They manifest characteristics that enable stable communities. Sex within marriage, no divorce, marriage and sex for procreation, reliance on extended family and local community, no industrialization/urbanization, social isolation, religion as unifying principle. Hippy communities on the other hand tended to be built around sexual promiscuity or at least lack boundaries around sex and marriage, and subsequently suffer commensurate relationship/family breakdown. Not to mention that hippy communes are converts to agrarian life and when the going gets tough there’s no millennia of continuity to rely on but there is the memory of the city and the supermarket.
Do Amish women have the ability to attain financial independence? If not, I would add that to the list.
All evidence says no, they don't. Their financial situation is very tied to the entire community.
> Sex within marriage, no divorce, marriage and sex for procreation, reliance on extended family and local community, no industrialization/urbanization, social isolation, religion as unifying principle.
All of these things have been present in the most war-torn and unstable societies (ex: much of the Middle East, some of the areas around present-day China and Russia).
> Hippy communities on the other hand tended to be built around sexual promiscuity or at least lack boundaries around sex and marriage, and subsequently suffer commensurate relationship/family breakdown.
There are cultures that existed for hundreds of years without the concept of monogamous marriage. Monogamy doesn't guarantee familial stability, nor does promiscuity. Domestic partnership (what we would call marriage) was a familial and economic relationship, not always a guarantee of sexual exclusivity.
The second-largest empire in history, the Mongol Empire, had an enormous amount of polygamy and sexual promiscuity.
The Ottoman Empire, Ethiopian Empire, and many other large (and long-lasting) empires practiced polygamy.
Even ignoring all of that, in the US, most people cheat on their significant others[1]. There's no reason to think that's a modern phenomenon, either.
1. https://today.yougov.com/topics/society/articles-reports/202...
No, they have been condemned for females and tolerated for the more powerful.
Regardless of whether sex was monogamous in most ancient societies, it was nonetheless ceremonialized, (somewhat) feared and (to the extent possible) regulated. The rules changed, but the presence of rules was consistent. It's not easy to find a culture that took sex as lightly as ours. But it's also not easy to find a culture that believed the Earth orbits the Sun. Ancient cultures often believed in some form of vitalism and had spiritualistic beliefs about the consequences of sexual activity. Those practices are not so easily mimicked by converts raised in the atomic age.
From your article:
>88% of women and 73% of men say kissing another person while in a monogamous relationship is cheating
It doesn't follow that most people actually have sex outside their exclusive relationships.
I would agree that the post you replied to places an excessive emphasis on sex. Hippie communes that I've examined often failed to effectively manage expectations regarding the work required and the quality of life that could be achieved.
My ancestors are Mennonites. I visited them in Missouri when I was fifteen. There is something appealing about their lifestyle, but after experiencing it for a couple of weeks, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't choose it.
Classical Greece springs to mind. Possibly high Roman culture also.
Pax Mongolica was a thing.
OP was talking about stability, not oppression. The Amish are oppressive, though not seemingly in a brutal way. Many societies with similar values to the Amish were also extremely oppressive.
Regardless, I gave examples of incredibly brutal societies that valued monogamous marriage and sex for procreation. My whole point is that these variables have nothing to do with whether a society is stable, but it's also true that they have nothing to do with whether a society is nice to live in.
Yeah, and then they died out.
Did any survive?
I forget how many wives the Emir of Dubai has had-a few, simultaneously. From what some of his ex-wives have said, he’s an abusive husband, but Dubai sure survives. And while most marriages in Dubai are monogamous, I’m sure he’s not the only man in Dubai with multiple simultaneous legal wives.
I think the argument is that putting constraints on individual sexual freedom promotes social stability in the long-run; the existence of constraints is more important than their precise details.
Think about it. Technology has left these people a literal century-plus behind. The longer the Amish exist, the higher the rate of retention will be.
Furthermore, once you leave the Amish community, you are forever renounced by your family and friends. So you're left adrift without any support in a world that has left you behind.
This leads to the question you seem to have ignored. Is longevity itself a positive trait? If an abusive cult existed for hundreds of years, would you call it a success? Hacker News readers should place a higher value on innovation and less on blind faith in tradition, in my opinion.
https://abcnews.go.com/2020/amish-teens-tempted-drop/story?i...
Im not going to argue with you because its just going to be anecdotal, but I can tell you that the kids are not brainwashed if thats what you're referring to. The "shunning" is also exaggerated. It looks like you just watched "Amish mafia" on TV. Most stay Amish because it really isn't a bad system at all.
They use plenty of technology, its just approved by the community after careful consideration.
They have their problems but their focus on the family is vastly superior to most of the modern day degeneracy devoted to chasing whatever fleeting pleasure is popular at the moment. They will be around for a very very long time.
This is not true. Watch Devil's Playground for counter-examples.
Most/many of them were founded by 1 (sometimes 2) relatively wealthy individuals who had the means (often familial) to acquire land and do the initial capital purchases necessary to get things off the ground. When/if these individuals lose interest in the commune, let alone leave, the implicit agreement that bound the community together starts to fall apart.
The communities that have survived for decades after being founded in the 68-75 period almost uniformly do not have this property. Twin Oaks (VA) is perhaps the prime example.
You could cite The Farm (TN) as a counter-example, but that would mostly be a diversion - The Farm survived because its founder (Steven Gaskin) never lost interest in or left the commune.
Comparatively we can meet people who lived in failed hippy communes, but the successful ones aren't likely to interact with you.
Is a temporary commune even a failure? Is a long lived one necessarily a success?
Are there 50 year old hippie communes we haven't heard of?
Yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farm_(Tennessee)
There are probably others too.
And then of course, the kibbutzim in Israel, though almost all of them have radically transformed themselves since they were founded.
They didn't fall apart, exactly. They're still living as Amish and they're moving to be closer to their families:
> “We wanted there to be an Amish community here, but seems like everybody Amish is more from Ohio or Pennsylvania, where there are more trees,” Rudy Borntreger, the community’s bishop, or elder, explained. “I think it's so open, nobody wants to join us. Now more people decided to move back to Iowa and Minnesota, so kind of for unity's sake.”
The amish men actually do back breaking work, which instill a sense of sharing. They also organize in locked couples, smaller structures more efficient to avoid drama, and focus on reproduction: the hippies cant reproduce, they cant even focus on one child, let alone agree on who will have to be responsible for parenting.
The idea the hippies had was that all structure was stupid. The idea the Amish have is that there s only one old structure worth living by. Ofc the Amish will survive and the hippies dillute in chaos: the first preserve entropy to a minimum, the second pushes it to a maximum.
There's an even simpler way to describe it: the goal of the hippies didnt seem to be self preservation of their structure, while the Amish have an absurd obsession with it.
What are you basing that claim on?
They don't show it happens more often compared to the rest of society. And with the exception of NPR (somewhat), I find your sources questionable.
I'm asking you to backup your claim and you interpret that as offense?
> young people in isolationist authoritarian communities are literally more trapped than victims in the greater society.
I'd say victims of sexual abuse find themselves trapped and isolated in general. As to whether Amish victims are more trapped than non-Amish victims, I haven't seen any evidence to point one way or the other, so I won't make a conclusion about that.
You are leveling non-trivial claims against some folks so you need to offer commensurate evidence to substantiate those claims.
There's also a century of history of large kibbutzim in Israel that are somewhat religious but fundamentally organized around agriculture or industry.
Israel has religious and secular kibbutzim as well.
Some hippy communes failed, or just decided to break up, but religious communes fail as well.
People absolutely require a system of metaphysics. It is one of the most basic and natural needs of mankind; it is how all men come to account for the world and their existence in the world. People in general have little time for philosophy, so a folk metaphysics must be simple and easy to understand, and must be connected to a straightforward system of moral principles.
Communal hippie living is a lifestyle that one typically grows out of.
The Amish -- like the Hasidic Jews, and like various other religious movements -- are an essentially metaphysical community. The metaphysical principle comes first, and the rest follows. The way they live life is wholly on account of how they interpret their religion's moral principles and strictures.
It's easy to leave one lifestyle for another. Not so easy to leave a religion that you were raised in, and which you have built your entire world-view around. There's a certain IQ threshold for that, as it requires the de novo construction of a new metaphysics.
I am sure that a lot of atheists are flattered hearing this, but come on, they heard about it online, or even from the community's conniptions about outsiders. For that matter "what if what I see with my eyes is what is real" does not take a big I.Q. to think of.
The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness.
I'd be surprised if our eyes give us a truthful perception of reality. They give us a functional understanding that allows us to thrive here but nothing more.
(And saying "IQ" when you meant "intelligence" is a sign of a midwit.)
Yes, I agree totally.
That IQ threshold isn’t very high as witnessed by the proliferation of supposedly novel midwit metaphysics propounded on the Internet.
“It’s all random and emergent man” isn’t any kind of impressive intellectual construct.
Um, you might want to check the average IQ for Ashkenazi Jews, Hassidic Jews are primarily Ashkenazi.
> People in general have little time for philosophy, so a folk metaphysics must be simple and easy to understand
Yah, it's quite clear you know basically nothing of Judaism if you think their metaphysics are "simple and easy to understand".
That’s not to say there isn’t value in a lifestyle like this. But it requires a lot of effort that many people either don’t want to or cannot put in.
Amish culture is not all that different than general American culture structurally. Communes are.
The Amish aren't getting a lot of recruits, so the folks that are there were born, raised, and indoctrinated, which also helps with sticking.
Only after it has worked for a few generations can you know one is sustainable.
Amish communities also aren't self sufficient though. They'll happily sell and buy goods with outsiders and even sell amish furniture via websites (not sure if they use an intermediate). A ton shop at the Costco near me.
[1] https://medium.com/the-collector/10-rules-you-had-no-clue-am...