Book excerpt: Building Genuine Community emphasizes a notion of a community in which people are bound together by a common life situation and a common purpose without using that common purpose as an exclusionary factor that distinguishes between those who belong and those who do not belong to the community. Without being scholarly, technical, or obscure, Building Genuine Community lays the foundation for true community, which is the seeking need of the age. True community is difficult to define. What makes some communities thrive and others fail? True community is not an ideal or a specific goal. Rather, it is a twofold direction of movementa movement within each particular structure of family, community, and society to discover the maximum possibilities of the confirmation of individuals as true others within that structure, as well as a movement from structure to structure toward more genuine community. Building Genuine Community proposes nothing less than to do away with the old and tired polarities of the individual versus society, individualism versus collectivism, competition versus cooperation, and free enterprise versus socialism. In place of all these ideals, this treatise confirms that otherness is the only meaningful direction of movement for friendship, marriage, family, community, and society within a democracy.