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Notes -
I think there are different levels of communities. Yes, what existed a couple hundred years ago, or today still in rural villages disconnected from globalism, are much more connected and interreliant communities. Every person knows every single other person in their community like how I know my own close family. Maybe we should have a different word for that sort of thing than what we use for fandoms. But community is a sliding scale. Is a 1930s rural American town of a couple thousand where everyone goes to one of five churches a community, if it's not literally everyone knowing literally everyone personally? Was my highschool graduating year of ~400 people, where everyone knew about half the class personally and would do reasonable favours for each other but not go as far to help them build a new house a community? Where do you draw the line before getting to fandom? Especially since some portions of fandoms do get pretty close, there are lots of stories of people meeting and getting married through a fandom.
On another level, I think moving away from the death penalty may have degraded communities. You can worry less about whether strangers are trustworthy if you know untrustworthy strangers get executed and thus aren't around anymore. But also degrading communities morally necessitate the removal of the death penalty. It's one thing for a group of people who've known a criminal since they were a baby to say "yeah that person needs to be killed, it's sad but the best option here, they simply are a danger to keep in the community". It's another thing for a jury of strangers to say "yeah that person needs to be killed, even though all we know about them is what these two very biased lawyers have seen fit to show us".
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