharing knowledge, capital, power, and rights! Sharing space, both literally and metaphorically! How can we imagine Europe’s future when only a vanishing proportion of young people can experience political activism, law enforcement, and responsibility inside state institutions? How can we seriously think that Europe is the cradle of democracy, if even in the 21st century widespread democracy in schools is not assured? If the acquisition of knowledge is already tied to a hierarchy, how could democracy become lived experience?

What can artists do for all this? Perhaps we can be more modest. We can seek opportunities to collaborate with creative actors in other fields. We can try to share our knowledge and experience, to make it useful, not exclusively in the interest of artistic goals. Directors, direct demonstrations! Painters, put brushes into children’s hands, let them paint over the boring buildings of multinationals! Conductors, lead enormous choirs on city squares! Why?

Because if we let people worship only their familiar admirations in meagre rooms, then our activities will unavoidably support the politics of isolation. We will exhort people to scrape at the surface of our art. They’ll never grasp that it’s all there, always on the other side. We’ll stay here, on this side of the mirror, apparently safe, really in danger such as the world has never seen. Across Europe growing numbers want order. Not any order but real, thick, impenetrable order. Why? Because they’re afraid they might slip lower, fall out, be annihilated. They’re right: the end really is close. But not why they’d think so. There might be more policemen, stricter laws, larger prisons, higher walls, more varieties of control; but life wouldn’t become safer merely because we materialise our fears, because we raise statues to our terror. The Earth’s warming will not lessen, the economy won’t flourish, prosperity won’t overwhelm us, simply because we say: the 60s are over, enough of this unrestricted desire for freedom, it’s time to work. It won’t work. Let’s not fight ourselves! We don’t deserve this punishment.

Árpád Schilling