Community: When children grow up, their values and beliefs may differ drastically from their parents'.

I have wondered about the long term stability of intentional communities. I found a book in Google Books which documented several examples of communities that failed. It was very pessimistic. That's why I like the Diana Leafe Christian books - and yes, I know I keep advertising it - because they talk about both the failures and the successes, and it's not just vague and general, but instead, very specific in describing techniques used to create successful, long-lasting communities.

I've always thought that communities change over generations partly because new children grow up with different values and beliefs than their parents had. I wonder about a mechanism for keeping the community stable, without just suppressing new ideas. I imagine giving young adults a ceremony that asks them whether they really want to remain part of the community, now that they're old enough to have some idea what they want. (For instance, the Amish baptize people in adulthood, not childhood.) They can temporarily leave, and come back later on after seeing the world. Or they can leave permanently, and join the mainstream world. Or they can leave, but stay nearby and create another community of their own with slightly different values and goals, and that community will cooperate with the old community, yet still be free to do its own thing.

With the voting system, one group of people KIND OF gets what they want, while a whole other large group of people doesn't get what they want, or gets something they don't want. (In reality, even the 'winning' voters will see their plan changed as it moves through the bureaucracy and is eventually written into a law, and even then it might not be enforced or implemented the way they want.) Over and over again, laws and decisions are made which are disliked by a large group of people who don't agree with them. The laws apply to everybody. And you can't do anything about it because you were born here, and the whole society was already set up before you were born. Your only choice is to leave the country, because there are so many bad laws now that you personally have no chance of getting all of them fixed.

DLC's books describe other methods of making community decisions, not just majority voting.

I'd like to explicitly teach community-building knowledge to children as part of their basic education. It would make them feel more empowered to change the world, so that they don't just get frustrated and give up whenever they see how hopeless it is to try to vote for the government to do what you want it to do.

The communities exist like tiny landlocked countries surrounded by a larger, hostile nation. I call it hostile because they still force you to pay taxes and comply with zoning laws, and if anybody snitches or has a grievance against you or a community member, the IRS, Drug Enforcement Agency, secret agents (like the ones who infiltrated Ed and Elaine Brown's group of friends and captured them for tax evasion), helicopters, tanks, Child Protection Services, etc will eventually show up. Somebody interfaces with the hostile surrounding nation by dealing with government paperwork and bureaucracy, but the community can be set up so that members of the community are partially shielded from directly dealing with government all the time. They can talk to their internal community associations and get advice from them instead of talking directly with government agencies, at least for some types of issues.

All communities have a 'dropout rate,' the percentage of people who decide to leave. But in the mainstream community, it's harder to leave, it's not easy to really know or understand what you're trying to get away from or where you can go to find something better, and you don't know how to create a place that works the way you want it to work. It's possible to move around and find places that have slightly better conditions.

But it helps a lot to live in a community where they have a focused, specific, explicitly written statement of their shared values, beliefs, and goals. It's easily accessible to anyone, all of the time, because frequent community meetings require your participation, and you will always be focused on those shared rules and goals. In a small, focused community, you can't avoid being conscious of the community's rules. If you decide to leave, you'll know the reasons why you're leaving, what specifically you want to get away from, and you might have an idea of what specifically you want to see done instead. You might be less likely to just vaguely drift around not knowing what you want, like people do when they get 'lost' in the mainstream world. Living in a community and participating in its government gives you a better feeling for what you want done and how to do it.

I don't have a lot of time left to write...

Communities and cultures can get corrupted from within, which happened over a period of centuries in this country. Even an intentional community which starts out pretty focused can change over time. But you always know that you can start another one if you can't fix the first one. And again, DLC's books give examples of long-lasting communities that are working well. I'd like to see more examples of subcultures and subcommunities that lasted for hundreds of years - most of the examples are things that started maybe 30 years ago - but still, it's a mostly positive and optimistic constructive approach to the subject of building communities. Not just stories that reinforce the message 'All intentional communities fail, so don't even bother.'

I want community because I am preparing to start a family and raise children. I want my children to have a future. I see economic instability and collapse, and cultural corruption, and bad health, getting worse and worse in the mainstream's future. I see the mainstream world still has taboos on certain subjects like electronic mind control. I want a community that protects my children against those things, and protects their children as well, so that they have a safe world and can be happy and healthy.

one of these days i'll have to talk about julian simon and the ultimate resource again: it was another mostly optimistic book. i'm disagreeing with some parts of that book now, a few years after reading it, but its overall optimistic spirit is part of all of my assumptions about the future.

...have to go to work now.