segregated spaces vs. community self-identity

do communities have a right to come together to identify themselves as a community and decide on how to best shape their environment to meet their needs without having to account for anyone else's? yes. indeed, it has been discussed for the last 2 years as the aim. but what when these communities are 'problematic'? all white? all rich? too much power? a community can be a community in space so long as it has equal power to any other community in any other space? maybe that's it. but see, such are the ideals in our constitution, but we haven't been able to pull it off.

if the spaces are exclusionary, the communities that come together to self-identify are bound to be exclusive. do they have a right to have gotten in the space they inhabit by oppressing, expressly excluding others based on anything other than criminal activity? no. how far does this extend? ...i don't know. maybe to nation-states. but people need something to organize themselves by, because people love to organize themselves. for a while, it was by geography and creed, and then by nationality. sometimes, now, by region like the EU. identity boundaries grow like capitalism. which is amoral. and maybe immoral. maybe people don't have a right to divide by income or wealth, maybe that's the fundamental problem. housing doesn't work as a commodity.

and here i go blaming capitalism, but our democratic ideals are moral and our economics are amoral. (or maybe even immoral.) and our democratic ideals are employed by flawed humans (which is what we're all stuck being) and to discuss power is to scratch at something so primal, psychological and mystical that we can't really even talk about power itself but only how we observe evidence of it. humans seek to control their environments, their realities, their identities and their externalities. control requires power. why the urge for this extends to such a significant scale? why does having power so frequently means taking others' power? i have no idea! and to try to answer that is to pontificate about the Nature of Man. ask the bible how that's going for them. and economics, while completely subject to people's emotions, masquerades as this right-angle-having, straight-line-making, rule-having, no-nonsense amoral system.
and humans -- at least a lot of them -- can get their head around it. it's even reassuring, in a world that looks to our category-loving brains to not have any rules.

maybe faith is just a manifestation of the tendency of the human psyche to seek rules in a way it can comprehend, and Nature is too vast for us to trust it without knowing the rules. power. control. anxiety. faith. religion tells us not only that there are rules, but someone or something is in charge of it, and handling the management. we understand heirarchy and can handle having a boss.

maybe economy was something that we constructed to handle our level of management, and made rules that fit our brain, our thinking patterns. control on the ground, between one another. every now and then, our economy with its sort of rules intersect with Nature and religion's rules, and we have to negotiate. our rules are going well. we understand them. they govern a system that seems to function on its own, and we forget that it was a manifestation of our thinking, quit asking questions, in fact ask it for advice. it impedes on people and we point to it indignantly. there are rules! eventually, it would work so well and so cleanly that it would trump Nature, and religion. we're the boss now. it's not right, we just made a monster and it functions just like our brains work so we understand it, love it for being rational in an irrational world, overlook our human additions and our emotional contributions, live within its confines.


at any rate, through us history our economy grew, and our national identity grew around our economy more than around our democracy. rights -- a moral question -- intersects awkwardly with economics -- an amoral system that governs us as profoundly and more instantaneously. in a free market capitalist model, people have the 'right' to as much material wealth as they can acquire, without really having the right to not acquire any wealth.

we don't have any national position on human rights, anyway. human rights are not a concern of nation-states, a product of economics, wealth-acquisition by following rules that fit human brains. human rights are god's department, and he got demoted.

so this is a long and super weird way to say that yes, in matters of geography and governance, communities have the right to identify and participate in government to shape their environment, but they don't have a right to hold more wealth, food, access to government or natural amenities than any other community identifying the same way. do people have the right to exclude once they've identified, even when not being exclusive was one of the requisites to community formation? um, yes? no? fuck. i dont know, this shit's at the root of governments and identity formation and human nature and economic structures and the history of human diaspora. 72 hours just isn't enough time for me to get this one resolved.