I like your point about building community and individual and group integrity rather than wasting energy on activism. As George Herbert said, "Living well is the best revenge." But that 'living well' isn't just (or even mostly) about material prosperity, it's about cultivating virtue and the flowering of the great and beautiful works of the human soul as expressed in, for instance, art and music. It's living the sort of life that makes others want to emulate you. And of course it makes you a happier, more pleasant person, too.

One libertarian in my Facebook stream made a post the other week about how all the things that he once enjoyed in life now seem meaningless to him. What a horrible state to be in! Who would want to follow the recommendations of that guy?

I'm afraid, however, that we are so atomized and deracinated that most no longer really know what community means. It is not, as John Taylor Gatto points out, merely another word for 'network.' Community is part and parcel of every aspect of our lives, not one aspect of it that we keep separate from the rest. It's very fulfilling, but also leaves one feeling very vulnerable. And you can't build a community out of people that are only focused on themselves (and who would want to?).

The only power any of us really has is decidedly local. We can choose to make ourselves better, and our families better, and our neighborhoods better, or we can not. But until we've done that, we have not the slightest hope of transforming the whole world for the better, and trying to do so is dangerous folly, a pretense of knowledge and virtue as gigantic as that of the central economic planners.