Highlights From The Comments On Liberalism And Communities

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[Original post: Should Strong Gods Bet On GDP?]

1: Comments About The Theory
2: Comments About Specific Communities
3: Other Comments

Comments About The Theory

Darwin writes:

I think you may (*may*, I'm not sure) be vastly underestimating how many people are in some form of nontraditional tight-knit community.

Notice that many of the communities you list are things you've directly personally encountered through your online interests or social circle. Most people have never heard of libertarian homesteaders or rationalist dating sites, perhaps you have also never heard of the things most other people belong to.

For my part, I have been part of a foam combat ('boffer') organization since college. You may want to say 'that's not a community, that's just a hobby', but the people in this sport form a strong community with tight bonds outside the game itself. Not only do I go to practices twice a week, I have 2 D&D games and 1 board game night every week with mostly members of the community, members of the community are my friends that I go out to movies and dinners with, play video games with voice chat on Discord with, talk to online in Discord servers and web forums and group chats, go to parties with and gossip about with other community members. Aside from attending over a dozen weddings of community members (mostly to other community members), I've served as best man for 2 members and wedding officiant for 2 other members. The sport itself has houses, guilds, and fighting units, all with their own ethos, credos, goals, activities, and hierarchies; it has knighthoods and squireships, it has awards for arts and crafts and community service. The sport has regular camping events that end up looking like temporary compounds of hundreds to thousand+ members, lasting from a weekend to a week. We may not have a singular God or Invisible Hand we all worship, but we have strong community norms towards things like inclusion, creating positive experiences, some modernized gender-neutral version of chivalry, creating safe spaces, etc.

If you didn't know me very very well, you might know that 'oh yeah, he does some kind of sword fighting thing on the weekends I think?', and not know there's a large and strong community there.

I wonder how many other things are like this - I think 'oh yeah, they play softball on the weekends, oh yeah, they belong to a knitting circle, oh yeah, they go to a lot of concerts, oh yeah, they volunteer at some kind of community center', and have no idea that there's a strong close-knit community surrounding those things that remains largely invisible to outsiders.

Logan (blog) writes:

As another commenter (darwin) said, I think Scott is underestimating how many people are in ~5/10 "weird" intentional communities, comparable to rationalism. Rationalism is just more salient to him, because he's in it. A lot of 5/10 weird intentional communities are pretty invisible to people outside of them.

FIRE (as in Financial Independence/Retire Early) in particular comes to mind as another weird community that absolutely corresponds with his thesis of affluence enabling more niche community-building. FIRE people have online forums and meetups, and groups of them do things like buy up most of a block of houses to take over a neighborhood in a small town in Colorado. It's way easier for everybody to go to a community meetup in the desert for a week or two if they're affluent. That applies to a FIRE meetup I went to in the desert in Utah, and also calls Burning Man to mind. Tons of people just draw the line of weirdness at a place where they can blend into "normal" liberal society.

So a 9/10 weird cult is a really different place to draw the line, but it's really quite normal to be in a 5/10 weird community, almost certainly not only 10% like Scott estimates. And since "weirdness" is defined by what gets ostracized, it's notable that the communities we define as the most weird are the most illiberal - conservative/orthodox religious sects. Illiberalism is "weird" in a liberal society because illiberalism is definitionally the one thing that liberalism openly ostracizes.

I appreciate the FIRE example - if they’re taking over parts of neighborhoods, they at least get a 5/10 on my scale.

Still, I will defend the claim that less than 10% of the population belongs to groups like this; I think commenters overestimate how many people don’t have any cool hobbies or unique groups that they’re part of. If 50K people are that seriously into FIRE, and there are a thousand communities of that size, and there’s 50% overlap (e.g. someone who’s both into FIRE and a Mormon), then that’s still consistent with less than 10%!

Mutton Dressed As Mutton writes:

I think the problem with the material abundance version of tight-knit community is that most people don't really want tight-knit community. They want the benefits but not the downsides.

The downsides are both real and unfortunately deeply and inextricably linked to the benefits. You can maybe buy your way out of some of the downsides, but at some point you have to accept the package. You can imagine a kibbutz that is less insane, but a kibbutz that is just a chill place where people do their own thing is not a kibbutz. Most people don't want the full kibbutz.

Cartoons Hate Her makes this point better and at length: The Village Nobody Wants.

Groups like the Amish (and Hasidic Jews, etc.) achieve community by raising the costs of leaving so high that most members aren't willing to bear them. Some do, and the stories are often quite sad (https://www.amazon.com/All-Who-Go-Not-Return/dp/1555977057/). Even less insular communities, like the Mormons, do something like this (although mainstream Mormons could be regarded as striking a fairly successful balance).

I suspect rationalist enclaves are long-term unstable like most intentional communities. They aren't actually drafting on wealth, they are just huffing ideology and will eventually implode or explode. I've had some limited exposure to deeply rationalist subcultures, and what I mainly observed was that they were extremely weird. I say that, sincerely, without judgment -- it's fine to be weird, even good in many ways -- but weirdness doesn't seem like enough to hang a community on. The moment will pass, people will move on.

I think it’s worth distinguishing among four strategies for community:

1. The medieval peasant strategy: you are stuck in a tiny village for your whole life, guess you’ve got community whether you like it or not.

2. The Orthodox Jewish strategy: try to replicate the medieval peasant strategy within a large modern society by starting with an ethnicity/religion and having very high barriers to exit.

3. The Cartoons Hate Her strategy: try to get random people close to you to form a community - but they might not find it very engaging and it might never start to begin with.

4. The liberal (eg rationalist / libertarian / foam boffer / LGBTQ / FIRE) strategy: try to gather a particular type of person together into a “natural” community that feels intuitive and low-effort because members are doing things they believe in (or enjoy) with people who are deeply similar to them. Here the “barrier to exit” is that the community is already optimized for your preferences and you would be less happy outside of it.

I claim that the first two work better in conditions of poverty (because they’re based on barriers to exit), the third works only sporadically and doesn’t scale, and the fourth works better in conditions of affluence (because it requires people to sort themselves, which might mean choosing where to live based for community rather than financial reasons).

Ariel (blog) writes:

Just because something is valuable, that doesn't mean people will put in the effort to achieve it. Even putting aside monetary issues, it's a huge effort to build a community, and people won't necessarily go ahead and do it. An advantage of religion (and maybe the techo-rationalist space) is that they provide natural conditions for building a community.

But shouldn’t this problem be a good match for entrepreneurial capitalism? If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?

DangerouslyUnstable writes:

I think the problem with this idea is that: when there isn't a single default strong community, most people do the lazy thing and choose not to participate. I think that no matter how rich people got, most people would never be part of a strong community because being part of a strong community takes effort. I think this is why, despite living in the richest nation in the history of the planet, we have some of the weakest/least amount of strong communities, which is why I find your comment that more money = more community strange. Yes, for people who care, having money makes it easier. But all of western civilization is proof that more money does not, in general, equal more community.

If you make community opt-in, as liberalism does (and to be very clear, I'm pro liberalism), most people will not go to the effort of opting in. Almost everyone in the US is rich enough that, if they wanted, they could be part of a strong community. They are just uninterested in the effort that would take.

I don’t think “effort” is the exact right way of looking at this.

Compare this to some sort of impressive athletic accomplishment - let’s say being able to lift 300 lbs. If I wanted to be able to lift 300 lbs, this would be hard, but not complicated. I would Google “good gym routine”, find a gym near me, go a couple times a week, gradually ramp up, and eventually achieve my goal.

If I wanted to be in a very strong community, I don’t think there’s any way to just “expend effort” and make it happen. Maybe I could learn Hebrew and convert to Orthodox Judaism, but there are lots of reasons not to do that besides just laziness (plus one extra reason for people who aren’t already circumcised!) If I wanted a community of the “ten normal-ish families on a suburban block raising children together” variety, this seems about as tough as founding a new company, in the sense that you need to be creative, agentic, and willing to risk everything falling apart.

This is what I mean by “this space needs entrepreneurs”. If I want a Ferrari, it’s going to be expensive, but not complicated. Once there are expensive and effortful, but not difficult, ways to get a good community, I’ll be more willing to believe that effort is the barrier.

Justin writes:

The example of the Mormons is a good one, but in more ways than “get lots of people of the same religion together in one place”. That model was certainly true of the early church, but the real innovation of modern Mormonism is exporting the same community-building model to all four corners of the earth. A common experience for Latter-day Saints traveling abroad is to be struck by how nearly identical the Sunday experience is whether in Africa, America, or Asia. The upshot of the Church’s system of social organization is that it is effortless for a Latter-day Saint person to slot into a new community wherever they go, and it is likewise easy for the community to sustain itself as individuals naturally come and go while they pursue their secular lives and careers. That kind of physical location independence goes a long way towards solving the practical problems highlighted in the post.

Maybe the Mormons are the entrepreneurs we’re looking for?

Comments About Specific Communities

Ebrima Lelisa writes:

I doubt the conclusion of this post.

I've visited an Indian friend in rural Pennsylvania. Their housing community is 98% Indian. There's only 1 non-Indian family out of the 50 houses.

Close to where I live there's an apartment block which is 80% Indian, especially students.

If money is an issue or anti-discrimination laws then how do these communities form?

Great point! And I agree Indians are the best example - too new to piggyback off older communities like Chinatowns, and usually rich enough that their proximity can’t be dismissed as ghettoization. I don’t really have a great explanation for this; maybe it just proves that if you’re committed enough you can still make it work.

Hilarius Bookbinder (blog) writes:

» “Why don’t conservatives live in trad whites-only farming villages on the Great Plains?”

There seems to be a movement in exactly that direction: https://www.returntotheland.org/about

Their site says “Return to the Land is a private membership association (PMA) for individuals and families with traditional views and common continental ancestry. We hold events and conferences, and we help groups of our members form European heritage communities…We will return to the land to separate ourselves from a failing modern society, and we will make positive cultural changes in ourselves and in our ancestral communities” - so yeah, that sure is a movement towards trad whites-only farming villages.

Their first test community has bought land in Arkansas, and there are a few articles on it, including this one which describes it as “about 40 inhabitants who live on 150 acres of land [with] cabins, roads, wells, a community center, and a schoolhouse”, and this interview with movement leader Eric Orwoll, who says that “a second Hitler won’t arrive unless people do the work”, but that “when I say, you're gonna have to wait for that new Hitler to arise, I'm not saying you're going to have to wait for a new person to start a new Holocaust. I am saying you are going to wait for a charismatic leader who is going to advocate for your interests”. How Orwollian.

Richard Hanania has an article supporting the movement here, as part of a galaxy-brained defense of open borders. His argument is that you have no right to keep foreigners out of “your” country, but that if you want a foreigner-free community you can always form some enclave on private property like these people are doing. I appreciate the proceduralism - but suppose that enough current Americans wanted a non-open-borders community that they figured out ways to purchase most of the United States, turn it into a community like this, and institute some sort of democratic governance for it. Wouldn’t that just be recreating the current situation of an America where most people don’t want open borders and so we don’t have them, but with extra steps? If so, why mandate the extra steps?

Yosef writes:

You forgot ultra-orthodox Jews. There are, depending on how you define it, at least two Hasidic towns in New York and a supermajority Jewish town in New Jersey.

Many people in those places work 'secular' jobs, but a job as a PA in a medical practice where almost all of the providers and patients are Jewish isn't really secular. If you work in a clothing store selling Jewish clothing, is it really a secular job?

He’s right. I added them in, along with the Mormons. Other suggestions for groups I forgot include Mennonites and Hutterites (similar to Amish), online gamers, the military, and the Long Now Foundation.

Matthew Talamini writes:

The Amish are actually illegal. For instance, some sects don't believe in smoke detectors, so none of their buildings are compliant with fire codes. Each community has one smoke detector stashed away somewhere, and when they construct a new building, they stick it in an appropriate place until the inspection is done, then take it down and put it away. (Or, that's the rumor.)

It's the same with sewage rules, egress requirements, etc. Many of which are ridiculous for structures that don't have electricity or running water. But it's still illegal to violate ridiculous laws.

In many places they've succeeded in negotiating carve-outs for their settlements in local building codes. But in others, officials just turn a blind eye, or else it's a source of constant conflict.

Roughly all of the examples of intentional community Scott points to are (technically) illegal in one way or another. Education, child welfare, zoning, public accommodation laws, animal welfare, discrimination, public health, child labor laws, etc.

Mostly, in the US, as long as everyone involved consents, you can get away with breaking these kinds of laws. But if you become A Problem, or if somebody complains about you, your situation can become quite tenuous. The Amish have had to go all the way to the Supreme Court as recently as 2021 (to avoid installing septic tanks for their graywater).

Granted that this is true for the Amish. I’m less sure it matters for the average community, for whom the level of smoke detectors in buildings isn’t a big issue.

Still, many people tried to argue that government repression was a major block on community creation. One reader mentioned EPIC City, Texas, a proposed Muslim community which was being fought by anti-Muslim conservatives who accused it of wanting “sharia law” (organizers countered that it was just going to be a neighborhood around a mosque, without any special legal carveout). Other people brought up the way housing discrimination law bars most forms of choosing who you live with, making it hard to have an Xs-only neighborhood.

I am mostly skeptical of how much this matters because of how many groups manage to have communities anyway, but some readers tried to argue there were specific stories for how each of them escaped the problem (either getting grandfathered in, like the Amish, or being sufficiently-liked-by-leftists to escape anti-discrimination law, like various immigrant groups)

Other Comments

Notmy Realname writes:

I wouldn't consider bay area rationalists a bona fide Community, just a social club, until you demonstrate enough sticking power to grow your community in perpetuity. Every other Community you mentioned (besides the libertarians who I also don't count) have a relatively low churn rate and enough growth to keep up with it. Are you confident that you'll be able to continue pulling in new members a decade from now? Do you think your kids will turn apostate?

I’m sort of confident? We haven’t gone through a full generational turnover yet, but the first cadre of people who got involved in the late-2000s (eg me) are in their forties now, and we still have new twenty-year-old college students joining each year. Around 2022, when the rest of the world realized that AI would be important, I worried we would lose our distinctiveness. But the rest of the world has dropped the ball as usual - the stochastic parrot folks most obviously, but even the average person who talks about “superintelligence” these days just seems to imagine ChatGPT getting extra-good and making OpenAI extra-super-rich. So I’ve updated towards thinking we have some edge which is hard to replicate.

But I also don’t think this matters too much for my broader point. A liberal society of constantly shifting strong communities, each of which only lasts one to two generations, would be perfectly fine, as long as there are new ones springing up to replace the old. There would be something sad about your kids probably being in a different community from you, but in many cases that’s already a given (the average LGBT person knows there’s a strong chance any children they have will grow up to be straight) and maybe it’s ultimately for the better (if there was a 99% chance that rationalists’ children would stay in the rationalist community, I would worry we were doing some sort of brainwashing - if instead they get really into FIRE and find a community there, maybe that’s a best-case scenario).

Walruss (blog) writes:

This is missing something unique about this moment in history, and I'm super skeptical of arguments that start with "this is missing something unique about this moment in history."

The past 3 generations have been defined by absurd abundance. Not just abundance of material comforts, but abundance of media and the removal of almost every point of friction to consumption. The latest breakthroughs in entertainment products literally weaponize psychology knowledge to encourage continuous engagement. Even without that, having access to television 24 hours a day is a banquet of entertainment options of which a serf can only dream. The biggest impediment to community isn't the liberal world order, it's that video games have gotten really really good.

So what's the solution? Wait a minute. Like most of the world I've spent a decade doing nothing but consuming entertainment products and now I'm sad, isolated, and devoid of meaning. So I've started going outside again. I've started playing board games at friends' houses. A breakthrough of miraculous proportions, the other day I went to a game night and nobody brought out a board game. We just sat and talked.

We did a big social experiment of "what would it be like if instead of spending time with each other we just stayed in our house, ordered food to be delivered to our door, and consumed 12 hours of entertainment a day." We enjoyed it at first, but eventually got bored. So I'm optimistic about community going forward.

...depending on how good the chatbots get at flattering us while pretending to be real people.

I agree that we’re being hit with constantly-increasing improvement in the quality and quantity of addictive media, and haven’t socially adapted yet.

I’m less optimistic that we’ve reached some kind of tipping point. I think we probably adapt to each step (ie our great-grandparents would be horrified at our current lifestyle, but we would be equally horrified to have to live like our great-grandparents), and that some of the realizing-this-is-bad has to be done on a person-by-person basis, and that as old people die and new young people age into the targetable-by-addictive-media demographic everyone has to learn the same lesson over and over again.

I’m less enthusiastic about a society-wide re-orientation than I am about the first few social entrepreneurs creating Amish-lite style communities, those communities gradually going through respectability cascades of early adopters → semi-early adopters → normal people, and then alternatives being available and thinkable for merely-normal-agency people at earlier and earlier stages of the disillusionment process.

Phil H writes:

I don’t buy the money argument. The USA is already the richest country in the world. Adding more money won’t make it less like it is. One problem the USA seems to face is that many of the world’s good and bad ideas are invented there. Europeans have a bit of perspective, and can take from the American experience whatever seems good to them. In the USA, as soon as you decide to do something sensible like build a strong community within the liberal framework, a new shiny object comes along and interrupts your plans. Being on the forefront isn’t easy!

Ethics Gradient writes:

I think UBI isn't enough here, you also need to do something about status competition. I could probably afford most necessities I consume on half my current income (revealed preference: I invest a lot of that income. Albeit obviously having a lot invested income is valuable for deferred consumption), but I am also a social primate attempting to maintain status for myself and my offspring among a bunch of other social primates similarly competing. "Literally not starving" is basically a solved problem, and "having sufficient good and services to live a superior life in terms of objective rather than relative consumption to a supermajority of historical humans" is also basically solved. But, for example, living in San Francisco requires a San Francisco income, and living well / keeping up in status competition requires more of that.

The Internet, unfortunately, works largely against this by making status competition less localized even while Dunbar's number and cognitive space remains constant.

Yeah, this is a good point. I hope the post-singularity version is immune to this (if everyone is on UBI, status is less of a concern). Otherwise I don’t know how to solve it, except by making community itself high-status (which I think is somewhat happening in some sectors).

Amica Terra (blog) writes:

While this post is helpful (I agree that abundance and communities are not contrary, especially in the sense that more abundance means you need less coercion to retain community standards), I think this is the wrong lens for this issue. The book The Upswing by Putnam is incredibly important as a historical social science grounding for debates around weakening communities. Most of these debates assume a monotonic decrease in community (which also seems to be happening here), but The Upswing takes great pains to note all the ways that in the first half of the 20th century, all the indicators of strong communities in America were going UP.

We ended the Gilded Age fractured and alone, and built up civic associational life, communitarian ideals, etc. from around 1900 to around 1960, after which all those indicators start plunging in all the charts you see everywhere today. But because we have been so focused on the last 60-odd years of data, we have missed the incredibly important context of the (titular) upswing that occurred in the first half of the 20th century in America and didn't require populism (in fact, the Populist movement in America was strongest right BEFORE the upswing began, ~1870-1900), and it was the Progressives that kicked off associational, communitarian ideals. This increase in community and togetherness was a strong trend through the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Postwar years. It wasn't costless! There were reasons people rebelled against the reigning order in the 1960s and 1970s. But every solution creates its own problems, and I think making this about Modernity and not about the last 65 years of culture obscures the contours of the issue.

Shaun Willden writes:

I think the core challenge to rich, liberal would-be communities is that true community is built upon serving one another, on deep interdependence.

Real interdependence is naturally achieved by groups of poor villagers who all must work together to survive. It's also easy for better-off but still not really wealthy religious communities who support one another emotionally and financially through the inevitable hard times experienced by individual families. Their shared faith plus knowledge that they, too, will someday need community support holds them together.

The need for mutual support motivates people to work through and/or ignore the inevitable interpersonal frictions. But as wealth rises, institutions take responsibility for helping with hard times, and looser and more distant online communities provide information and emotional and sometimes even financial support (e.g. gofundme) the tangible need for tight-knit community decreases. There's still a desire for such connections, but it's not enough to motivate the effort and tolerance required.

I don't think shared hobbies or even religious faith is enough when people don't actually need each other, and the impersonal interdependence of markets clearly doesn't.