North American Phalanx
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
As usual, people are the problem:
1. Everything becomes politics. All the bad things you hear from neighborhood associations are replicated in communes in different forms. Negotiating and deciding everything together is nice until differences become too big to handle.
2. Introverts or retreating people are sidelined. Because everything is politics, those who network and are good at influence get all the power. Unpopular people don't have equal power. Popular people have excess power.
3. If you work for the commune for 20 years and suddenly things go sour on you, you leave out with noting.
Everyone who want's to build commune or equal society should start with THE TYRANNY of STRUCTURELESSNESS by Jo Freeman aka Joreen https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm It details power relations within radical feminist collectives,
You can't have a tight community like this unless the members are all homogeneous in traditions, beliefs, values, etc. This was doomed from the start.
They were all once tight communities "homogeneous in traditions, beliefs, values, etc." that eventually split (though perhaps they weren't still "tight" communities by the time of those splits).
In any case, people are good at finding things to disagree about--and groups of people in elective association are good at fracturing over disagreements.
Citation needed.
I partially disagree. I think you are assuming a set of specific circumstances that often apply but are not universal. I think it depends on what you want to use your freedom to do.
On a timeline measured in months or more there is no anonymity anywhere. If whatever it is you do is so socially unacceptable as to be a problem people will take notice. What changes is the criteria you need to meet to become a problem and how big of a problem you need to be to get attention.
My observation is that diversity increases freedom and community resources available to enforce social norms decrease freedom. dense cities are high in both, rural areas are low in both.
So in the city it is usually much harder to be the tall nail but if you are the tall nail you will get hit much harder and in BFE you're probably a problem but not a big enough one for it to be worth the community's resources to go after.
This is why various religious and political fundamentalists/extremest communities tend to wind up living in a compound somewhere rural (they're big enough and violate norms enough to be noticed anywhere, best to go somewhere the community probably can't justify harassing you too much) and when they do get bothered it's often by the state not the local community/government.
(if it's not obvious, I'm defining freedom as "the ability to do things that most other people don't like without bad things happening to you").
Sure. I didn't mean anything illegal or inmoral, just different enough from the norm as to make the usual idiots to tell you. If you don't know what I'm talking about, chances are you haven't lived in a small community.
Some things are more tolerated in the city but the trade-off is that the things that are not tolerated are addressed by the government (which means fines that will make you destitute if you don't step in line and men with guns who will put you in a cage if you don't pay).
By contrast you can usually tell the small town busybodies to pound sand and unless you're actually negatively affecting a lot of people with whatever it is you do then it's probably a non-issue. Those people are always crying wolf about things and nobody takes them seriously because everybody knows that most of their complaints are unfounded or not serious enough to be worth dedicating the community's limited resources (at a small enough town level the distinction between private action and government action does get a bit blurry) to doing anything about it.
I find cities anything but anonymous -- you're always around people, there's no privacy in the sense that there's always someone observe you. (ie, you're never alone in the woods)
So, you have at least two definitions of anonymity:
- a lack of social pressure due to lack of interest, and interaction with (mostly) strangers
- the ability to escape from observation for brief periods
People that doesn't know you is as if they weren't observing you. So it's more or less something in the middle :m
"Jobs were compensated at three levels, with exhausting or repugnant jobs earning a premium and light and attractive jobs being docked a penalty"
Imagine a world where actors, and white collar workers made less than people who dug ditches and cleaned up refuse.
Digging ditches and garbage collection are compensated poorly because of the surplus of people willing to do whatever to make ends meet.
The second point, the surplus of people willing to do whatever to make ends meet - this is shrinking as more people expect to be able to survive without working, but also a fair point.
Any ideas or issues that are discussed today were discussed in the past - or at least similar ideas.
Something worth remembering next time you head for the poll booth.