Counterfeit Communities

Counterfeit community is a term first used by John Freie in a 1998 book titled Counterfeit Community: The Exploitation of Our Longings for Connectedness. [Page 347]According to Freie, counterfeit community occurs when people's natural desires to form communal bonds and to feel connected to others are exploited in order to advance self-interest goals (for example, economic profit, power) that run counter to the building of genuine community. Rather than growing as a result of the complex human interaction of people, feelings of connectedness are externally manipulated and therefore artificial, deceptive, and false. The creation of feelings of connectedness that characterize genuine community requires the hard work of building bonds of association through the honest recognition of disagreements, the resolution of those disagreements, the forging of agreements to work together, and the building of consensus about basic values and beliefs that unite people. Counterfeit community requires only that people have a desire for connectedness; it does not require the hard work of building community through human interaction.

Freie claims that counterfeit community permeates contemporary life. It appears in the housing industry with claims of community being made by the developers of gated communities, in the marketplace with the promotion of privately owned shopping malls as communal centers, in the workplace with the use of participatory management techniques, in politics with appeals to a national community, in religion with the use of marketing strategies by megachurches, and in cyberspace with the explicit attempt to create virtual communities. In all instances, the appearance of connectedness and community is presented without the presence of the underlying structure of diverse human interaction that characterizes genuine community.

Freie maintains that genuine community is organic, while counterfeit community is artificial. Counterfeit community is developed and marketed by those who wish to extend their own power or increase their own wealth. It is created and maintained in one of two ways: either by distorting some aspect commonly associated with community, or through the creation of simulacra (copies of aspects of community that never existed).

There are two major criticisms of the concept of counterfeit community. First, it has been suggested that counterfeit community differs from genuine community in degree rather than in kind. In other words, it might be possible that counterfeit community is merely an adolescent form of genuine community that could, in time, develop into genuine community. Second, while Freie correctly identifies people's longing for community as an impetus in the formation of community, he fails to acknowledge that people are influenced by other feelings as well, feelings that may not support the formation of genuine community but that might lead to the formation of counterfeit community. Selfishness, for example, inhibits genuine community, but it may well be a compelling component of counterfeit community. If that is the case, then counterfeit community is not so much a result of the manipulation of people's longing for community as it is a natural result of other, less communitarian, emotions and impulses.