I spent time growing up in a couple of different 'intentional communities', both of which are dying a kind of slow death for similar reasons (as are many others that I am aware of).
These communities were founded by groups with particular sets of shared ideals. Shortly after being founded they started to welcome new members - offering a share in the assets of the community in return for labour and commitment. This generally worked well.
The problem is that as these people approach retirement they begin to realise that the community and its assets are all they have in the way of a retirement fund (sometimes also a modest private fund as well but their share of the land they live on is usually their most significant asset). This realisation is usually enough to stop or slow the practice of giving new members a share in the community's assets. This in turn makes joining the community less attractive.
On top of these financial concerns, there is the lack of shared ideology from one generation to another. The children that grew up in these communities prefer to go off and live their own life instead of carrying on with their parents dreams.
I am only aware of a couple of communes here in NZ that appear to be making this generational transition successfully (most communes here are approaching 50 years old, having been started in the 70s by people in their 20s).
It doesn't have to be that way. There are certain common patterns in communities who stay healthy without losing their ideals.
Does the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) in Germany count as intentional community?
This community is ever growing, and I'd say they changed generations at least twice: the oldest members (1st generation) retired long ago, some meanwhile died. And the now-elders (2nd generation) are making place for younger peers (3rd generation).
To put this picture more into perspective: There are now-middle-age members (age ~40-50) who joined the CCC in their yough, but still know the community's beginning only from the tellings of older members.
And yet there is a strong sharing of ideals and values. Due to their early history (helping and protecting members who got in trouble with KGB) they are still politically active, strong proponents of data protection and privacy, as well as opposed to large data collectors, intelligence agencies, military and the industries around those. They hold these ideals even though hacker communities in many other countries (US, etc.) developed into a totally [1] different direction. Their annual Chaos Communication Congress is breaking records year by year, in terms of attendees but also in terms of quality and volunteer engagement.
And this is just the CCC. I know some other communites here in Germany which are similarily structured and healthy. But these are less known internationally, so I decided to cite those the CCC as my example.
The "trick" of all these communities is that each task is performed by a team - even though sometimes a single person would be sufficient. So there is a decoupling of the task from the single individuals performing them. This means each team can grow, renew and rejuvenate gradually, at its own pace. [2][3]
[1] pun intended
[2] Thinking a that, a similar strategy is also what keeps large code bases healthy.
[3] Thinking even more of that, democracy as a whole works that way, which is why it's easier for democracies to rejuvenate than for most dictatorships, most of which fail utterly after one or two generations - to be replaced with a totally different dictatorship, or hopefully with something that is better for the poeple and more sustainable.
The CCC is most definitely not a community in the sense the article was talking about. There are obviously organisations that exist for longer than a couple generations. I have attended a couple of CCC meetings and I like it a lot. But members don't organize their entire life around the CCC. It's a club. Members can attend meetings once a week, once a months or once a year. It's an entirely different thing. Nobody relies for their food supply, shelter or retirement on the CCC.
Would the Amish be considered an intentional community? They've somehow managed to keep their community together and functional across the generations, and in the face of enormous technological and cultural upheaval.
it's helpful to distinguish intentional community from commune. the amish have private property so there is maybe more incentive to accumulate intergenerational wealth.
they also withhold secondary education from their children and pressure them to marry and reproduce at a young age, so staying in the community quickly becomes their only realistic option if they want to feed their family.
Interestingly, none of the communities I was referring to in my previous comment were based on religion (with the exception of one that was loosely christian-pacifist).
Perhaps where religion is involved the outcome may be different.
I think the article touches on how the Amish avoid this 'problem' - the threat of ostracism from the (probably exceptionally tight-knit) social group keeps younger generations bound to the community.
Barely at times. The attrition rate (not staying within the community) for the Amish can be quite high, and the only way to "share" generation over generation is to subdivide property.
If you tried to start the Amish now it'd never last, it's too large a leap. But the Amish society evolved slowly over time much like others. If you went back to the early days then the Amish wouldn't be that different to others around them. It's just that there was a bit of a split and our societies have evolved in parallel since then under the influence of different values.
It sounds like since they aren't creating more wealth, either through increased productivity or lowered costs, they start to worry about the dilution of community assets?
This in turn makes joining the community less attractive.
That sounds like it just hits the natural limits of a community? Doesn't sound too bad.
> That sounds like it just hits the natural limits of a community? Doesn't sound too bad.
It's not too bad, unless new (younger) members are your primary source of wealth and labor. A commune primarily consisting of retirement aged and older adults will be far less productive, and will eventually reach a tipping point of unsustainability.
> It sounds like since they aren't creating more wealth
This definitely plays a part as far as I can tell. The two communities that I mentioned that are looking most sustainable have an important thing in common - they both operate large businesses (orchards and gardens). Many of the others have devolved to the point where members live on the land but seek work elsewhere.
While I think anti-capitalist communes are as hopeless as the author portrays, communes of likeminded individuals have been successful. Consider the Chelsea Hotel in NYC. In addition to being the cornerstone of NYC's art scene for 100+ years, it also contributed to billions of dollars in value creation. [0] The hotel was intended to be a community for artists from the start, and by every measure it was successful.
A few factors that made the community successful:
— Residents still had jobs
— Residents were expected to pay (very low) rent
— Residents had a lot of leeway if they missed their rent
— Residents were generally selected for their likemindedness/talent
— Residents stayed at the hotel for a good stretch of time, fostering a sense of community
— Short-term tourists and wealthy patrons helped keep the rest of the community afloat (like many of these communes)
— It was in Manhattan, not the middle of nowhere
I think it's still remarkably possible to create successful intentional communities. However, I think that being isolated with 100 people in the middle of Indiana is probably less tolerable (in the long term) than living in a communal hotel with 100 people while still living in an exciting city. It's less incestuous that way, and you're constantly being invigorated by new ideas from your next-door neighbours.
I like this story. My pet theory (after thinking about this for half an hour) is that the key is to keep the tight-knit community (selective entry probably helps), probably the internal governance structure, but drop the requirement of self-sufficiency. In fact, interaction with the "outside world" might well serve to more firmly anchor the group's identity.
I want one of these for software developers. Edit: and no, YC doesn't count. Sorry.
Thinking/Questions about this more for "software developers":
1) What would be the equivalent of a "painting"? (esp in the age of copypasta from stack overflow)
2) Who would the "owners"/"patrons"/"tourists" be?
3) How could this work internationally?
Some thoughts:
1) I don't really know. At first I was thinking "create a program that automates some task you could do with your computer" so it could allow for the mundane and complex, but the former is probably found as stack overflow questions. I know some forums use submit a pull request on git repo with a mod as a way in.
2) I was thinking that software engineers in relatively high paying gigs could be the "owners" who would in a sense subsidize maybe a nice apts somewhere in SE asia/ eastern europe where they themselves could vacation or hang out, or other engineers could live and pay "rent" (as well as all the necessary hacking of the legal/visa system) either in currency or maybe gigs with/for other engineers, companies and freelancer clients would be "patrons", or "tourists"
3) You can pretty much deploy code from anywhere in the world, but navigating the bureaucracy/exploitation (mostly looking at wage discrepancies) of traveling and working anywhere in the world isn't quite here yet. Something that feels transient like airbnb, but robust and minimizes the incentives to pollute "the commons".
But also good to keep in mind that such a system probably won't be free of what ails us all as humans.
The recurse center mentioned by the other poster seems like something in that direction, but seems very focused on a specific location for bringing people, where I think something like this could benefit from being able to be anywhere with subset of such people involved able to go from place to place or fixate as they see fit/things arise.
A 'school ship' model might work - A ship large enough to go from country to country while carrying some cargo and passengers. One could set it up so one is able to buy 'shares' in the company which translate to cabin and cargo space, or just pay by the voyage. That would create an atmosphere of a few people deeply invested in the project but also a steady stream of fresh faces and ideas.
I'm not sure what your point is re #1. I wouldn't try to translate the concept so literally.
Your ideas for ownership sound good, but another option would be a co-op. There's obviously all sorts of difficulties with this, but it seems possible. Also, there doesn't have to be just one. It can be customized per location, per group of founders, or per anything-else. We can let the variants fight it out in the best Darwinian fashion.
In your #3, are you talking about having the whole group roving around the world? At that point it seems like you're taking about something a lot more ambitious than I am.
I guess with #1 I was just thinking what would be the equivalent of a "painting", since that seemed to work for them.
With #3, I was thinking that maybe some people would want to be roving around the world, to different hubs that are all connected.
So instead of fighting it out with other similar yet competing(?) ideas, each hub would reinforce another with given resources available to people who are passing through or at a hub at a given time, yet still have the freedom to do their own thing.
Also, maybe something like this could avoid being too reliant on a given location (like NYC for the artists, or possibly what SF has become today) over time if a locations economics turn out to not be so in favor compared to other locations, as well as allowing for flexibility with others who cant/wont move to a single location/country.
What I take away from reading F.A.Hayek (particularly The Road to Serfdom and The Fatal Conceit) is that a community can keep itself going even when it's full of inefficiencies, so long as the members of the community all seem focused on the same goals.
This is why a sense of national community is strongest during wartime, when everyone is focused on winning the war. But once that emergency is gone, so is the common purpose. When the members no longer see the same goals, there will be no way to keep them all working in concert.
Perhaps in this Chelsea hotel, the group had sufficient focus because of their art.
Other commenters have mentioned a possibility of a religious element helping, as with the Amish. I don't think this is the case. For one thing, I don't see the Amish as a very distinct community (as opposed to culture); its margins are very fuzzy. And as a counterexample to the claim, I'd point to the Israeli kibbutzes, which I think we can interpret as religious because of their Israeli foundation (especially at the time, when Israel was very young), and were certainly failures.
Many people lack, or don't have enough of, the ability to deal with conflicts, emotions, unexpected outcomes, etc. Not to say that these things are always easy to deal with for anyone.
Advancement is also an infuriating process. Either there isn't enough opportunity to learn or develop the skills to advance, or the requirements to get someone or some organization to invest in you is difficult to obtain for a lot of people.
The maddening pursuit of self-interest makes people more discriminating in who to support and build up.
The way a lot of people put down others often tends to be very toxic and not everyone who is on the receiving end knows how to deal with that.
We definitely haven't tried everything possible to "get along". One thing for sure is that there is definitely advancement in this area led by thought leaders blogging and new trends such as the recent "triggered" and "safe space", the typical criticism by assholes like calling them "snowflakes", etc. And then someone will realize some new idea and the cycle will begin.
There is clearly a large amount of people who are deaf to these things, or perhaps it does reach them, just very slowly.
Education is so very important and yet we're gutting it here in America. I'd like to see more emphasis placed on teaching kids (and adults) how to deal with conflict with people and within themselves.
Most 'intentional' communities didn't fail and are still around after hundreds or thousands of years - they're called 'villages' and 'cities'.
Granted, not all were founded on ideological or philosophical principles, but many (if not most) were - some were christian settlements, some were people running away from poverty or some kind of banishment from their native communities, some were founded by idealistic explorers.
Forming a community based on drug fuelled inspiration is of course doomed to failure, because like it or not, a human settlement requires a certain 'machinery' set up which can sustain it - food production, energy, waste disposal, health care and so on - all of these need to be well planned ahead of time and resources (human or otherwise) allocated for each of these areas.
Another mistake that these communities make is turning away from technology and trying to live 'purely', based on the premise that technology in itself is somehow 'evil', which of course is not true, as that is a function of how people apply it to the world.
What if instead of avoiding technology, people in a community embraced it and actually developed new versions of it ?
How about a well-planned, energy-independent, self-driving electric everything, robots-everywhere high tech community of knowledge workers ?
Psychedelic buildings ? Fine, 3D print (or fabricate) them, while making them energy efficient.
Food ? How about building and fabricating plant-farming robots instead ?
Education? How about children participating in the design and development of the software and robotics developed by the community ?
Decision making: Through the software written by the community members.
All of this based on a sustainability and ecological ethos / leave no trace ethos.
Just a few pointers.
Current technology is probably not quite there yet, although it's maybe a couple of years away - and what better place to refine it than the community itself.
The 'community' technology, when refined enough, can then be replicated all over the world pretty easily.
An alternative would be 'town-as-a-service' kind of organisations - building and maintaining the tech stack of entire cities/communities, although it would totally rock if the community itself did this.
> Most 'intentional' communities didn't fail and are still around after hundreds or thousands of years - they're called 'villages' and 'cities'.
That doesn't count as an intentional community. Unless you are talking about very specific `villages` and `cities` that where created from the top for specific groups.
A sense of shared sacrifice strengthens community bonds. I would suggest that there is a signalling problem that needs to be solved ("we are all in this together, making this sacrifice") - in other words, an unforgeable way for community members to signal to each other that they are not free riders. If everyone knows that everyone is not a free rider, the community will be much stronger. I submit that this is the primary reason religious "intentional communities" with strict rules are much more likely to succeed than the generic "utopian community" ones. Without that sense of shared sacrifice, it is too easy for grifters and free-riders to glom on.
In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt cites evidence that intentional communities that have shared sacrifice without sacralising the acts or the principles behind them see no gains from the sacrifices demanded. Essentially, you need religious fervour or something similar to get the advantage of sacrifice.
I live in an intentional community. It is only 3 years old and not flourishing at all. The major problem is the benevolent dictator system and highly restricted rules.
I find reading these reports very interesting because I would like to find/join/build an actually successful village.
Current cities are highly regulated and high cost. All I want is my own plot of land(not a commune) with like minded neighbors who built their own houses, grow their own gardens, and work on technology. It seems like the only way to do that would be to cooperatively purchase land at split it up on ground leases, making it commune ish
You mention like-minded neighbors... even if everyone in your community is like-minded, your community property boundary touches properties owned by people who may not share your vision or ideals. Then you need to create a buffer zone around your community. But even still, and especially significant for communities that want to do farming, property beyond your control can do things that directly affect water flows into your property.
There are some eco village efforts going on around the world. The Tamera group in Portugal is fairly famous (and mentioned in the article), but it tends to draw a lot of attention due to it's _almost_ mandatory practice of non-monogamy. (And I challenge you to look through their photos and imagine being expected to have sex with some number of the other community members :P ).
Costa Rica seems to attract very eco-minded community efforts, and in fact much of their tourism is eco-related. You might find something interesting there.
There's a bit of a difference between a community of libertine/religious utopians to practice their ideals and ventures set up for (mostly) paid workers to operate trading outposts to yield sufficient profit to keep their wealthy and powerful investors satisfied...
I don't think that's a fair comparison, given the article discusses things like hippie communes. Baby boomer collectives are a far cry from groups like the Amish.
I was kind of disappointed by this article, it seemed very distant from the real flourishing intentional communities that exist today. Seems like the author did a little reading and that's about it.
If one is going to connect intentional communities to startups a good one to think about is the Factor E Farm that's part of the Open Source Ecology project [0]. The community is a hacker space for implementing and experimenting with machines for self sufficient communities. It might not be the best when considering intentional communities since the community supports the project.
Another community worth considering is called Dancing Rabbit [1] in rural Missouri, it was founded in the 90s by Stanford grads. Its model is that of an eco-village. Residents are economic free agents, many of whom free associate into a variety of co-ops. The land is owned by a trust and the rules the trust holds residents to place an emphasis on ecological stewardship. It has around 75 residents.
Twin Oaks [2] in VA by contrast is a classic collectivist community. Its modeled after the community described in Walden 2 by BF Skinner. The community is centrally planned and is income sharing, that is, residents work on business and chores for the community who receives the revenue, pays all expenses, and gives the individuals a small allowance. This community has been around since the 70s and has over 100 residents. Its businesses include hammock making, tofu making, book indexing and agriculture.
There is a huge selection bias in that statement - emergent systems often don't make it past the first opposing stimulus, so you're only considering the ones that evolve past a certain point.
I think that most communities (but specifically utopian communities, as the article discusses), like startups, aim for a "non-zero-sum" ideal -- that is, a way of making everybody happy.
But there's something about our existence that screams "zero-sum": there's scarcity in the universe, for one (a lot more hydrogen than lead, for example); there's scarcity in the Earth (a lot more iron than gold); there's scarcity in nature (mates are hard to find, not finding a mate means your genetic material doesn't propagate), heck there's even scarcity in our own lives (if I spend time studying math I won't have time to study music).
IMO failure is driven by this facade of non-zero-sum-ness crumbling and people becoming disillusioned.
So I've tried to change my mentality recently when building (or thinking about) social things. In a zero-sum universe, if someone has a lot of followers, someone else won't have any. If someone gets some benefit, someone else won't.
Socialism vs capitalism is a very weak analogy (the idea of scarcity and winners and losers goes far beyond economics), but I think there's some merit to it.
My point was that the (virtual) communities that fully embrace the non-zero-sum properties of computers usually fail because the outside norm of scarcity gets imposed upon them.
Some things are necessarily constrained. The electromagnetic spectrum, the atmosphere (in terms of pollution), land, and social capital are always going to be contested and you can't just make more.
Intentional communities, by and large, fail to recognize the many darwinian iterations of evolution modern societies have gone through over the years, where successful social organizations have overwhelmed their less-adapted brethren.
Simply put: the current way of organizing society is a pretty good plan for organizing a very, very complicated social mechanism full of smart, self-interested actors towards the common good. Is it fucked up still in many respects? Absolutely. Do you have a better idea? Highly unlikely. We've been working on this whole "getting along" thing for millennia, and we've tried pretty much every idea possible at one point or another.
There's a modern conceit that we're somehow smarter or better than previous generations, and that's very misguided. We're much better informed, certainly. The conventional wisdom, the collective mental schema regarding what's a good idea and what's not, that's improved dramatically. Not because you thought about it, but because a bunch of faulty social assumptions have gotten weeded out over the years. But people are pretty much the same as they've ever been.
This applies to everything, not just society. We see flaws in things, but don't realize the story behind them. We think they are oversights, or mistakes we can fix, and don't realize they are often times the result of a tradeoff to fix a more severe issue.
Just a few examples:
Tech: The NoSQL movement thought SQL databases were slow, so they stripped out a lot of the parts of an ACID database to make it fast. Some of those parts turn out to be important.
Government: We complain about regulations, because we don't remember how bad things were before them.
Medicine: Anti-vaxers think we don't need vaccines, because they never experienced the diseases they have eliminated.
I think of Uber and AirB&B as great examples of this, too; they bypass all sorts of rules and regulations we have put in place for transportation and housing, and at first they seem to be amazing. They are cheap, efficient, and provide great service. But as they grow, we start to notice more and more negative effects to society. These are the same negative effects that we put the regulations in place to address.
> Government: We complain about regulations, because we don't remember how bad things were before them.
Maybe, but sometimes regulations reflect a historical context that's no longer valid.
As technology changes, and as cultural mores evolve the circumstances which prompted a regulation may no longer be valid.
That isn't to say that the regulation is now doing more harm than good, but that if we came at it today as a fresh start, we might not choose that exact set of regulation.
To give a very extreme example, let's look at health-inspections for meat.
1. Was motivated by disease tainted meat being wide-spread in cities, with no way of tracking down bad producers, and no simple way for consumers to ensure their meat wasn't tainted before eating
2. Fast forward 100 years
3. The regulation is still beneficial but (a) simple cost-effective testing can be carried out by consumers in their homes or grocers before sales (b) the industry has become incredibly cohesive, with much more sophisticated logistics methods and a smaller number of producers.
Today, if we wanted to 'solve' the issue of tainted meat---the industry could self-regulate out of fear of government action, and consumers/grocers could spot check with relatively small overhead.
We might not end up with the same level of USDA oversight as we currently have---although we probably would end up with something.
It's tempting but wrong to believe that our regulations are exactly what we would have always thought out, in every circumstance, simply because they're currently still beneficial.
My experience has shown me that over time, someone will get away with as much as you let them. I.e. 50% of grocery store fish is not even the fish on the label.
So just because things are OK right now in the meat department.. take off regulations and wait 5 years, and someone will undercut by sneaking dog meat into ground beef, and then some people will die from it, and we will be sad and pass more regulations again.
I WANT freedom and less regulations. I do not trust for profit actors to deliver that for me.
On the other hand, if you want organic, grass-fed meat, you can get that at Whole Foods.
The the thing with regulations is that because they apply to everyone, every man and his dog (and his lobbyist) gets to have a say, and you end up with one size fits nobody.
Maybe it's better to avoid regulating any particular standard of quality, and allow people to buy and sell more or less anything they want so long as it's not misrepresented. Dog meat as ground beef is not cool, dog meat as dog meat, maybe that's ok?
Or the guy at Whole Foods will sell you dog meat and label it organic grass fed beef, because nobody is looking over his shoulder.
If your assumption is that nobody is going to try to cheat or cut a corner to make a buck then your system is not going to work in the long run. As your system grows the odds of having an asshole who cheats and ruins it for everybody approaches 1.
"All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
A better argument against (some) government regulations is that some of them were bought by industry to exclude competition, and were never meant to benefit consumers at all.
Those aren't the ones that get complained about the most though. It's the health and safety ones, ones that ensure that industries don't just externalize a lot of bad costs that get attacked the most.
Your argument seems to assume that health and safety regulations aren't lobbied for as anti-competitive, which they often are.
A chicken farm might be reasonably safe if one in 500 chickens are checked for illness or disease. Of course, it would be perfectly safe if every chicken were checked for illness and disease, and checked at every step of the distribution chain. Of course, there's a huge cost disparity between reasonably safe and perfectly safe, and it behooves the largest farms to push more towards perfect, as sure, the cost of chicken goes up, but it goes up across the board, limiting the ability of smaller farms to compete, thus giving a competitive advantage to larger farms.
To prevent against salmonella and other types of infection, Grade A eggs in America must be vigorously washed, treated with chemical sanitizer, rinsed, and then thoroughly dried. Is this for safety? Clearly, it's there to prevent infection.
To prevent against salmonella and other types of infection, Class A eggs in Europe must never be washed or cleaned in any way. Because washing reduces the shelf life of an egg, and because inadequate washing greatly increases risk, they outright ban farm or factory washing of eggs. Is this for safety? Clearly, it's there to prevent infection.
The net result is that we have a pretty high set of safety standards in both Europe and America, despite diametrically opposed means of getting there. The only real difference is that the cost of regulatory compliance for egg makers in America is much higher in America, and as the equipment for washing, chemically treating, rinsing and then drying eggs is expensive, it favors larger egg farms to smaller egg farms, and increases the capital requirements to enter the egg market commensurately.
Always a bad idea. Have you been to countries why there's very little govt regulation? To promote self-regulation is akin to saying that we don't need a "central" govt.
Yes, obviously I am not arguing "We should never make changes because everything we do now is for a reason and so we should keep doing it the same way"
I am just trying to point out that it takes a LOT of context to understand why things are the way they are. We often look at the superficial features of something, and immediately think we can do better.
We should change things, but we need to be extra vigilant in understanding WHY we are doing things the way they are before we change them, and have a plan for how to deal with all of the things the current method already does.
While generally true this iterative process created a huge amount of cruft and cargo cult, the best example of which is the common law system: Does it work? Absolutely, and surprisingly well at that. It's however also ridiculously Byzantine and can be quite inequitable.
These convoluted structures and systems increasingly break down because they mandate a common code for everyone to live by regardless of their respective ideas and ways of living. Brexit is a nice example of this. An entire country's future jeopardised because a majority at that particular moment voted by a thin margin that this might be a good idea.
Who are they to tell others how and where to live and work? Conversely, who am I to tell them how they should live their lives?
I don't have answers to these questions but I feel the answers lie at a local level and with decentralised structures rather than nation states.
A return to independent city-states is probably the future of society. Unfortunately we're currently going in a direction of a one world wide government
While I agree with your statement that independent city states are the future of governance in general, we are always going to require a broad coalition government. This is because actions taken in one place frequently spill over to another, and there needs to be a mechanism for redress in these circumstances. For example, a factory upriver dumping waste legally according to its municipal regulations affects everyone downriver of it. Additionally, there needs to be a check in place against tyranny by the majority at the local level.
I think a best case scenario would be popular-vote based local (metropolitan area) democracies, with a "world court" system that protects rights and arbitrates disputes between governments.
There can be no independent abstract "world court" because there is no military to back it. The closest we have is probably the united nations security council, which is composed of US, Russia, China, France, UK + 10 others that vary over time. These actors have varying interests which keep each other in check to some degree.
A world court doesn't require a military in a highly interdependent world. Economic sanctions are sufficient. A city state is going to require food and goods from other city states. If you go against the ruling of the world court, other city states refuse to provide those goods, and you are going to fall into line fairly quickly.
Another benefit of smaller independent city states is that it is easier to check their aggression. If raising a large army requires broad cooperation among city states, that greatly reduces the likelihood that such a force will come into being. This is because of the difficulty in coordination and the fact that multiple city states are unlikely to share the exact same interests, reducing their impetus to unite.
They may not be mutually exclusive, eg. you could have a system of a world-wide government whose only job is enforcing trade & property rights and providing physical security, while delegating responsibility for social mores & resident services to the city state.
Even more significant than societies sort of work as they are is the selection effect, whereby communities set up by and for people who don't like how society works are going to end up composed of people who tend to - at least at the stage of their life they join - be more opinionated about the way things ought to be and/or less capable of assimilating into and succeeding in conventional society. Some of those people are going to be difficult to integrate no matter what social system you devise.
Except the structure of society has shown to be extremely unstable, even over relatively short timeframes. In just the past few generations we had two major wars that rocked the world, and drastic changed the societies of many countries.
Modern society is not a compelling example of a stable local maxima that has survived the eons, it's a seemingly calm period for our portion of a historically chaotic system.
No way, we were field testing two alternate societal modalities, fascism and communism. Didn't work out, for different reasons.
Governments, yeah, they come and go, but the modern republic, rule of law, checks and balances, regulated capitalist, civil society state is currently the world champ, and is in the process of consolidating its place as the default structure for social organization. It takes generations for societies to iterate.
The current alternate modality is the tightly regulated non-democratic socialist/capitalist hybrid, a la China, which has done well but I think isn't going to go the distance, as they don't really have their failure mode worked out. When they hit a recession, as they inevitably will, how are they going to handle it? The real advantage of capitalism is reallocation of resources from ideas that have played out to the next set of ideas. You just can't manage that with a government-- stakeholders in old, bad ideas hold too much political influence and do not go gently into that good night.
>is in the process of consolidating its place as the default structure for social organization. It takes generations for societies to iterate.
Yes, and perhaps this will be the perfectly stable system that will stand the test of time. Or maybe we're due a few more iterations yet.
Your previous comment suggested that modern society had demonstrated some kind of evolutionary fitness that means it's not worth trying anything else. My point is that I don't see much to support that.
Uh, you live at the absolute pinnacle of human civilization. There has never been a period more peaceful, informed, just, or prosperous than right here, right now, today. Quantifiably so. There's no close second either. The fifties and sixties were unbelievably fucked up (the current American faux-nostaligic high water mark).
We could always do better though. And there's no reason to believe we won't. People are working on making a better world all the time. It's built into the system. Let's try your idea next, and if it fails, it goes in the trash with the others.
i'm wondering if the tighter control of information (i.e. the firewall) makes this alternate modality uniquely resilient to some types of failure.
it may not have the same upside potential but perhaps it can lumber along under its own momentum. maybe even create enough illusion of momentum to weather dips that might otherwise be more detrimental.
to the extent it might need to evolve to be more democratic it could do so in a way to give the illusion of choice but the freedom to choose between false options isn't much of a choice.
clearly i'm feeling a bit cynical after this election cycle. yikes.
anyway i thought your comment was interesting and it got me thinking.
I'm old enough to remember when Japan was gonna take over the whole world. They did great, by the by, but hit some real cultural problems and stalled. Still doing fine, but definitely plateaued. I'd expect China to do something like that, although I question whether their totalitarian state is going to be able to hold together if growth peters out. When a bad year is 4% growth, people are remarkably tolerant of the government doing whatever. In lean years, not so much.
And honestly, as bitchy and entitled as the American middle class is, they're the folks that demand progress and reform. Lacking a group of people with that level on initiative I think would be self-limiting in terms of what you could get out of your economy. They need to move up the value chain to keep going, and the kinds of people that do that are kind of pushy as a rule.
> When they hit a recession, as they inevitably will
Ignoring your other points, it's interesting to notice that the boom/bust business cycle of a market economy is something you are taking for granted as an attribute of all systems.
It's a bit disingenuous to suggest we are not smarter as a race. We have centuries of knowledge and information at our fingertips. If we choose to ignore that, then perhaps we are no smarter. But we shouldn't.
Surely, given a puzzle box we have the same chance of solving it. But when it comes to making grand choices for complex societal systems, we have much better information to guide us.
I think the parent comment wanted to teach us that we can make mistakes and we might not get it right even now, undoubtedly true. But we are equipped to make much better decisions, unless we completely ignore all history.
Perhaps history majors should have a more key role on policy making.
Furthermore, better tools can facilitate the implementation and maintenance of systems (social, governmental, entrepreneurial, what have you) that would have been unsustainable with the tooling of the past.
The Morris West [1] book, The Navigator, is an interesting read in this connection. A mixed group of people, headed by a charismatic and larger-than-life Prof., Gunnar Thorkild, of mixed ancestry (white + Polynesian), set out in a ship from Hawaii, using a secret map, to find a lost Polynesian island known to the ancient navigators - guided by an aged Polynesian relative (grandfather?) of Thorkild. They end up finding it, but during a storm, which wrecks their ship on the outer reef of the island. The rest of the book is about how they manage their lives there, their trials and tribulations (interestingly, the latter more due to human nature than nature :). (It's sort of an adult Robinson Crusoe type story with some differences.) Some sub-plots within the overall story. A pretty good read, IMO, and carries some lessons too, about leadership, human strengths and frailty, etc., including about facing death with dignity.
P.S. I think the stuff mentioned in the book (The Navigator), about ancient Polynesian techniques of navigating by the stars, the sun, the wind, the waves and the sea currents, might be true (though West only describes them briefly via the voice of the navigator (Thorkild's relative, Kaloni Kienga, after whom the book is named).
Why I think so, is because I remember reading an article in National Geographic, long ago, in which they wrote about this sort of stuff. They visited many places in the Pacific and South Seas, interviewed and discussed all this stuff with people (traditional Polynesian navigators) who had these skills, as did their ancestors, and wrote an article or series in NatGeo about it. I remember it being very interesting reading.
That's a pretty good argument, but I feel like in the last ~100 years or so something important has happened that didn't exist before: easy communication. I can talk to a huge number of people instantly and get news from all over the world. Since the printing press, new means of communication have changed societes dramatically. I'm not convinced that the structure we currently have had time to adapt to the new ways of communicating that the Internet provides.
In a way it's true, but that could be said about any innovation, any startup: 'Do you really think you have a better way of doing it than what has already been figured out?'
If people followed that principle, there would be no democracy, civil rights, rule of law, women's rights, most religions wouldn't exist, etc. Some of those innovations challenged what had been true for all of human history.
our society evolved from a tribal system based on scarcity,backward beliefs, and limited knowledge. While it still somehow works it will not survive a head-on collision with abundance, education, increased longevity and automation.
These communities that fail, do so mostly because in life most of the things we try fail. Just like with startups we will have some "unicorn" societies created, but first we have to fail. fail often and fail fast.
Unfortunately our civilization is not conductive to experimentation when it comes to society and culture. While we think we're tolerant and progressive, in reality we all are very conservative and intolerant, even if only subconsciously.
> We've been working on this whole "getting along" thing for millennia, and we've tried pretty much every idea possible at one point or another.
Fallacy. "Millenia" ago we lived in huts and had a life expectancy under 30. We had sticks and stone lances. Now we have computers and nuclear weapons. Less 150 years ago modern science started in its earnest. The literally world-changing implications of technology cannot possibly be overstated. So the idea that we've not managed to fix society in the last, say, 3000 years of trying completely ignores the fact that the last 200 have transformed life to the point of making it unrecognisable, and the next 50 will do so surely as well. The impact of things like post-scarcity, AGI, or fusion power, make that point completely moot.
>"Millenia" ago we lived in huts and had a life expectancy under 30.
I can't stand this particular misunderstanding of life expectancy. Pre-industrial societies weren't "Logan's Run", it's just that infant mortality drags the average down. If you substitute "life expectancy at birth" (the usual meaning) with "life expectancy at 5 years of age" (meaning people who survived infancy and toddler years), life expectancy looks pretty similar to the present.
And I can't stand this argument. First, it is false: even life expectancy at 5 years of age was way worse than it is today, from 47 at age 10 in ancient Greece/Rome, to 64 at age 21 in English nobility in the Late Medieval, to give a few examples. Today it's over 80 for your average citizen of the developed world. Second, why on earth should we discount infant mortality? High infant mortality has a terrible impact on societies. It's completely arbitrary to disregard.
A good book on this theme is Matt Ridley's "The Evolution of Everything", which argues that social institutions are generally a lot more evolved and a lot less designed than people realise, and that we forget this at our peril.
The problem I see with these communities is that they never manage to achieve prosperity. The best of them sort of get by, but none of them are actually rich, or anywhere close to it. I think that points to some fundamental problem in what they are doing.
Are there any alternate communities that have actually had that as a goal? If not, you can hardly count that as a failure.
Most alternative communities were set up to explicitly de-emphasize the goal of material wealth in exchange for emotional, religious or environmental wealth.
The problem is the definition of prosperity. How much and what do you want or need to prosper? How much dependency will you accept? How much maintenance risk?
Quick prosperity has usually been achieved by distribution of the cost elsewhere.
The main goal of a community is some degree of sustainability, which strictly conflicts with ultimate profit and prosperity.
And if each community tries to prosper you get hard interactions at the edges, including equivalent of tribal or trade wars.
This is partly why the model does not scale, especially in the modern world.
Hierarchical models are open though to corruption if not handled carefully, and subject to alienation of the leaders.
Conventional economic theories fail to make a useful practical distinction between value creation and resource/wealth enclosure and monopolisation. (This is deliberate - you need to know about Henry George to understand why.)
An updated scientific economics would highlight that distinction instead of attempting to obfuscate it.
I suspect it's harder to be corrupt if you're generating real social value, and relatively easy to be corrupt when you're simply appropriating value tokens.
I think this is what they were referring to[0] in part:
"Mason Gaffney, an American economist and a major Georgist critic of neoclassical economics, argued that neoclassical economics was designed and promoted by landowners and their hired economists to divert attention from George's extremely popular philosophy that since land and resources are provided by nature, and their value is given by society, land value – rather than labor or capital – should provide the tax base to fund government and its expenditures.[90]"
Well, that's just not true. Though certainly not the norm, some of these communities have done really well:
- Yogi Tea was started by 3HO which was a network of Ashrams in the 70s, today they do tens of millions of dollars in sales.
- Oneida Flatware has its origin in the Oneida Community, a 19th century free-love sect in New York State, and they're still one of the largest silverware brands.
- The Bruderhof Communities run the Community Playthings company, a multi-million dollar furniture operation.
Those are just the ones that come to mind. Interestingly they are all examples of religious groups. I'd love to know of examples that are not.
To the contrary, prosperity has been a problem for some of them. The Israeli Kibbutz movement, for example, experienced a lot of tension as a result of their successful businesses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz#Economics
The reality of running a business tends to conflict with peoples ideals.
> The problem I see with these startups is that they never manage to achieve profitability. The best of them sort of get by, but none of them are actually rich, or anywhere close to it. I think that points to some fundamental problem in what they are doing.
Replaced "these communities" with "startups" and "prosperity" with "profitability". Statement remains just as true.
It seems to me as if many communities just get by because their members continuously invest in them, by providing money that is not really earned through the life in the community.
Because the further you are away from the original members, the further away you are from the people who did a lot of the work to create the community in the first place.
As the community approaches its peak, every new member gets to enjoy the increasingly polished community, but lacks the respect needed for the work required to get that polish.
Eventually, the inmates take over the asylum, and the original members leave.
The reasons given: "capital constraints, burn-out, conflict over private property and resource management, poor systems of conflict mediation, factionalism, founder problems, reputation management, skills shortage, and failure to attract new talent or entice subsequent generations"
Just an opinion having spent a few months on a few in rural NC: Hippies are well meaning, but generally bad at the logistical/business angles to running these within a broader state environment, i.e. county/city zoning, fundraising, banking concerns, ownership legalities, etc.
Yup, just like many very passionate, motivated entrepreneurs. They have the vision and maybe the charisma, but definitely also the drive, to get the thing in motion and collect some participants. But just as the essay pointed out, once the organization grows beyond a certain size and maturity, a more business-like leader takes over.
And we have plenty of tech startup examples of what happens when that charismatic visionary (non-businesslike) leader fails to recognize when it's time to step aside...
Consider what makes a community succeed in the first place, and what examples of successful and failed communities there are.
Travel through much of the rural and rustbelt United States, for example, and you'll find thousands of failing communities, in the sense that quality of life, opportunity, population, and social infrastructures are declining.
The fundamental premise of a community is that it provides a basis for livelihood, generally on the basis of solving some problem of interest to both the inhabitants and those with whom they trade: rasing of crops or other agricultural products, providing extractive resources, access to transportation or communications routes or hubs, including ports, crossroads, railways, or trading centers.
And that's after taking care of the basics: fresh drinking water, disposal of wastes, adequate food supply, shelter, protection from elements and enemies.
Facilitating productive human interactions, most especially trade, industry, development of technology or science, financial services, and the like.
Or providing for social welfare functions: education, healthcare, defence, organisational acumen.
An "intentional community" is one, generally, formed on the basis of some idea, and frequently an idea at odds with orthodoxy. Within any advanced system, most deviations from the norm are maladaptive, which is to suggest that most ideas aren't all that good. So there's that.
Heading off into the desert to pursue some idealised society starts off with several strikes against you: no commerce, poor means of support, and an insular society. This isn't certain doom (the Mormons, after all, did colonise Utah), but it's an uphill fight. The Mormon emphasis on industry is probably among the success factors.
I think the discussion is missing the signs of intentional communities around us, that we simply don't recognise as such. Colleges and universities are little more than communities based on ideas themselves, and whilst dynamic and not entirely corresponding to the notion, aren't so far from the idea. I'd argue that every city, town, or village, is in a sense an intentional community based on the idea of forging a livelihood, which is the distillation of what it takes to exist and sustain a community. That might be a good idea to start with.
And, as I'd noted to start with, there's no assurance such establishments will continue or prosper either.
The intentions are too defined for people to get any satisfaction from actually living them out any longer than it takes to prove that such an intention can be carried out.
"Activism Or Escapism: Making Sense of 21st Century Communes"
by M. Jade Aguilar has a lot of references. Text seems to be paywalled, but maybe you can find what you need via Google Books' snippets ...
Mennonites, Amish etc. are 'intentional' and have in reality fairly 'anti capitalist' ideals (though not framed in those terms).
I know it's not the authors intent - but they are similar and should be a basis of comparison to grasping why some work and some don't.
These traditional communities are highly authoritarian (as some hippie communities often are), but they're maybe 'culturally authoritative' instead of individualistically. By that I mean - social or religious orthodoxy 'sets the rules' as opposed to 'some guys word' or a 'loosely agreed upon set of rules with little foundation'. At least in the former, there's a degree of objectivity, however good or bad you may judge those rules to be. In short - very strongly traditional/culturally conservative mindset helps to define a set of behaviours and attitudes that people stick with, and as long as they do, it keeps going.
We have many near my hometown, very pleasant people. I'm sometimes jealous and wish I could chill with them for a few months.
The author neglects to note the most famous, successful and longevitous example: Israel.
Millions of Jews followed Moses into the Sinai desert to build an intentional community over 3,000 year ago and the project is still going today. Even more remarkably, this community grew out of a single family. Most of the intentional community projects of the 19th Century are explicitly modeled on this.
> Millions of Jews followed Moses into the Sinai desert to built an intentional community over 3,000 year ago and the project is still going today
That absolutely did not happen. If anything like the Exodus as written happened -- and there are plenty of reasons to doubt that it did -- it didn't involve millions of people, a number which the Bible doesn't even claim and which would be implausible for the Hebrew population in Egypt at the time.
You are correct that that number doesn't appear in the Bible, it's extrapolated from the count of 600,000 which only included males over the age of twenty.
Your source does not, in fact, contend that, it takes the number of adult males literally, reports the larger figures as extrapolations of the total population from it, including a specific figure of around 3 million in the Exodus out of 15 million Jews (about twice the population of modern Israel) that were in Egypt at the time of the Exodus.
There being 3 million Jews in Egypt at any time that would fit the Exodus is fairly implausible; 15 million well exceeds all estimates I've seen of the plausible total population of Egypt at any such time.
Now, certainly, that number shouldn't be taken literally, and there's good reason to doubt whether the outline of the story beyond the number should be, either, which is why it makes not to cite it as a historical example of, well, anything other than a religious myth.
What methods do you use to estimate the plausible population of ancient civilizations?
Most secular academics do see the Exodus as legendary, but not mythical.
You've heard of the Hyksos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyksos
Striking parralells . . .
This is where Wikipedia really fails. It makes a statement with huge implications, like:
A century of research by archaeologists and Egyptologists has found no evidence which can be directly related to the Exodus captivity and the escape and travels through the wilderness
Which dismisses a "century of research" based on a single little citation:
Meyers 2005, p. 5.
Which upon visiting the book, provides the same blanket statement at the bottom of the page, and is itself a citation to yet another external resource.
Did you even bother to investigate the "lack of evidence" claims yourself, or did you just assume the entire black hole of citations was correct?
Well the jews we're unique that they combined the power of a religious community and religion in general(religion do activate core psychological mechanisms among humans, and a good way to inherit ideals to children) together with being extremely closed to the outside world, both because because they choose so, but this was also forced on them through history, most strongly embodied in the holocaust, one major reason for the existence a Israel as the place where most Jews live.
And as a religion, lasting 3000 years isn't that unique. Christianity and buddhism are very old too.
Quote: "Duhm, heavily influenced by Marxism and psychoanalysis, came to see material emancipation and interpersonal transformation as part of the same project."
Hmm ... Marxism and psychoanalysis? I honor this person's idealism and commitment to principles, but these two topics aren't remotely scientific -- they aren't meaningfully tested against reality before being applied. And apart from not being reality-tested in advance, they both have terrible public track records in cases where people went ahead and tried to apply them.
It's only the second paragraph of the article, and the reason has already been revealed. This issue can be summarized as, "Before jumping into a lake, first make sure it's not frozen."
I spent time growing up in a couple of different 'intentional communities', both of which are dying a kind of slow death for similar reasons (as are many others that I am aware of).
These communities were founded by groups with particular sets of shared ideals. Shortly after being founded they started to welcome new members - offering a share in the assets of the community in return for labour and commitment. This generally worked well.
The problem is that as these people approach retirement they begin to realise that the community and its assets are all they have in the way of a retirement fund (sometimes also a modest private fund as well but their share of the land they live on is usually their most significant asset). This realisation is usually enough to stop or slow the practice of giving new members a share in the community's assets. This in turn makes joining the community less attractive.
On top of these financial concerns, there is the lack of shared ideology from one generation to another. The children that grew up in these communities prefer to go off and live their own life instead of carrying on with their parents dreams.
I am only aware of a couple of communes here in NZ that appear to be making this generational transition successfully (most communes here are approaching 50 years old, having been started in the 70s by people in their 20s).