Like startups, most intentional communities fail. Why?
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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).
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 suspect that is true. Passing on preferences is harder than passing on morals.
From that perspective, saying that religion makes this easier is a bit tautological.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for clarifying!
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.
[0] https://medium.com/@bagelboy/make-america-bohemian-again-de8...
I want one of these for software developers. Edit: and no, YC doesn't count. Sorry.
It's not exactly the same, but there is the Recurse Center (formerly Hacker School).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Company
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company
Most notable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company
Peter Thiel Further clarifies this: https://www.wired.com/2014/09/run-startup-like-cult-heres/
I think this insight/mode of analysis is most valuable to founders.
Renowned urban planner Andrés Duany has praised the design of these communities. [2]
Some kinds of intentional communities survive. Other kinds almost never do.
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.
[0] http://opensourceecology.org/about-factor-e-farm/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecotopia
it attempts to solve all of man's biological, emotional, and spiritual needs via a techno-eco master plan.
top 10 book on my list. enjoy
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.
Failure of communities that embrace this fact is usually brought on by external entities that cling to the norm of scarcity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"Whole Foods’ expensive, ‘humanely treated’ meat is a ‘sham,’ PETA lawsuit claims" ~https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/2...
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.
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.
Oooops mardi gras & carnivals.
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.
Also known as Chesterton's Fence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
Also known as, "X is broken and we're fixing it."; "Building an X that doesn't suck."
cringe
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edited for grammar and re-wording.
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.
But: We do have better tools.
And better tools combined with the same level of smartness can give you better or at least different outcomes.
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.
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.
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.
Most alternative communities were set up to explicitly de-emphasize the goal of material wealth in exchange for emotional, religious or environmental wealth.
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.
"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]"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George#Socialization_of_...
Replaced "these communities" with "startups" and "prosperity" with "profitability". Statement remains just as true.
- 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.
The reality of running a business tends to conflict with peoples ideals.
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.
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...
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.
I'd be interested in reading about it.
The Fellowship for Intentional Community is a great resource for the latter, see http://ic.org/
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.
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.
I'm guessing this was an intentional omission.
Please don't assume bad intentions
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?
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.
And lots of people contend the number is not meant to be interpreted literally: http://www.aish.com/atr/Number_of_Jews_at_Exodus.html
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.
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 . . .
And as a religion, lasting 3000 years isn't that unique. Christianity and buddhism are very old too.
Mormons are one such community.
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."