As people emerge from the cocoon of school and childhood, the path prepared for us, we find ourselves with a multitude of decisions about our lives. Most of us are increadibly conservative, we choose the well-trod path to the "next level." A job, a home, maybe a family. For some people even these well-trod pathways are not easy roads to follow.
But generally we are all trying to get to a place where we are surrounded by valuable things. Not in a monetary sense but in sense of what is truely personally valuable. Our society often confuses these two. The society at large values things monetarily, which is interesting because money is pretty much the same everywhere and forces everyone to have a similar conception as to what is valuable. This is the slavery. Not that we can't choose WHERE to spend our money, but rather that most everything from soap, to landscape, to music, to food, and even to art has a monetary value which we are forced to adhere to. Do we have the freedom to change the value of say, food? The value of an hour of our labor? The value of a late night dancing with friends under a full moon on a beach? Mostly we do not, and this is our slavery, the tyranny of the whole, of society.
Obviously the determination of what is individually personally valuable is a critical aspect of the search for freedom. It gives you a purpose, a direction away from the "norms" of value as determined by society. This determination is never over, it's part of the process of life. Nonetheless most people eventually get to a point where they feel some things are valuable. The point may come when they decide to listen to the TV and buy what is sold. It may come when they decide to take-up a certain religion. It may come as they make an important life choices such as completing an education or buying a home.
The tyranny of society is that once we know what we personally want we are often thwarted from achieving it due to compromise. Speculatively if I wanted to always go to work in a pair of shorts and nothing more, it's probably going to be hard for me to find a job doing what I want. If in the course of my job I wanted to say never use paper I would probably find this impossible because everyone else who I interact with doesn't seem to share this same value. I'm forced to compromise either I get a job or I get to wear shorts, never both.
Now imagine if I found a group of people with whom I shared values. Imagine too that as a whole we were capable of creating a business. I might be able to go to work in a pair of shorts and never use paper. We would all be closer to acheiving a state where the stuff we value is in our lives. This is the nexus of community, shared purpose. As a group it is easier to overthrow the tyranny of society, of the greater community.
Community can occur almost anywhere. A group of people riding a bus have a community in that they are all using the bus. They have a shared purpose and probably value that bus. A country as a whole can be considered a community. In the United States of American our community was formed for the purpose of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Each community we are a member of has two aspects. Rights and responsibilities. The bus riders have the responsibilities of pay fare, and generally not bothering other passengers. In turn they gain the right to travel from place to place. Citizens of our country gain the rights laid out in the constitution and have the responsibiltiy of paying taxes, voting, serving jury duty and a few other things.
Communities should also be structured so that they are adaptive. In a sense they are living organisms like fish or petunia's and must be capable of adapting to keep place with the environment they are situated in.