Early Community Patterns Can Prevent Crisis

Posted on April 3rd, 2009 by saman

Any crisis can be prevented if people keep the rules of the community. In the following lines, you will discover an interesting community, an example of rural community when everything in people’s life was simple and clear. For example, the titles were awarded based on merit, demonstrating qualities of leadership, community spirit.

They had to graduate school (the university of those times with a duration of 3 years) where besides learning the art of leading, of serving the community, there was mandatory a foreign language, economics, religion, medicine, etc., all that was needed to lead the destinies of the community which considered him suitable for this position. It is known as mentioned in chronicles that leaders were able to speak foreign languages, and difficult ones, like Polish and Greek. It was even recommend spending at least a year abroad to learn the language and the customs of the people concerned.

Other specific of rural communities in the past is what is defined as the village law. Each community had its own laws because they knew the best the local needs and conditions. There was a set of common laws in all the communities like the obligation of mutual help or the responsibility of the leaders, but the rules of everyday life of the community were determined locally by agreement. Moreover, it is little known that they had a judge of the wells, which was a kind of ecological cop who imposed for example the distance between the latrines and the fountains, to ensure clean water, he used to establish a place where they could store manure, etc. In addition, people were fined if they did not follow these guidelines.

Turning to the economic organizations, community members possessed part of the whole. This system is still visible in the case of forests or pastures. It is called common possession.

It has several advantages. Thus, in this system each member is interested in increasing the common possession. Nobody could give away anything from the common possession without the approval of the community and thus they could avoid situations when factories were sold on anything. There were achieved more easily some large community projects such as building village citadels, especially as they used permanently group work. They used to build the new couple’s house together; schools were built in groups too etc.

The system proposed is very efficient and developed for many centuries. Another curiosity was that if a family had only daughters then the little girl remained in her parents’ home and the groom was established there. He even took the name of the father-in-law, not to disappear their name. In this case, the man had a house. In other cases, the community built and brought everything necessary to the new couple.

Always, the youngest child remains at home and had the obligation to look for his or her parents. This aspect also has an explanation. When the youngest child matured, parents were elderly and could contribute less to the financial life of their child, because the youngest child was stronger, with less worries and it was more likely that he could provide peace and security for his old parents.