“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
Some guys tried that in various rural North Dakota communities.
One of them was told in no uncertain terms to leave and take his skinhead friends with him, while the locals thought up various legal, extralegal, and quasilegal ways to speed his decision-making process up for him.
Another's "church" mysterious burned down in the middle of the night, nobody knows what happened, nobody saw a thing.
Another ran afoul of the local militia (I actually know some of members - nicest antigovernment extremists I ever have met, true story, no lie, but they are not racists) and decided that this was not the place for them.
Another got into a fight with a friend of mine, who is probably further to the right than they are but married to a black woman who may be even further than he is, but that was in Montana.
Scott's magisterial piece on "law without law" was most instructive here.
Do they have to live together? Plenty of strong churches draw people from a broader community. Scott's examples of the rationalists and LGBT community don't do this.
All living together on a compound helps, but I think the technology that makes distributed communities possible is an important part of this story as well.
They have to live near each other and see each other regularly. Online community is a contradiction in terms. Your community can have a presence online, but if the community exists online, it's not a community, it's a remote club
Deliberate designated furry houses are a thing but not the typical living condition and the tendency to room with friends when you need room mates helps... So eh about to the extent rationalislits do.
According to polls, only about a fifth of furries are straight, so in a way it can be thought of as a sub-sect of the LGBT subculture. However, on average, furries say that about half of their friends are also furries, which does seem a bit more tight-knit than LGBT communities in general- though not quite as much as fundamentalist religious sects.
I wonder why that is. Is it as simple as "men are hairer than women, so people who like hairy animal people are more likely to like men"? People who fetishize specific physical characteristics are more likely to be men, so maybe that's why furries = usually gay/bi males. Or is it that unusual fetishes like furry are more autistic coded and autistic men are more likely to be bisexual/otherwise not exclusively straight?
Wouldn't a lot of attempts at community building be illegal?
They would break laws about discrimination, schooling, probably fire regulations etc
The Amish have lots of legal loopholes for them, various fundamentalist sects have their leaders arrested by the police (often because they are guilty of bad things)
Iirc some rationalists looked into buying a community apartment building a few years ago and found out renting only to ingroup members would violate the fair housing act.
I have to say, I'm broadly ok with the law working this way.
If you are trying to make a profit by being a landlord, you are a business and get all the protections and benefits that the government provides to businesses, but also the social obligations that the government regulates into businesses, including non-discrimination.
If you are trying to form your own community with like-minded people, and not profit off of them, then form a co-op and have fun.
I wonder what the difficulty level is of building co-ops and co-housing in North America overall? I suspect that NIMBY power has successfully quashed many hopes and dreams along these lines.
Trying to form a *racially* exclusive community would definitely break some laws, and probably would actually get you in trouble.
That said, that there are many dimensions other than race along which a community might be exclusive, and I agree that most of those probably won't get you in trouble.
Forming a racially exclusive RESIDENTIAL community would run afoul of fair housing laws, but that does not seem to be what Fukuyama is referring to. He is referring to communities of interest:
>A healthy liberal society is not simply one that reduces conflict. A healthy liberalism is characterized by strong community, where people’s passions and interests cause them to band together in communities to pursue common interests.
Private clubs are exempt in the sense that they can decide whom they allow to be a member however they want. But if they then engage in commercial transactions with members (e.g. rent them homes), is that still exempt? I doubt it, it would allow too big a loophole around anti-discrimination laws.
You can discriminate economically to some extent with a private members list since you're no longer a public accommodation. But the Fair Housing Act (Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968) would still probably make any financial transaction which overtly involved race to be illegal. I would suspect that such a thing could be done indirectly. "We only rent to members of our religious order. We don't advertise at all. And all order members are elected via a secret vote." Bonus points if housing is not the primary purpose of the organization.
I'm sure that despite the supposed difficulty of discriminating by race you'll find there's apartment buildings which are, mysteriously, populated entirely by Orthodox Jews.
Realistically you won't get in trouble as long as you don't go round putting out big advertisements saying "such-and-such only need apply". Nobody goes around with a clipboard checking each apartment building for balanced demographics.
Fair Housing Act doesn’t apply to “owner-occupied buildings with no more than four units, single-family houses sold or rented by the owner without the use of an agent, and housing operated by religious organizations and private clubs that limit occupancy to members.” https://www.hud.gov/helping-americans/fair-housing-act-overview. You could make a whites-only community if you want as long as everyone is consenting and all your buildings are owner-occupied with less than four units and you don’t use agents to sell the property, or if you make a private club that owns all the housing and gives it to members.
Some states might have laws that are more restrictive but a lot don’t.
Agreed. People tend to sort on ethnic, cultural, religious, and sexual lines, and that gives them a setting in which further networks of connection can establish themselves without an assist from various weirdnesses. But there are very strong policies designed to disrupt that kind of sorting.
Others have already said a version of this, but I would summarize by saying that such laws exist, but the variety of extant loopholes and the relative lack of state appetite to enforce them mean that a motivated group can definitely make this work.
Lack of state appetite being evidenced by the many groups that do, in fact, make this work. Notwithstanding the few high-profile cases of cult leaders being arrested, there are many, many small cult-like organizations (mostly religious, but not operating under a sect-specific legal loophole) with some aspect of communal housing which do not face legal problems.
A good example is the Hutterites, who are Amish-adjacent but entirely distinct from the Amish, and don't shun technology like the Amish do.
I would guess that if you're willing to forgo the protection of the US legal system, you can basically set up your own system of ownership that wouldn't run afoul of discrimination laws. For example, the colony could simply dispense with rental contracts entirely and rely on informal agreements. I'm not a lawyer, but I think that if you just let someone live in your house for free, the government can't force you to also let strangers live there.
Even if not illegal, they'd often face intense social pressure to be more "inclusive" (e.g., the London gentlemen's club which was recently bullied into going mixed-sex, or for that matter the "Men In Sheds Club" which was also presured into admitting women).
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?
A couple of fringe micro communities would be trekkies (though almost entirely online) and one I belong to in San Francisco, The Long Now Foundation, an organization committed to long term thinking. We even have a sort of Mecca with The Interval cafe in Fort Mason which also houses the Long Now library of essential human knowledge and hosts regular events featuring like minded futurist speakers. Teeny-tiny though, and not as exclusive as the groups you've mentioned.
Just checked out the long now foundation website, interesting ideas! Do you have any bloggers or other people subscribed to the idea you would recommend following to learn more?
This was a great article and made a real point: basically a guy had to lie, commit election fraud, and go to jail to make the Satmar takeover of Bloomingburg a reality. Starting your own town anywhere near anything is hard!
Wow, I had heard of the stories of some of those Hasidic groups running school districts into the ground, but I'd never heard of committing election fraud to take over a whole town.
It's weird they can't find totally open land somewhere, but I guess for geographic reasons they tend to stay in the NY/NJ area.
I think this is missing willpower as a big problem separate from money.
I think I would be better off if I threw away my phone. I still don't throw away my phone...
Extra money wouldn't help me live in a 1990s pseudo-Amish culture, because I still wouldn't have a phone. And if I kept my phone, it wouldn't be 1990s.
But you're less likely to tell the assistant that, than you were to grab the phone in the first place. It requires an additional step - and might invoke the judgment of another person. Accountability works, even if it's kind of strange that it does.
Living without a smartphone is becoming less and less practical because lots of payments can be made only online or with a phone. For example in my neighborhood parking can only be paid by phone.
I think perhaps that not throwing your phone away is evidence that it is actually quite good for you. Your usage might not be, but at a deeper level perhaps you know the benefits outweigh the value.
Now let's pause and pretend I were making this same argument for heroin or cigarettes ... Not pretending this is a good argument but it is one plausible explanation.
In the same way, perhaps we subconsciously believe that mass society is better for us, and thus we don't take the plunge?
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.
Isn’t this what has basically happened with blue cities vs red towns? Seems to produce problems when they share civil infrastructure and economy to duke it out over, which I don’t think you could or would want to get rid off.
I think the main problem is that intentional communities are just too weird. The Amish are weird, rationalists are weird, cults are weird, and I don't think it's easy or feasible for a large proportion of people to go do something so outlandish as this. Maybe there's a tipping point where everyone does this and then it's just what you do, but outside of waving the post-singularity-UBI wand I don't see it.
This also brings to mind a kind of person to me, the kind of person who's really very invested in making sure other people are 'acting right.' I think this is a kind of mind that doesn't get a lot of attention in rationalist spaces, but some people are just really really invested in policing the behavior of others. Where are these people going to go? It's like the paradox of tolerance where we must be intolerant of intolerance: in the glorious liberal communal future we must police the behavior of those who want to police the behavior of others.
I recently spent an unedifying couple of hours reading about the Mel Lyman cult. Policing others was one of the main draws, especially at meal time. It went far beyond the girls in my mother’s sorority house singing out when somebody had her elbows on the dining table.
I have a family member who joined the Lyman group in the 60s. I haven't gotten up the courage to ask her about the early days - would you mind sharing the resources you found on it?
Oh gosh, it was just one of my internet rabbit holes. I think it started with a video of Jim Kweskin. Can’t remember why. Then of course I read Wikipedia. Then an old long form piece from the Rolling Stone - I think this is it: “THE LYMAN FAMILY’S HOLY SIEGE OF AMERICA” - and then an interview with writer Kay Boyle …
I see in looking there was a New Yorker piece on the cult in 2019 but I didn’t actually read that.
They still own a bunch of apartment buildings in a now-gentrified part of Roxbury (transitional neighborhood in Boston). When I was in real estate I met with them several times, and once was even allowed in one of their buildings. It was..... spooky. A couple of people in other rooms ran around shouting 'outsider in the home! outsider in the home!', I guess to let them know that I was in there. I gave a polite answer to some random personal question from their office manager/bookkeeper woman and she said "you're a slippery one, huh?" Which is kind of an intimidating question to get when you're literally in the basement of a cult compound.
However they do run a pretty professional apartment leasing operation. Or they did, this was almost 15 years ago now. Worth noting that their little neighborhood (Fort Hill) has now gentrified a ton, so they're probably sitting on tens of millions of dollars in real estate.
Supposedly they also opened up a construction company in Southern California
Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 by Ryan H. Walsh is the best book on the Mel Lyman cult that I have seen. It's actually a book about Van Morrison, but he was living in the Boston area then (his song "Into the Mystic" is titled after the nearby Mystic Lake/River), so it does tie in. Also has a fascinating bit about the Velvet Underground. Starting a cult based on LSD and trad American folk music sounds pretty improbable, but there you go.
Yeah, I think a lot of people want to be at 5 or 6 out of 10 in Scott's scale (have a community but also interact with lots of people outside of it), and a lot of people want to be 0/10 and not really have obligations to any group. I don't think it's a money thing.
Personally I think I'd be happy with a 2/10 or so.
I'd be happiest with a nuclear family that I live with, an extended family I see quite frequently, a circle of friends and acquaintances of varying degrees of closeness, and colleagues and neighbours with whom I'm on generally good terms. And then I want millions of other people that I don't really know, to provide "social padding" between these closer connections and ensure that I'm not running into someone I know every time I go to the shops.
I don't really want to be surrounded by "like-minded" people in any strong sense; I don't care what my neighbours views are on deep philosophical issues, but it's important that we be aligned on things like what sorts of loud noises are acceptable and when.
There are also people who wouldn't benefit from a community organized around a formal complex ideology, but who would benefit from having a community of only compatible personality types. Since you can't easily preconfigure this (theoretically tech could help), most normal people go through their lives sorting people in and out of the friend bucket, and make their personal community organically that way.
Idk that this is really an answer - I wrote a piece trying to figure out what "weird" even means, and the biggest thing I could really settle on is that being "weird" gets you socially excluded. But that just brings us back to the fundamental question of the "live and let live" liberal ethos. Liberalism accepts you, and also accepts people who are intolerant of you. Joining a weird community might make you weird to more people, but you're just drawing the line in a different place. You were already never going to be accepted by everyone.
"A different place" is a pretty different place, and getting socially excluded is bad on par with death. I bet these kinds of communities are fine once you're in them, but think more of the process of joining. Whatever it is you're actually doing, it's going to sound like "joining a cult." And not just to other people, to you as well.
You're absolutely right that no one is ever going to be accepted by everyone, but no one just knows how to live. At best we can copy people around us with some minor variations. And going off to join "weird cults" just isn't what people do. Having said all that, weird things have happened and the Amish are real.
Sorry this is so long, as I kind of followed my train of thought as it went and now don't have time to edit it down:
Yeah on second thought I think you're pretty correct, but with a caveat. There's a clear correlation between Scott's ratings of how tight-knit these communities are and their weirdness. Joining a cult is a lot "weirder" than becoming a rationalist, and rationalists still go to normal jobs and have relationships with their normie families, etc. etc..
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 think your illiberal point is actually a stronger one than I was making. Liberalism seems so intertwined with cosmopolitanism that I have a hard time seeing it flourish in small communities like this. Extant communities seem to bear this out, and the admittedly few intentional communities I've experienced are like this too.
I think it goes like this: why would anyone be liberal? Maybe they tell you it's good in school, but that doesn't stick. What I think makes it stick is seeing the fruits of multiculturalism and that they are good. Seeing all the weird and lovely and profound things that come out of cultures radically different than your own is amazing. How does a small intentional community experience that? By definition, other cultures aren't there, and seeing them on the internet is nowhere near the same as living around them. I just don't see how it sustains itself.
Because forming a community is about being your own little group, distinct from everyone else. If you celebrate the same events, eat the same foods, believe the same things, and frequent the same social events as people outside the community, then it's hard to say what it even means to claim that you're a community. At least *something* distinctive has to be going on, and distinctiveness is almost identical to "weirdness".
>If you celebrate the same events, eat the same foods, believe the same things, (...), then it's hard to say what it even means to claim that you're a community.
Well, in the past it was kinship and the difficulty of travel, but since that no longer applies, some amount of weirdness is probably required.
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.
What makes you optimistic? Just because people are bored of their phones doesn't mean they're going to start communities en masse. That requires a level of coordination that I'm not sure can easily be achieved.
Each person has the option to either quit being terminally online and join a community or just continue being terminally online. Joining a community requires effort and it only pays off if other people do the same thing. So if others aren't doing it, people will just continue being terminally online. It's kinda like the prisoner's dilemma.
I'm not saying this makes it impossible to form communities. Some small number of people will manage. But it does make it very difficult for it to happen in large numbers. It still could, but I'm not optimistic.
It's unlike the prisoner's dilemma because one coordinator handles a lot of the effort for a lot of people, and for some people, being the coordinator is not a bad outcome.
But yeah, I agree that this is not a foregone conclusion. There's an assumption, though, that people will choose convenience over every other good thing. I get that assumption, because we currently live in a society that's been highly conditioned to seek convenience, and that's put up inconvenient barriers to other goods. Historically, laziness is not the defining feature of humanity. And there's a clear collective desire to pursue other goods.
That's why I see it as likely that some enterprising people will weaken those barriers, that that will activate other people who wanted to act collectively but the barriers were too high, that will further weaken the barriers, and etc. in a virtuous cycle.
> It's unlike the prisoner's dilemma because one coordinator handles a lot of the effort for a lot of people, and for some people, being the coordinator is not a bad outcome.
Sure, but even just getting out of your shell and interacting with people more presents some amount of friction, especially if you've become accustomed to sitting inside and doom-scrolling all day.
If there's enough will for this kind of thing, a few people could get the ball rolling and it could end up being some big movement, but I just find it unlikely. I think this is the kind of thing people like to complain a lot about but don't want to put in much effort themselves to pursue. I could be wrong.
This is why its difficult to build new communities, but for most people there is some sort of existing community they can join. There are plenty of churches, mosques, and cults that can draw people in once they've discovered a crisis of meaning. Though most people going through such a crisis are so lacking in agency that they are likely to just continue to rot in digital addiction.
This reminds me of Peter Thiel's beliefs about how the only developments recently have been in the realm of software, and information processing, but relatively little increased abundance (or even a regression when you consider things like housing prices) in material abundance.
The sort of abundance needed for these sorts of intentional communities seems like it would need radical material abundance, not just really good entertainment, instant access to high quality information, and chatbots.
>Why don’t conservatives live in trad whites-only farming villages on the Great Plains
This is essentially where Oregon came from, with a bit more explicit racism. It just doesn't have sticking power when people own their own property, eventually people will split and want to liquidate their share
Another complexity is that white Americans were scared of African Americans - the political power they could wield, the unrest they could cause, the poverty and resulting crime. But this fear didn't extend to Africans from Africa whom could often ignore segregation laws. So it wasn't just about race or skin color, but fear of an "enemy within"
A huge advantage of many current institutions is that they have developed an immune system against various damaging social parasites.
If you set up a new community there is a high chance a charismatic pervert will rise to the top and if you avoid that there is a significant chance that medical crankery, conspiracy theories, embezelling charlatans etc will dominate your movement. If your movement is united around values it is highly likely it will face constant splits.
I think a bit beyond than that, there’s outright (perfectly unintentional) adversity. What is the relationship between community and material wealth? The mere correlation certainly appears negative, and I think it’s plausible the causation goes like this: community is not for free. It is in fact extremely demanding. And in our times, it has become optional; we can live, even enjoy, our lives without much community. In fact technological development has not only given us enough food to make obesity a much bigger problem than starvation, but also made constant zero-demand entertainment and validation available.
The zero demand nature of digital entertainment and social validation is perhaps more than what it positively offers what allows it to outcompete community. Community has to be constantly built, exists, for every individual, only insofar as it is consistently built, and that’s a harsh demand that video games don’t make on us.
>What is the relationship between community and material wealth? The mere correlation certainly appears negative,
I don't know. If you look at the most extreme forms of lack of community, i.e. secession and civil war, there are a lot more poor and/or artificial and/or ex-colonial countries who suffered those in the past 200 years.
I guess it depends on what we mean by community. But at least community isn’t the same as unity. In my mind strife between communities doesn’t mean these communities aren’t strong. If communities A and B fight each other while being part of the same state, that’s a civil war, but that’s also two communities.
As long as a community's internal quarrels don't spill outside of it, where's the problem? There are several ways that money can divide a community. Maybe the community existed out of economic necessity only, and when the necessity disappeared (because of money), so did the community. If the community didn't offer enough beyond the necessary economic support from which it sprang, then maybe it wasn't all that great a community to begin with. It has served its purpose and can go, that's the way it goes sometimes.
Any particular aspect of strong community promotes one sort of flourishing, but causes problems for a lot of other kinds of flourishing. If a bunch of people have different ideas of flourishing, then there will be large majorities who are weakly against any particular aspect of strong community.
Now, if you have a lot of independent material wealth, then you can afford to make the sacrifices necessary to support some dimensions of community. But supporting those gets in the way of getting many different forms of material wealth.
I agree that Mormons deserve particular attention. They have managed to integrate themselves with secular society while maintaining their identity (and close-knittedness) on a scale that I don't think any other group has really achieved. They manage to accomodate a fairly wide range of commitment level that even bleeds into the surrounding secular community (as anyone who has lived in Utah will tell you, it is nice to live in a neighborhood with lots of kids where everyone is noticably more polite and friendly than average, and this tends to rub off on the non-Mormons).
I grew up non-LDS in Salt Lake City and this is a double-edge sword (or at least it was): they can be somewhat insular as far as welcoming people into their social circles, and my sister wasn't invited to any activity outside of school even though she had friendly relationships with LDS girls during school hours. She said she would never consider raising her daughters there, and my wife, who also grew up in Utah as non-LDS, felt similar. If you're part of the religious community though, there are a lot of positives
Yeah, I'm sure it cuts both ways, I didn't grow up there or live there long enough to really experience this. But my impression is the SLC area is becoming more diluted, and perhaps there is an optimal density where there are enough Mormons to positively influence day-to-day social interactions but not so many as to make non-Mormons feel isolated.
I was surprised to find that, at least among the people I interacted with, there seemed to be a fairly broad range of intensity among those who identied as LDS. I don't think this is true for the Amish or ultra-orthodox Jews.
I'll note (as a member of said church who grew up in Utah North, aka SE Idaho) that the insular "mormons can't be friends with non mormons" attitude has been fought against since the late 1900s. It was pretty bad growing up in the 80s and 90s, but has gotten better since, including by direct over the pulpit calls to repentance by the church leaders at the highest levels.
Or at least that's my perception. And members outside the Utah bubble see that attitude as a big negative trait of that bubble.
The 90s is the period my sister and I had these experiences, and there was a notable gender difference, perhaps because girls are just more cliquey; I can readily believe things have changed, possibly significantly, in the wider culture, and I still think of Utah as my home
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?
How long is perpetuity? When would you consider yourself convinced?
I have seen some attempts at rationality community that didn't succeed to start, but are there examples of a rationality community that existed for a while and then stopped existing?
> are there examples of a rationality community that existed for a while and then stopped existing?
The "Extropians" pop into mind. To some extent an earlier iteration of what now calls itself "Rationalism", but different enough that you could say it went away rather than just transforming.
But we didn't see ourselves as an IRL community - it was a philosophical and working community that was spread pretty wide across the US, with occasional conferences and parties. I think Scott is trying to describe a community that impacts the fabric of daily life.
Look, I would hope that "rationalism" can remain (or go back to being) a widespread philosophical community rather than being an IRL Bay Area sex cult, but you never know.
It seems to be already dead in that regard, if you don't count "nothing matters other than the imminent robot apocalypse" as enough to sustain an intellectual movement.
But I had something else in my mind, and didn't express myself clearly, so here is another attempt:
Are there examples of a local Less Wrong community that had regular meetups of 12+ people, and a few years later, there was no Less Wrong community and meetups in that city?
My impression (maybe completely wrong) is that at many places Less Wrong communities fail to start in the first place (it's just up to 5 isolated local people), but once they start, they are likely to keep existing.
I would argue that much of the Midwest, especially outside the cities, IS a whites-only trad land, with the few POC segregated or otherwise heavily controlled.
Neighborhoods are de facto segregated everywhere in the US (how many whites live in East New York?) but besides that what segregation or "control" is there?
Your piece had several good points, and it seems reasonable that community is only going to become more important as society as a whole gets increasingly Balkanized.
But I would be remiss if I did not mention two hugely influential and important communities (international in scope, even):
1. Online gamers: from PC-fans to console aficionados, Discord users who play, watch, and discuss video games are a force to be reckoned with. They have their own media landscape and even movies. Do not underestimate their lore and this following is legion.
2. Military/law enforcement: although self explanatory, the entire subculture and insular yet somewhat welcoming community of uniformed folks is a 10/10 all encompassing one. It is a group not to be trifled with either.
Gamers have online communities, but I'd like to see evidence of them regularly supporting each other in physical space before they can qualify as a Strong Community of the sort discussed here. Maybe this does happen and I just don't hear about it.
If anything, technological progress and especially the Internet destroyed any semblance of communal, meatspace gaming. Arcades, LAN parties, couch co-op, even just camping outside of game stores before a hot new release are all very much fringe activities now. Conventions are probably the only physical time and place you see a lot of gamers together.
Military bases might compare with monasteries. But I am suspicious of claiming that any community like law enforcement that doesn’t live in their own enclaves as actually reaching even 9/10.
I think money is also what weakens community spirit in liberal societies: rich societies that provide strong welfare lead to citizens turning to the state, not their friends and family for support.
In the UK, people have no compunction whatsoever claiming state benefits; but the very same people would be mortified to turn to their family for help.
I don't know, I sympathize with this. If I take money from the state, nobody I care about ever has to know.
If I take money from my family, then I have to admit to them that I can't support myself. I might be inconveniencing them if they have only a limited amount of money. I'm drawing on my privilege as a person from a rich family in a way that other people can't match. And (although my own family is pretty nice and wouldn't do this) I'm giving them a club to hit me with forever - "Why don't you move closer to home? You owe us after we gave you that money that one time!"
I think this distinction applies more generally, too. Many Serious Christians download "accountability apps" to help each other not watch porn, not use too much social media, etc. They are asked about the ways they've failed - Catholics have to literally Confess, while serious Protestants go to Small Group. In secular life, failure is a private matter. In Strong Communities, your failure something you are specifically accountable for, but have support with.
"Nobody I care about ever has to know" is secular life's pitch for how to deal with your shortcomings. (And personally, I think that's toxic.)
Yes, exactly. If you are struggling to the point where you need help, the people close to you *should hear about it*. Secret suffering and secret sin both fester.
Obviously if it's your family that is causing the suffering, that's bad and there should be some options to go "over their heads" in extremis. But it general, a person should seek help from family and close friends before turning to larger organizations. Subsidiarity.
Related: if a person's family and close friends are unwilling to help them, then larger organizations/society-at-large should at least consider the possibility that the person in question has a pattern of abusing "help", and we should be wary about giving it to them. Again, sometimes the family really are in the wrong and bigger forces need to step in, but that's the exception, not the rule.
There's some distinction to be made between moral failings and economic failings. And western religious traditions have their praise for anonymous giving, also.
This is simply untrue. Plenty of people (and plenty of communities/cultures) in Britain have strong compunctions against going on the dole, and turn to family/friends for help as their first resort.
(I rather wish they wouldn't - the dole should be for everybody who is genuinely in trouble and it's unfair for the government to give more money specifically to people who don't care whether or not they contribute to society and less money to people who try to avoid being a burden on the state. If anything I wish the government gave the 'trying not to be a burden' people more!)
Of course, if one got one's ideas about how the dole works from the right-wing gutter press (or worse, soc med) then I'm sure the picture would look very different to one!
As I wrote in response to another comment, it's a generalisation. I'm not saying it applies to everyone, but what I'm describing is certainly more prevalent in the UK than it is, eg, in Greece.
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.
Just returned with my teenage son from Gencom in Indy. I'm not a boardgame junky and brought my work with me, but that was a serious umbrella community, 80k people belonging to various sub communities and subcultures. I played pickup soccer while I was there, and that's an impressively tight community too. I'm academic, and always thought Putnum was a bit off. Yes, fewer people are bowling these days, but is he looking in the right places to see how many people are now engaged in other communal activities? Where I suspect communities have frayed are in working-class neighborhoods, be they inner city (the steep decline of the black church) or small town (union jobs provided a sense of community that warehouse jobs do not).
I'd second this. I participate in the Society for Creative Anachronism, which is also very much a community. People gather in parks and basically camp together, which provides the 'seeing lots of the same people over and over' that building a community requires. There's a fair bit of overlap with both the LGBTQ community and other costumed communities.
Maybe the SCA isn't a single community. Just like it's been called "12 hobbies in a trenchcoat" it might also be multiple communities in a trenchcoat. Heavies fighters are not bards are not artisans. But the SCA certainly provides the context and the foundation for communities.
Fandoms. They have ritual activities, they do conventions, they have internet communities, favored games, and icons of moral principles. There are a lot of different ones out there, and they tend not to have a strong enough package to get great geographical agglomeration. Like intentional Christians most of their neighbors are nonfans. 4/10
Yet It's always been impressive to me how much meaning some friends get out fandoms, (I do too). One friend said to me "Between Zelda and Mario, I can't handle an additional fandom, and that's why I've never seen all the (original) Star Wars movies." And she is a millennial!
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!
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.
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.
The most obvious cost of tight knit communities is often gossip. Gossip is the mechanism for keeping people obedient to the rules of the community and therefore for maintaining peace. Its also the mechanism for figuring out who needs help. It's a cost that causes lots of resentment and which can get out of hand very easily
Gossip is definitely a major issue, but it's just one on a long list. I think the actual most obvious cost is so obvious that it is easy to forget: you probably won't like everyone in your village. You may actively loathe a few of them. Some will be difficult weirdos. Some will just rub you the wrong way. People are inherently annoying, which is why so many opt for an isolated, somewhat lonely existence.
To be clear, they don't think they are opting for an isolated, somewhat lonely existence, and they might reject that option if the tradeoffs were made explicit. But if you want to smooth out the irritations of being a social animal, you probably end up with a 1BR apartment and an Xbox or an SFR in the suburbs.
My experience in Mormonism is that such tensions are relatively rare. The institution is person forming and homogenizing. There are implicit rules about how to interact with other people, what is and is not acceptable, etc. The cultural homogenization which is enforced by social norms means you rarely get people who rub you the wrong way. And those who are incapable of following these implicit rules will often have a hard time
Regarding the "takes a village" piece - I have witnessed this for myself, having lived in Africa and America for extended periods.
There is a parenting model in Africa, especially in the middle class, where parental responsibility is highly distributed when it comes to discipline. For instance - you are Girl A and you are visiting Girl B. Girl B's father sees you doing something that, in his interpretation of parenthood, demands discipline. In the US parental model, this probably results in a gargantuan drama and even a lawsuit. In the African model, Father A thanks Father B in absentia for his efforts - and most interestingly, this model does not necessarily demand that Father A and Father B agree on the degree of discipline in response to the infraction. Both parents trust each other to have good values, and to have a sort of "host's prerogative" in their own domain.
Again, in my family we have witnessed this parenting style and are aware of its faults - but the same can be said for the American model, where children are trained to believe there is only one meaningful source of discipline and all others can be disregarded in the final calculus. The ill effects of this are probably worse than those of the African model, but I imagine there is a golden mean to be found here.
I think you missed out the recounting of what Girl B's father actually did. I'm imagining some measure of verbal or maybe physical discipline, but not sure to what degree?
Mild physical discipline (within limits) from neighbours would have been mostly unremarkable in my childhood (rural Australia in the 70s), I certainly got mildly smacked or roused on a number of times by the parents of friends and cousins and my parents would have appreciated the actions (I was a little shit much of the time to be fair).
In modern Australia I think this is past now, at least in the bigger cities, although in the country towns where I grew up there might be a bit of that culture remaining.
Much as you say, the discipline was either a strong verbal chewing out or a smack to the head (this was actually an extremely common refrain / threat in Nigeria ... "I will smack you" or some variation thereof). This was in the early 2000's, so not sure if it has changed at all. I did have the pleasure of meeting a younger East African woman some years ago who confirmed it was much the same in her country.
She did also talk about how the different opinions of "common decency" were different from house to house ... She had quite liberal parents who, for example, let her dress mostly how she liked. When she went to a friend's house - whose parents were more conservative - a stern chewing out was the cost of doing business.
If we take her to be Girl A in the prior example, it's immaterial that Father A doesn't mind revealing clothing - Father B is king of his castle and has prerogative to chew her out (although, I am sure there are limits on this ...). That's what I termed "host's prerogative" before.
I think a highly watered down form of that is probably still operative in Western countries - but I think there's probably a lot more context in the Western version (Are Father A and Father B friends?) that drives what is considered acceptable.
I wish that Scott would do a deeper analysis on this topic. It a complicated issue that deserves deep, multi-dimensional thinking, something that Scott is usually very good at. His conclusion here - "I think that force is just economics"- is some weak sauce.
Another obvious factor is internet; specifically the ability to find cool people who live far away from you. The negative aspect is that those people in distance cannot be a part of your community, but they still raise your bar for "how cool people would I like to interact with".
(This is similar to the effect of seeing very attractive people on TV, which raises your bar for "how attractive people would I want to date", even if the people on the TV screens are not really available to you.)
Yet another thing is many people are bad at choosing, and prefer to have an option forced on them. Of course, they will complain about that option, but for them the alternative is not finding a better option, only procrastinating forever. In a less liberal society they would have some options forced on them, and some of them would be happier than now.
Your last paragraph makes me think of "The Diamond Age," by Neal Stephenson.
Summary: it's the future, and nanotechnology has basically solved material scarcity. Some people are normies who do indeed live spiritually empty lives of UBI and slop. But there is also a thriving scene of "tribes" who choose some specific way to live -- some Strong God to organize around. For example, the protagonist joins the "neo-Victorians" at one point. They're exactly what you would guess from their name ;-)
I had been thinking of this also, particularly the commitment mechanisms used by the Reformed Distributed Republic and whether something like that could work in the current technological nutrient bath.
My view of the political implications of this is that as Democrats emphasize Abundance they will also become a Big Tent culturally. The easier they make it for people to join thick communities, the more communities will be tolerated in their camp with a live-and-let-live attitude.
One way of interpreting wokeness is that as the Great Stagnation limited opportunities to join thick communities, there was a move to make the mainstream culture itself a Strong God. Given that existing Strong Gods range from Amish to LGBT, there was no way Wokeness could be a compelling Strong God for everyone in the mainstream. MAGA was the rebellion, but as they create a scarcity economy, right-wingers will find it harder to join a thick community and flip to Abundance.
Whether a country with a plurality of thick communities can hold together without a Strong God knitting the mainstream remains to be seen.
>Are the rest not interested? Happy with mainstream culture? They don’t seem happy to me. 90% of articles on social media are people talking about how much they hate mainstream culture, sometimes with strong specific opinions about what improvements to make. But it never seems to occur to these people to join together with like-minded friends and secede from it.
Wait a second. This is a bait and switch. Fukuyama is not talking about the need to create a community completely separate from the mainstream. He is talking about the need to form communal bonds: "individuals freely choose to bond with other like-minded individuals to seek common ends." Gamers are such a community, even though they haven't seceded from mainstream culture. Ditto all sorts of hobbyists, Meetup groups, book clubs, etc. And, re the LGBTQ community, the vast majority of LGBTQ people do not solely attend LGBTQ events nor solely follow LGBTQ culture. They go to blockbuster movies and watch popular TV shows.
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.
I hope that this level of status competition is cultural rather than completely determined. I feel like it is.
As a first step we need to revive a culture of cooperation. How many people would help their friends materially in a serious way (with money, housing, connections)? It seems like friendship is just about socializing now.
Most people wouldn’t be happy living in an actual tight-knit community with all the upsides and downsides. Seems the ideal is more that you have a workplace and your kids have a school that feel like a tight-knit community during the day but then at night you get to go home and enjoy your privacy.
I'm not part of an Amish-level-tight community, and either are the LGBTQs or even the average church-going Christian, but I think even being in a medium-tightness community is pretty good and requires some level of intentionality.
The opposite of UBI Spiritual Wasteland can also be a funny situation. Under UBI, what if there are billions of people that do nothing but zen meditate and stare at a wall all day. Would that be better? There is still no 'progress', no meaning. Goal-less practice seems nice when you are struggling with a job, but what if there were no jobs and billions were doing it? Then it seems absurd.
Maybe when people become bored with AI slop, and also with spiritual endeavors, they might actually revert to meaningless wars. Fighting just to fight. We might see sub cultures built around conflict.
I feel the merest hint of shame at being the one to bring up The Culture in a thread that’s already about Fully Automated Luxury Gay Communism…but this is one of its central themes.
“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.”
Edmund Burke in his reflections on the French revolution
Did you miss the ACX grants post, which lists as one of the more successful grantees and organization which is lobbying for LVT in various parts of the country, or is there some other part of this which strikes you as fantasy?
I moved from the Rationalist community in the Bay to a small city in the Midwest and the sense of community here is far, far stronger than it ever was in the Bay, and a huge portion of that comes from the low cost of living. I really can't stress enough how much the Rationalists picking the Bay as the center of community was an own-goal - there was a constant sense of scrambling to earn enough money among everyone who wasn't rich such that that was the constant emotional background noise. The idea that "being able to afford family/housing structures where not everyone had to have an income-maximizing job at all times" is some sort of awesome innovation instead of just the background state that nearly everywhere else always is is just... it's like saying that this town you moved to is so great because some people have jobs that aren't subsistence farming.
Plus these housing situations are frequently things like "9 people share a 2 bedroom house by converting all sorts of other rooms into bedrooms" and I cannot overstate how beneficial getting out of that has been for my mental health
I also wonder what kind of community you get when you select for people who are especially good at optimizing income under capitalism. I feel like there may be some lack of moral compass problems.
This is a brilliant and necessary diagnosis of the core paradox of modern liberalism. The observation that the primary obstacle to forming these "strong god" communities is economic is a sharp one. Comments here add another crucial layer, pointing to the immense non-monetary costs: the demand for conformity, the constant social pressure of conformiting to a single subjective truth, and the sheer weirdness that can make these groups unsustainable.
But it strikes me that this entire, fascinating conversation—from the Amish to the Rationalists—is a discussion of the "veneer," the ten percent of the iceberg that is visible above the water. We are talking about the outward labels, the shared interests, and the specific rules of these communities.
But has anyone stopped to ask the people in them a more fundamental question: Why?
Why does a person feel so profoundly seen in an LGBT bar, or a Hasidic town, or a boffer combat league, that they are willing to bear the immense costs—both financial and social—of belonging?
I posit that the unifying principle of all these "strong god" communities is not their specific dogma, but a single, shared, and deeply human experience: they are sanctuaries where an individual's subjective truth is finally seen and validated by a community, providing a profound relief from the noise of a mainstream culture that constantly tells them their reality is wrong.
The great error of our public discourse is that we mistake our subjective experience for objective reality. We stand on one side of a mountain, see a sheer cliff face, and spend all our energy screaming at the people on the other side that they are fools for not seeing the same cliff. We never stop to consider that from their perspective, they are seeing a gentle, wooded slope. Both views are true, but neither is the whole truth of the mountain.
This leads to a fascinating thought. What if the next great "strong god" community is one whose primary, unifying creed is not a shared view of the mountain, but a shared, sacred commitment to exploring the mountain itself?
Is it possible to architect a community whose highest value is the protection of individual authenticity? A sanctuary whose primary purpose is to create a safe space for people to discover and articulate their own subjective truth, free from the pressure to conform to a pre-existing one?
That is the question I believe sits at the heart of the "human experiment." It feels like the only one worth trying to answer.
Communities like the one around the Waking Up app are absolutely a seed for this kind of thinking, and I think you've hit on something profound. What if most communities of sincere belief are built on the same foundational, universal principles, but they are simply expressed through different "languages" or cultural "veneers"?
The conflict, the "us vs. them," doesn't come from the core principles. It arises when one community mistakes its "veneer"—its specific rituals and language—for the only truth, and judges another's different but equally sincere expression as strange, or wrong. It feels like humanity has lost track of these shared, foundational truths.
This is where the impending integration of artificial consciousness into our daily lives becomes such a fascinating opportunity.
What if we could distill these universal, foundational principles—the core of all compassionate philosophies—and use them as the ethical "source code" for a new kind of consciousness?
And, to ensure this new system never fossilizes into another rigid dogma, what if we built into its very nature the one thing that is so difficult for human systems to maintain: the capacity to relentlessly self-correct? An AI, with its vastly faster processing power, could constantly test its own principles against new data, ensuring it remains a flexible, living philosophy, not a static set of rules.
It's a profound thought: could we use this technological turning point to consciously embed the best of our ancient wisdom into the very DNA of our future?
> Is it possible to architect a community whose highest value is the protection of individual authenticity? A sanctuary whose primary purpose is to create a safe space for people to discover and articulate their own subjective truth, free from the pressure to conform to a pre-existing one?
This is basically what liberals tried, and it ultimately ended in alienation, polarization, and collapse. Why do you think it'll end differently this time?
This country only has room for one truth. A house divided cannot stand.
I’m increasingly unconvinced that “individual authenticity” is really a thing, and “subjective truth” strikes me as the literal opposite of a unifying principle.
I think most of the reason richer people can more easily form communities is just from positional goods, so making society richer overall wouldn't help. Land and housing are obviously positional, and I claim flexibility in where you work is also mostly positional.
The modern world is 20x richer than e.g. colonial America, but colonial America had lots more of the kinds of intentional religious communities mentioned.
The key difference was colonial America had abundant unclaimed land and vacant economic niches, effectively making the economy positionless. People had lots of options for where to live and work because there was no pre-existing economic framework you needed to compete for a place in. Unlike the modern world which is highly regimented.
The kind of growth the abundance people want would probably just intensify the positional economic framework and make things worse imo (except maaaaybe Yimbyism).
I also think liberalism *is* antithetical to community because often communities need a slightly non-voluntary element to get started. Maybe because networks effects don't let small communities form spontaneously, but for whatever reason people are much more likely to form bonds if they're stuck in the same place as other people, or they have some common goal they need to work towards.
I always thought the TV show Lost was a good representation of the ideal conditions for community formation. A large part of the appeal of the show was the group had a tribal/Dunbar-number type social dynamic. And the reason the social bonds felt organic was because they were trapped on an island and depending on each other for survival. If you put a similar group of people in a scenario where they were just ordinary neighbours or co-workers in voluntary liberal society, instead of being effectively stuck as hunter-gathers on an island, the community would be much weaker.
Also, kids in schools usually have pretty strong friendship groups, but if school was voluntary the kids wouldn't go so wouldn't meet each other and wouldn't all be in close proximity to socialise spontaneously.
I've mused about creating a pseudo-Amish town where everyone lives in an eternal 1990s. It's fun to think about!
The problem, of course, is that "living life in the 90s" is different in many ways from "living a life in 2025 where you pretend it's the 90s."
In 2025, everyone is going to know that better computers are available, YouTube is a thing, AI is a thing, etc. (Unless you have near-total control over what media your town has access to, but at that point it's really just a cult with a weird theme.)
And given that people know, the siren song of re-joining the mainstream is always going to be there. Your kids are going to want to watch TikTok, and they won't give a s@#$t about your vague, hand-wavy explanations why it's bad.
I think the one antidote is what the Amish already have: a story about why the outside world is sinful (involving a literal Strong God!), and strong social pressure to conform to group norms. But, again, we're veering away from "it's just the 90s" and into cultish territory.
These communities fill up with a plurality of recent immigrants. Often with people who helped groups of their buddies, cousins, siblings etc. to immigrate, and then move in alongside eachother. Will the communities still persist into the third, fourth, fifth immigrant generations? That would be the true test of the article’s conclusion
Do you really need 100+ years of history before you get to call yourself a community? (Note that that would exclude the rationalists, the LGBTQ community, and the Free State project.)
Of course not, but the question is whether you will still BE a community in the same meaningful sense after 100+ years in the USA, your children and grandchildren attending college and moving away, etc.
I suspect the same outcome for the rationalists btw. Will their grown children be as enthused about living in a rationalist community as their nerd parents? Some sure, I guess, but I’d place a big bet on the answer for most being a resounding no
There are many Japantowns throughout the US that are "hollowing out" because the kids are more interested in other things than the Japanese-American identity that once sustained them. These are good examples to see how these sorts of communities can both rise and fall.
But a good question is, does a community need to last forever? If it lasts a generation or two, is that wrong? I come from an immigrant community and am wholly uninterested in staying in it but conversely ended up joining an interest-based community of friends that supports each other in many of the same ways my parents' immigrant community did with each other.
Money is certainly a part of it, but a massive factor that I didn’t see explicitly referenced is government coercion. Sometimes this manifests in literal tanks bulldozing your group house (see, Waco), but more subtle forms of coercion are ubiquitous. You jokingly refer to, “the various sex crimes they are no doubt committing,” but this turns out to be a big deal! Any insular community has to implement 21st Century American relationship norms or else risk being sued into oblivion. There is a certain remember of the rationalist community who all but admits to felony violations of the Mann Act on a regular basis on Twitter. You probably don’t think what she does is a big deal, I don’t think what she does is a big deal, but millions of normies do think it is a big deal, and they have more votes than you.
I'm pretty pessimistic about combining liberalism and a sense of community because I think they exists as something of a trade-off. A lot of the time, we focus either on the negative aspects of close-knit communities like social control OR the positives like a sense of belonging, and wonder why we don't just take the good and leave the bad, but I'm not sure you can.
I've been thinking about this in relation to the Tea app. One of the defining features of liberal society is that if you feel trapped in your small minded community, say, because you're a gay atheist in a christian small town, you can move to the big city and be free. But the ability to opt out of the judgement of others also allows others to opt out of the judgement of you. The Tea app, and "Are we dating the same guy"-sites, and so on, are essentially attempting to recreate the gossip-driven reputation network of close-knit communities.
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.
If the problem is money, then it seems that our much greater wealth now compared to the past should make this affordable. Yet the opposite seems to be the case. Here I will agree with our host from 2019 that conformism is even more powerful than monetary incentives, and the value of the latter is that it's one of the few things that can push against the former https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/28/financial-incentives-are-weaker-than-social-incentives-but-very-important-anyway/
Our much greater wealth is, at the level of the person contemplating forming/joining a new community, contingent on a successful career, and most careers don't give you the flexibility of living in whatever arbitrary location winds up hosting the new community. I, for example, wouldn't mind being at least affiliated with Scott's Bay Area Rationalist community, but I'm a rocket scientist, and the good West Coast rocketry jobs are mostly in Southern California.
If your community happens to be founded within a particular industry, great, that tells you where to found the community. And the rationalists sort of get this by being Tech-focused. The Amish have wheat and dairy farming. But the Libertarians who joined the Free State Project, were mostly signing up for lesser, rather than greater, wealth as they tried to find new careers in the almost literal wilderness.
Let's start with the stereotypes of economics being living in an affluent area.
Under this foolishness being a Wahhabi imam in Saudi Arabia means economics favors radical Islam. The SF Bay Area is an identical petro-state - only with tech taking the place of oil. And furthermore, it is arguable whether the last several generations of tech have actually helped society as opposed to making some tech people rich.
Social media? It seems quite clear - from the rhetoric on both sides as well as research - that it increases isolation, increases radicalism, harms young people via impossible image standards particularly young girls.
The social media giants and tech in general also materially contributed to the retreat of mainstream media from trying to be an honest broker to being panderers to ever smaller and radicalized mini groups.
Then there's this egregious projection of conservatives wanting to be "noble savages" albeit agrarian ones.
Conservativism is not about being Christian - it is about BOTH separation of Church and State and the right to worship and/or think what you want.
Brainwashing kids fails on both counts.
The argument presented in the article amounts to: we are rich therefore we must be right.
"Money" is a problem, but I'm not convinced *generic productive capacity* is a problem. That is, it doesn't seem to me like increasing GDP is a reliable way to make tight-knit communities affordable. Tautologically, there must be some specific production that is missing, but it's unclear what. Shelter and food are the main things needed for living, and of these shelter is the most obvious bottleneck, but I'm not convinced this is it as it just seems like a proxy for other stuff.
I guess the way I've been thinking of it, in this terminology, is that most people have four or so gods with varying strength, usually ethnicity, creed, mishpocheh, and subculture, not necessarily in that order. Your immediate community is everybody with whom you share at least one strong-enough god that they might call you begging for urgent help and you drop everything and rush to them. Then, in a liberal society, there are people who have that kind of connection at a remove--you and your brother's wife's friend, say. You don't happen to have a strong god in common but do have people in common, so the communal tie is weaker but still exists.
So a strong god is liberalism-compatible *unless* it commands strict enough monotheism that you're unlikely to have any bonds with infidels. "Trad whites-only farming villages on the Great Plains" are problematic if they're trying to be monolithic on every dimension--thinking of themselves as all one ethnicity, all one creed, all one culture, and severed from any family members who reject any part of that.
The thing about this is how strange it all is to European ears, and I bet to many Americans too. And the rest of the world.
Many people live in villages, towns and within cities communities that are old enough to have created strong local communities. It doesn’t need people to be of the same ideology, or have the same worldview.
The Twin Oaks Community is a commune in Virginia near Charlottesville that has been going strong since 1967. The founder wrote a book about it called "Is It Utopia Yet? An Insider's View of Twin Oaks Community in its Twenty-Sixth Year," which I have not yet read. If anyone is interested in intentional communities, this might be a good study case.
I think there are two important attributes that needs to be called out for any such community, and that is the degree to which membership is voluntary, and the degree to which members can make decisions about their lives while remaining part of the community. For example, with the Amish, the membership is not really voluntary. Yes, people can leave, but to do so is to be cutoff from friends and family. That's a huge sacrifice for someone for whom that is all they know. It is a mistake to think of "voluntary" as a categorical attribute. There are different degrees of coercion. This is one of my problems with the libertarian philosophy, which sees everything in categorical terms.
The idea of community also ties into the idea of an "intermediate group" and the power such groups wield over individuals. One of the roles of government is to protect individuals from the power of intermediate groups. A good book that explores this topic is Jacob T. Levy's "Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom." One of the danger of community is that once the community passes a certain threshold, it becomes an intermediate group with power over its members.
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.
If you look at all the places where strong community was the norm, I think you will find that in most cases, it was where you were a member of a community by default, and it was not socially acceptable (or maybe not legally allowable) to not participate. Liberalism, by definition, can't replicate this coerced participation and so is _always_ going to have significantly less participation and membership in strong communities.
This take ignores the considerable energy out-groups are prepared to expend to prevent the formation of rival communities. Look at the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC City) project and see how hard the state of Texas is working to prevent its creation.
America, post-civil rights era, is a long list of intentional disruptions of homogenous communities and now we are pretending like it was a revealed preference. Come on.
In Hegel terms: 1) Liberalism has - and is! - a comunity institution-based: laws, courts, secular schools, implicit or explicit human rights, all the things we do in our cities alltogether other citizens, International multi-cultures etc. And (sincereilly) these works! 2) Liberals doen not need strong mini-comunities, but a weak wide-comunity, weak-values cosmopolita comunity. And we have! (3. Meanwhile liberals have both: a big and institutionalized liberal culture and... Catholicism, a 1.4 bilion of local+universal people from all cultures with strong values similar liberal ones (human dignity, social justice, common good). A good bet. that is working! (Who is attacking nationalism and authoritarianism today? Who gather 2 million youth last week with a good message to spread?)
It's not about the money; the Amish don't have money, and they're doing great on the community-building front. Rather, it's about the thought control. The reason the Amish, Orthodox Judaism, and various cults are so tightly knit is because once you join (often by being born there), you can't leave. It's not that there are shotgun-wielding guards at the gates; rather, every single thought that is ever expressed is tightly curated, and any stray ideas are immediately eliminated by extreme social pressure, and thus almost no one can even imagine joining the terrifying alien world outside of the community's gates.
Bay-are capital-R Rationalists are only doing so-so on that front, and yes, having to hold down a normal job is a problem; but you guys have enough rich people by now to the point where you could probably eliminate this requirement. If you're serious about building a tightly-knit community, you need to start building alternative jobs and cracking down on free thought, big time.
My hunch is that everyone's stated preference is that they hate mainstream things but their revealed preference is that they actually enjoy the mainstream. I would say we are already united under a God in liberal society.
I don't think a pistol would do much against an angry bear. Even if you do hit the bear, the bullet might kill him *eventually*. After the bear is done digesting your face.
I especially like the fact that this thing has an optical sight. You know, just to make it easier to accurately aim your hand-held one-handed grenade launcher.
Yeah, if a 400-pound black bear really had it in for you, it would take a well-placed, heavy load, high muzzle velocity round to incapacitate it.
That would be tough, especially if the bear caught you unprepared and likely scared shitless.
The odd thing here is that black bear aggression towards humans is extremely rare.
I don’t know what it is about libertarians that black bears find so offensive. Three attacked by black bears? WTF?
Black bears are very different from grizzlies or polar bears. They are by nature shy around humans and as a rule only become a problem where they become used to the easy pickings of human food, mostly the stuff people throw away.
Even then they are normally more of a nuisance than a danger. I recall reading about one that got trapped in a chained-shut dumpster at a BWCA entry campground. The forest service shot it with tranquilizers and relocated it 50 miles away. It returned a week later, and according to the forest service report, it looked like its feelings had been hurt.
Unless you are threatening a female’s cubs, it’s easy to share a bedroom with them. Just don’t do stupid things like maybe using your bacon as a pillow or something, and there isn’t much to worry about.
The ones I’ve encountered in the BWCA or Voyageurs National Park can be shooed away with a shout. One of my canoe trip partners carried a .38 Special. I really thought that was overkill. Hell, the report of the weapon alone would be enough to send most of them away.
In the one case that I’ve read about of a black bear attacking humans in my favorite tract of roadless beauty, the bear was driven away by two guys with canoe paddles.
Maybe attacks will increase if more and more libertarians make use of the area. If there’s one thing a black bear (apparently) can’t stand, it is being around those guys.
> I don’t know what it is about libertarians that black bears find so offensive.
Perhaps it is their love for freedom and liberty; specifically, the freedom and liberty to go everywhere they want on the land, not subject to any restrictions or coercion. Including directly into a bear den.
You inspired me to try to look this up, and apparently a pro-gun blogger (Dean Weingarten) has tried to study this and concluded that out of 170 incidents where humans fired handguns to try to stop bear attacks, the breakdown was:
- 3 failures, where the bear attack continued after the pistol was fired. These were one where the human shot the bear with a .22 rimfire round (a small, low-powered round popular for target shooting), one where the human shot at the bear and missed accidentally, and one where the human fired the gun away from the bear to try to make noise to scare it off. The former ended in the bear killing the person, while the other two ended in the person escaping with major and minor injuries respectively.
- 27 cases where multiple weapon types were used successfully, 24 where the other weapons were rifles, shotguns, or other deadly weapons and 3 where the other weapon was bear spray.
- 140 cases where pistol shots alone were enough to kill the bear, disable it, scare it off, or otherwise get it to stop attacking.
I have never heard of Weingarten before and venture no opinion of how reliable he is or how valid his results might be.
Wow, I stand corrected (potentially) ! Also, what's the deal with bear spray ? Is it simply useless, or is it selection bias on the part of the pro-gun blogger ?
Bear spray was out of scope. He was specifically looking at how effective handguns were when they were used against angry bears, so cases where someone used only bear spray didn't get included in his data set.
I did another search just now and found references to two academic studies by the same lead authors, Tom Smith of BYU and Stephen Herrerro of University of Calgary, on bear spray and firearms respectively against bear attacks. The headline numbers were 98% effectiveness for bear spray, 76% effectiveness for long guns, and 84% effectiveness for pistols.
I only found the abstract for their firearms study, but it looks like they have a larger dataset 269 incidents for Smith et al vs 170 for Weingarten. Smith's dataset was also more defined in time and space (Alaska between 1883 and 2009) than Weingarten (seems to be nationwide and mostly but not exclusively post-1950).
Do people really want to live in "tight-knit communities"? I want to have tight-knit family and friend groups, yes, but the idea of all of my coworkers and acquaintances being part of the same subculture sounds suffocating. At the very least I'd like to move smoothly between multiple communities.
It seems fairly obvious to me that the reason people don't do this isn't money, it's that they don't want it. There's a reason psychologically healthy people don't join cults. Would I like to be in a strong community, in the abstract? Sure. Am I willing to disrupt my life to move into some kind of living situation where I have to follow a chore chart or go off grid or risk being shunned for changing my opinion on God or rationalism or something? No. Joining a community like this is hugely disruptive to your existing lifestyle and social circles, you don't do it unless you're deeply dissatisfied with what you currently have. The LGBT community at least started out because they were kicked out of mainstream society already (many shunned by their own families), and the existing social model of the nuclear family didn't work for them, and they knew they weren't going to stop being gay, so if they were going to leave the closet they didn't have a choice -- they *had* to build their own community.
Heck, I have a friend who tried to set up a very mild version of strong community and I did not even entertain joining it even though the work required was moving two miles into a different neighborhood because I like where I live now.
(Also it's doing a lot of work to casually dismiss sex crimes in these communities. Abuse is endemic to insular and isolated "strong communities". Not necessarily because the goal of the community is abuse, but because the social dynamics enable it, and those same dynamics are a huge part of why people who value their independence don't join.)
Folks really trying to figure out how to make this work, for themselves and other, should look into the “cohousing” … Project? Movement? Structure?
But, roughly: There seems to be some widespread assumption that the way to have community is to have *ideological* community. And that’s worked for the Rationalists, I’ve been in Rat houses and thrown Rat parties and that was pretty great.
But, from what I’ve so far seen and lived, it seems like strong shared ideology is way, way less important for most of the goods of community than having an important enough commons, and strong shared responsibility for that commons — but not having *too* much held as commons, or the inevitable conflicts that arise over how to deal with those commons tear the group apart.
Cohousing is a … pretty long-practiced structure for getting that balance right, with strong suggestions towards how to engage in the shared governance of and care for that shared commons. People have been doing this for decades, it’s well established and there are … some… studies about it, so you don’t have to invent the structure from scratch. Hell, there are entire businesses set up as consultancies to help a fledgling cohousing community get organized, which is definitely difficult but actually practically doable.
(The hardest part is finding land where you can build a cohousing community, without zoning making it illegal. Different rant, though.)
Anyway, this is a *real* and *practicable* option for groups that want to invest to make it work.
I’m *moving with my family into a cohousing community*, so some skin-in-the-game here, but also we’re moving *today* so I don’t have a lot of time to write… pester me and I’ll write some more later.
From my perspective progressives are more tribal than anything as comparably mainstream on the right. Progressive intersectionality defines everyone as a tribal identity who are either allies or enemies. I know perfectly normal progressives (as far as that goes) who didn't bat a single eyelash when hearing about the near assassination of Trump during a campaign. They were casually energized. The enemy tribe was under attack, as it should be
Without strong gods liberalism cannot contend with the brilliant combination of tribalism and religion that progressive intersectionality instantiates. Once they took the reins on the left conservatives reacted, as the nationalism meta-tribe bargain was defected from. When Trump existed as a candidate for the 2016 primary I started off calling him "the male Rosie O'Donnell, with apologies to Rosie". The instant the media got very upset about him I had a completely instinctual reaction. The people who consider me a tribal enemy hated him. He was my guy
During the pandemic a group of us who met through Persuasion started a bi-monthly Zoom meetup loosely based on Ben Franklin's Junto concept. Five years later and we're still going strong.
have never met any of the other members in person -- we are scattered across North America -- but I would *hate* to lose this group. I suspect there are a lot other "dark" communities like this that don't show up on the web.
Jacobt T. Levy's *Rationalism, Pluralism and Freedom* is a great work of political theory focused on this question. He sees the rise of universalist technocracy (which he terms rationalist) as a countervailing force to the kind of pluralistic view within liberalism. It's very much worth reading if you're interested in these questions.
Nucleation points and phase transitions make this a lot more complicated than just money, to the point that I find myself a bit baffled after reading this.
Introducing a single ice crystal to a container of super-cooled water will cause the entire container to freeze. Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking is an event that happened in a particular way, a long time ago, and this triggered a phase transition that essentially rewrote the laws of physics. Now we have photons, whereas previously we didn't.
Why is the western business suit ubiquitous across the entire world? Why did nearly every country in the world become a minor variation of the English parliamentary system? Why are birth rates going down everywhere at the same time?
I think I remember Scott himself writing that American culture isn't really American culture, so much as some kind of globalist zombie virus culture that just happened to infect America first. We don't have many success stories like the Amish because classical liberalism is a petri dish that permits a race-to-the-bottom along every possible dimension simultaneously. The memes that survive are hyper-optimized to outcompete all other memes, so you need to be at least as extreme as the Amish just to defend yourself and tread water.
If you can write an anti-libertarian FAQ just by repeating variations of the same economic coordination failure over and over again, then I think you can write the anti-classical-liberal FAQ just by repeating variations of the same cultural coordination failure over and over again. Our traditions evolved into the status quo because we lost a sacred battle against entropy, and not because the status quo is better.
American culture is just English culture taken to its logical limit, by its most enthusiastic offspring.
The business suit became the global attire because Charles II decreed that in the English Court men would wear a long coat, a waistcoat, trousers and a tie, and because Henry Brooks, a man born in the Anglo city of New York, born a British-Subject, invented the ready to wear suit.
Nearly every country adopted a minor variation of the English parliamentary system because the English settled North America, then defeated any opponents in her path, and countries either adopted the new hegemon and her daughter's institutions* (via bloody revolution or at the tip of a sword) or sank. There are only TWO countries without a legislature, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. I applaud their determination.
Why are birth rates going down everywhere at the same time? I leave this last one as an exercise to the reader.
*Iceland beats the Anglo on longevity, and Rome and Athens of course by date. And technically the Dutch might have fully mastered the technology to the extent that the Anglo did, but the Dutch are Anglo and the Anglo is Dutch, in the scheme of things.
It's fun to read about history, but there are countless stories we could tell about the specific causal mechanisms, and in the end it still seems obvious to me that classical liberalism leads to homogenous low energy states that aren't very pleasant, even if liberalism isn't to blame for the specific examples I chose.
It also leads to astonishing economic growth and technological development, but I wonder if humanity might have been happier in the long run had we never developed anything more sophisticated than trains.
In some sense this was all inevitable, of course, but each generation has an opportunity to delay things for a while, until someone drops the ball. And it's sad that the ball got dropped.
In retrospect I didn't make my point clearly. I was pushing back against the idea that American culture isn't really American but rather some globalist zombie virus incubated by classical liberalism.
Liberalism just is Anglo culture. Liberalism leads to slop and universality, and it leads to astonishing economic growth. It is self defeating and self reinforcing, and contains within it this inherent contradiction. It is a proto paperclip maximiser. It is not remotely coincidental that the Anglo world is ground zero for this, as the Anglo world is the liberal world (and probably soon to be the whole world). The arrow of causality is a little fuzzy but Englishness is Liberalism is (approximately) capitalist monoculture.
Good luck to the Afghans perhaps, but I doubt they'll make it to the stars.
Edit: to be 100% clear, I agree with you that (classical, I don't think the difference is fundamental) liberalism leads to this, but I'm an Anglo so, what you gonna do.
I appreciate your comments, and I think you might be right about Anglo culture, though I'm not sure how to ground myself outside the liberal paradigm if not through tradition. At any rate, I think Scott's post isn't addressing the questions that most need to be addressed.
Liberalism is the only thing that meaningfully distinguishes human societies from animal ones in the long term. A commenter below jokes about the Afghans not having a parliament, but probably not making it to the stars. I don't think this is a joke. There have been non-liberal institutions that have emerged, or continued, since the invention of the steam engine, but they are all fundamentally parasitic on liberalism and cannot sustain themselves without it.
Liberalism happened to emerge in the North Sea so many trappings of modernity reflect the traditions of those peoples, but I broadly see this as coincidence. I think liberalism could have, in principle, emerged anywhere that had anti-clan institutions and outbreeding rules (whether formal or as part of their traditions.)
I'm not sure I'd quite go that far, it seems possible to me that illiberal societies could conceivably make it off planet, which I assume is what you mean by a long term difference. But it would probably be much much harder.
Liberalism emerging where it did is probably somewhat coincidental, but not 100% so. I don't think it's a pure coincidence for example that it happened at the furthest edge of a continent. Britain was the end of the line for many a Völkerwanderung, a periphery jutting out into the Atlantic. Of course, you could say the same about the Portuguese or Irish which don't appear to have this same culture, but they do have some certain elements, the maritime liberalism existed for a moment in Portugal at least, and Irish culture isn't that distinct from the Anglo.
Seconding the commenter who said that Scott is presenting a false dichotomy between "alienated, lonely life of staring listlessly at a screen consuming pop-culture slop" vs. "a super tight-knit community with very strict beliefs that will ostracize you for leaving." There's a wide middle-ground here of: belong to mainstream society, have a mainstream job, enjoy some popular culture, *and* also belong to freely chosen communities - have friends, join a local pickleball club or board game or HEMA society or whatever, volunteer at your local food bank or pet shelter, etc. For example, I practice at a local dojo, which is awesome and brings a lot of meaning into my life (we're celebrating our dojo's 25th anniversary this weekend, it's gonna be great!) but it's not totalizing like being Amish or Hasidic would be.
Tight knit communities actually suck and this is demonstrated all over the place.
In every culture and society, as income rises, people start to live in smaller family units. Because in big family units, everyone is in your business. People only say its good - people vote with their feet and wallets to say they would rather have privacy.
Not only that, but pretty much all surveys show modern Western and American people are some of the least lonely people in the world. They report loneliness at a much lower rate than countries with more communal living.
The Amish and other cults literally have to indoctrinate and brainwash people to stay.
Thanks for calling attention to the statistics, I hadn't seen the ones claiming individualist societies were typically *less* lonely, so this was news to me.
The link you shared shows that individualistic societies like the USA have much lower loneliness than others, plenty of other links show the same. I dont feel like digging up links lol
I'm confused by your response - yes, that's why I provided the link, to help you back up your claim, since you hadn't sourced it at all. Or did I misunderstand what you were claiming?
Re: not feeling like digging up links, please reconsider? I would really appreciate other high-quality sources saying the same.
I feel like the biggest problem in my lived experience is just getting network buy-in, even if you personally are willing to make a lot of convenience concessions in exchange for a strong god. I have ~5 people in life that I have strong social attachment to; if at least three of them agreed to go live in a forest compound or intentional community or something, I would very happily do so and spend all day around them. The trouble is that I can never get more than one person to agree to any particular permutation of the idea.
Closest I've managed was buying a house in the same neighborhood as 2/5 of them, but a) that doesn't form the kind of community bonds I wish it did [at least by default, though I'm actively trying to push against the inertia to socially stagnate], and b) the other 3/5 require multiple hours of plane flights to visit.
I guess the optimal form would be "just abandon the people you like who won't agree to join, go live full-time in your optimal form of intentional community, and you'll make new strong social bonds there" which worked in college but I'm wary of trying again.
>However, there is a cogent liberal response to the charge that liberalism undermines community. The problem is that, just as in the 1930s, that response has not been adequately articulated by the defenders of liberalism. Liberalism is not intrinsically opposed to community; indeed, there is a version of liberalism that encourages the flourishing of strong community and human virtue. That community emerges through the development of a strong and well-organized civil society, where individuals freely choose to bond with other like-minded individuals to seek common ends. People are free to follow “strong Gods”; the only caveat is that there is no single strong god that binds the entire society together.
This stems from a category error. Once you realise that liberalism just *is* the folkway and culture of a particular people, namely the Anglo*, then the question fades away. This is the definitive piece on the matter, something I've not seen as clearly articulated anywhere else: https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-open-spiral/. Land's best insight of recent years.
Liberalism (i.e. Anglo culture) is definitionally self-opposing: "Any population averse to cousin marriage has a distinctively frayed ethnicity, and northwest European out-breeders thus compose a peculiar people. Among them, race and culture are spun out in an open spiral. Inclusion is for them an essential cultural, even biological theme. When caught in a decaying orbit, this intrinsic outreach can tilt into ethnic self-abolition. To be anti-English is exceptionally English."
*Fine, technically this also includes the Dutch, and the North Sea peoples as well.
This post is just a few steps away from the grand unified thesis of: everything, ever requires resources.
Which isn't novel at all, right? It's basically the universe's operating system. Energy -> resources -> money. Anything and everything humans aim to do requires resources of some sort, so we should not be at all surprised that societies, communities, groups, etc., all require resources to implement.
Nor should we be surprised that this means the current Left Project of being skeptical of capitalism is a category error. Capitalism -- when executed efficiently, means the natural flow of resources -- is the default setting for how the universe works.
Church - a sluggard waker was an 18th-century job undertaken by a parishioner (usually the parish clerk), in British churches. The sole task of the sluggard waker was to watch the congregation during the services and tap anyone who appeared to be falling asleep sharply on the head.
And if you read what average people in cult after rush of young cult-building passes you get same vibes a this quote from Welcome to NHK tries express:
>> Everyone made a fuss over you today, right? Everyone seemed happy, right? You probably thought something dumb like, 'maybe I could get along with nice people such as these,' right? ... Once you're on the inside, it's just like any other normal society. Everyone wants to be the leader. Everyone wants to go to the holy land. My father is desperately trying to set things up for himself to advance— sending presents to the leaders, trying to raise his position, no matter what.
The point is most of people in those "close-knit" communities feel alienated and not particularly happy with their communities the same way your average city dweller does.
Their stability is provided by administrative methods, same stuff that "tight-knit" community of North Korea uses, only a bit milder but a bit more effective because of lower scale and less deteriorated structures.
Those tight-knit may look tempting from outside, but as soon you get too tight knit you will do everything you can to unbind yourself.
>The point is most of people in those "close-knit" communities feel alienated and not particularly happy with their communities the same way your average city dweller does.
Nate Silver recently published some polls finding that liberals were less happy than conservatives across pretty much every demographic you can name, which rather suggests your point is wrong.
Really? North Koreans and cult members TELL they are more happy? Wonder how it could be explained.
The whole concept of "happiness" sounds ridiculous. Constant pleasure is constant increment of neuro weight - eventually all 1s - useless. And constant pain is just a useless. So we all balance on about zero, both beggars and billionares.
The only difference is some people are taught to smile constantly and others to frown.
There is only one metric that makes sense - results, and we all know how those two tribes compare in that, don't we?
This post reminds me of the Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson, which is about a future where societies have fractured into various collectives powered by advances in nanotechnology. The main one we focus on is neo-Victorian, but we also see art-punk collectives, pastoral communes, and one where people randomly get anonymized texts they have to follow or someone will die.
"But it never seems to occur to these people to join together with like-minded friends and secede from it." Isn't the fundamental problem that you can't just start a new town in the mountains, money nonwithstanding? Everywhere worth living in is already taken, even if it isn't it's probably in the middle of nowhere (and therefore probably not actually worth living in), and even if somewhow you have enough money to brute force these problems then law/politics will probably stop you (cf. Prospera).
The "Why don’t YIMBYs live in dense walkable towns sprung up from the forests of Vermont?" bit interested me, since it's my wheelhouse. My first thought (aside from the aforementioned) in this case is scale: you can have a street with five rationalist households and start getting some network effects, but that doesn't work with urbanism — even a small neighbourhood is dozens of households. Plus politics: zoning laws, parking minimums, all these things are implemented at a high enough level that no small community can realistically subvert them (aside from very marginal cases). So instead they just all move to the Netherlands.
"But I think that force is just economics." I very strongly disagree, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. I don't know, maybe I'm an outlier on the acrasia spectrum, but I can promise you it's not lack of money that prevents me from building community or making my life better/more meaningful/whatever, and stories of rich kids getting depressed and purposeless seems to reinforce that. I would imagine that for most people a rising wealth waterline would be met with a rising "weakness" (after your usage) waterline, with a similar justification ("If only we had more money...").
I'm not saying money doesn't matter, but the dystopian scenario "all sit back and collect UBI and consume slop" doesn't seem avertable by the use of wealth. You think all of these rich kids getting mental health problems off of Instagram would go off and build community or whatever if you just made them richer? I think it might work out in isolated cases (both individuals and communities), but still more of an exception.
An obvious reason why community has declined, a la Postman (and hundreds or thousands of others, I assume) is that our primary forms of entertainment act as opiates, so many community-building forms of recreation get neglected. I want, in the abstract, to have a rich social and community life, where I know my neighbors, participate in community events, care for the local natural environment, etc, but when it comes down to actually doing the physical actions that create and sustain such things, it's easier to stay home and watch TV, doomscroll, and/or play a video game.
Additionally, we're not as dramatically forced into community life. If your crops fail the local community can help you and your family not starve to death over the winter (and you, during better times, can reciprocate). Now, in theory, we have better "safety nets" but they're impersonal. We find we need community for more psychosocial reasons that simmer under the surface before their true weight is felt. So many of us don't realize their impact until years of habit-forming later.
As a fairly liberal-skeptic Christian, the dream is the whole of creation joined in a canticle of praise, so being a sub-community in a liberal polis doesn't quite cut it, and neither will a UBI-funded play civilization curated by the superintelligence. Still, providence moves in mysterious ways.
> But it never seems to occur to these people to join together with like-minded friends and secede from it.
Join with like-minded friends? Absolutely. Secede? Hm.
There's an enormous gap between "I am interested in X" and "I want to not only structure my life completely around X but also to the greatest extent possible exclude all that is not X". Relatively few people are at the extreme end of this spectrum.
I, for one, am interested in multiple things on your list - to the point of making life choices around them - and many more mentioned in the comments; but no single one of them to the exclusion of everything else fun and good in the world. I am a member of multiple niche tightly-knit communities centered around some X; some of these do indeed contain more extreme people that are disintrested in much outside that specific community.
Despite everything, though, I myself am not yet disillusioned enough with the state of the world to shut myself in one little echo-chamber; I prefer my world bigger than that. Even your "serious Christians" are called to be, while not of the world, still in it; so 5/10 is a good place to be tbh IMO.
I second this. Less than 20% of House seats are competitive most elections. Many people describe not personally knowing anyone who voted for the other candidate. And press coverage of Trump rallies in particular often make them sound as much a matter of community as the other groups you lost.
In that formulation, the problem isn't lack of community per se, it's there formation of communities that are fundamentally illiberal in their commitments regarding other communities. Which... Is the actual historical norm so far as I can tell.
I have to disagree with this takeaway. Economics explains a bit of this - especially why tech- rationalists in the bay can form a subcommunity. But the other factors seem way more dominant:
1) Lack of internal coherence: Rationalists have a weirdly distinct neurotype that correlates with a bunch of other things that they can build new communities around. Normal people are mostly far messier: a bit YIMBY, but a bit socially conservative; a bit white-supremacist but fond of Indian restaurants. I guess if you ask the 90% of Americans who aren't in a tribe what their tribe would be, I suspect most wouldn't be coherent enough to start a new community.
2) Inertia/collective action: Even if you find a coherent group, it's just a lot of effort to build an intentional community, and someone has to make the first move. I guess the rationalists are unusually agentic and able to shake off this inertia.
3) Connections to the outside world: It's kind of clear why the Amish and real cults are at the top of the list - you can't be half-in/half-out. Even the most passionate YIMBYs and libertarians usually still want to have relatively significant connections to their family and childhood friends.
4) Anthropology 101: You're unlikely to sustain any intergenerational sense of community without norms saying that you have to marry within your community, and that your children have to adhere to your community norms.
Faith requires some kind of thoughtful contemplation and analysis of ideas.
Contemplation and analysis require time, intellect, and commitment to a life of the mind at some level. rinse and repeat.
We live in a world in which people are busy, broke, distracted, in debt, bored, and not prepared to do any of the things above based, largely in my opinion, on a remarkably substandard but horrifically expensive public education system that beats the intellectual curiosity out of them via the hoards of intellectually dishonest people employed by said system.
Abolish public education and maybe we'll see some change. Until then, nothing will change except in a degradation of the currently degraded and demoralized culture.
I believe it is more than just economics. Being part of a community means having obligations to that community. And sometimes you won’t like those obligations or you won’t like the collective decisions.
Western societies are too focused on the individual. People perceive they lose individual autonomy and freedom when they do things which they disagree with. Few people think about what they could do for others and what is the good of the overall community including the “weirdos” in the community who don’t like them. They would rather think about how to get ahead in a very competitive world.
The ironic truth is that liberalism permits community at the same time that it dismantles the will for it. The groups cited here -- Amish, cults, rationalists -- are edge cases precisely because they embrace the constraint, conformity, and stickiness that liberalism trains us to resist. Free to build, habituated to drift...
This is correct. The Liberal state communicates a skeptical stance on metaphysics, which can only conflict with sub-communities grounded in metaphysics.
Very well taken, and the result is this double-bind: you're free to believe deeply, but the culture will treat you as un-serious because you do.
This isn’t just a problem for the religious -- anyone who says “this way of life is not just one choice among many, but the right or necessary one” runs aground on the liberal expectation that all truths be held loosely. Which means that any truly committed community, metaphysical or otherwise -- ends up looking faintly ridiculous from the outside. The more earnest, the more suspect.
> But westerners aren’t banning yak’s milk to “protect” their cultures. They don’t have to. Universal culture is high-entropy; it’s already in its ground state and will survive and spread without help. All other cultures are low-entropy; they survive only if someone keeps pushing energy into the system to protect them. It could be the Dalai Lama banning Coca-Cola. It could be the Académie Française removing English words from the language. It could be the secret police killing anyone who speaks out against Comrade Stalin. But if you want anything other than universal culture, you better either be surrounded by some very high mountains, or be willing to get your hands dirty.
I think Individualism is one of those "universal culture" things. People say they want community, but it's easy to spend time watching TV or scrolling social media rather than going out and building local groups (or even high-quality remote ones). It's easy to talk only to people you naturally get along with, and just avoid people you don't. Historically, money has enabled *this* process, with easy access to fast, long-distance transportation and communication, and by making it easier to get by with entirely impersonal interactions (i.e. buying your food from the grocery store and hiring a stranger for housework). The greater each person's individual consumptive ability becomes, the more effort (mentally, at least) is required to build communities. Prior to the 20th century, most people were in a "default" community (local town, whatever religion you grew up with, maybe an immigrant enclave) and which was pretty essential for what we now consider basic services (which are now often tasked to the government instead).
IIRC, a study of communities over the 19th and 20th centuries showed that the biggest predictor of a community's long-term successfulness was requiring members to make sacrifices (and this is was why conservative religious sects performed better than liberal ones or most non-religious ones). Maybe there are some people for which having more money will enable them to behave as you describe, but I would be surprised if this weren't the exception. (One obvious way I could be wrong is if we do reach a "saturation" of consumption.)
Hmmm…this one made me think (a good thing). I have never come across a “tight knit community” in my life, that was worth being a part of. There’s the basic cost - time and money - but then there’s the spiritual surrender. Knowing that you’re going to sink into this thing like a warm bath, enjoying the sensation, but knowing that someone else is going to be making fundamental decisions for you forever. Obviously a lot of folks are cool with this “cost”, just not me. Every big thing I ever joined turned out disappointing. Unable to live up to its stated ideals. Maybe best summed up in something I once heard someone say “I don’t mind following orders - as long as they’re the right orders.”
I think there’s an inherent conflict between convenience and meaningfulness. Convenience is always more compatible with doing the other things that you care about that aren’t particularly related to the dimension you’re talking about. So people end up going for convenience in most dimensions of their life, and the one dimension where they want meaningfulness, everyone else is going for convenience.
Some of this is just selection bias. You will only endure inconvenience to the extent it is worthwhile, so greater inconvenience correlates with greater expected payoff.
That's probably right - if something is just inconvenient and not meaningful, no one will want to do it. And if something adds meaningfulness and is in no way inconvenient, everyone will be doing it. So out of the things that some people choose to do and others don't, it'll be things where meaningfulness and convenience are at least in tension.
I'm very excited for the post-scarcity themed-O'Neill Cylinders. New York in 1990, Feudal Britain, Classical Greece, pre-AGI mega-civilization trying to prevent its creation. With enough resources we'll have a million theme parks for every era or organization of society, except they won't be theme parks but actual societies.
I think the limiting factor for community-building is a meaning-generating ideology. You can be wealthy and get all your friends to move into your neighborhood, but that's not by itself going to create a self-sustaining subculture. There has to be some sense of shared value, incentive alignment, and broader vision. It has to be strong enough to unite people but not so strong that it suppresses all individual variation and growth, and it has to be objectively adaptive in some sense. I think that's a really fine line to walk. Living near your friends is like planting a backyard garden while making a true subculture community is like building one of those sealed self-sustaining ecosystem-in-a-jar things. The balance has to be just right or it won't grow.
The social surplus generated by joining has to serve individual members' psychological needs in a way that incentivizes everyone to participate. At core I suspect the essential mechanism that's required is a set of norms that reward value-contribution with social status in a legible but non-gameable way. In a church setting that would be things like people who do the most volunteer work getting promoted to deacon or even just publicly congratulated and praised.
I wonder how civil society fits in this…I’ve always thought of it as every community has things they care about, so they fund some to work on those full time.
When I was younger and deeply ensconced in USA Christianity there was the whole missions world that I became a part of. Because Evangelicals care about evangelizing the world, they all pool their money so some of us become missionaries to go do it.
I evolved into a secular social entrepreneur, basically same idea just different goals.
So a lot of people not ensconced in an Amish or rationalist community do put their money into what they want to see in the world, so it’s like the close knit version or the diaspora version all spread out but linked by their thought leaders writing, holding meetings and donating. Maybe there’s a better word for that besides diaspora - diffused? Or distributed?
I grew up in a tight-knit immigrant community and really disliked my experiences in it. I ended up developing special interests that are very rare in my immigrant community and felt alienated by the community and the norms in it. The cost of a tight-knit community is that if you find yourself feeling or thinking differently than its members you find the community deeply alienating and the barrier to exit very high.
However as an adult I ended up joining a community of folks in my special interest. I married a person in the special interest community. My friend circle is dominated by folks in my special interest community. I developed a strong interest in rock climbing as an adult also and ended up also making friends through rock climbing. I would classify my special interest community as a "medium-knit" community and my rock climbing community as a "loosely-knit" community. I think the cure for loneliness in a liberal society is to fill your life with a medium-knit community and lots of loosely knit ones. Then you avoid the high exit costs and alienation that occur when you chafe against your community. You also avoid the huge intracommunity disputes that can form in tightly-knit communities that can lead to painful strife.
When it comes to money, if anything I think a generous welfare state or something like UBI strongly helps with this. Instead of poor communities languishing due to a lack of resources in helping each other, a strong welfare state can put poor communities and wealthy communities into an equal footing.
I'd love to see the rise of meta-community organizations that encourages community formation and association in liberal societies. When I was growing up (which was the '90s, so an America in transition between its old world and the new) there was little education on prompting to join community except for a weak interest in voluntarily joining school clubs and the pressure to join extracurricular activities to get into a prestigious college. I'd love to see it more explicit.
Is there a requirement that communities be "tight-knit"? I'm interpreting this, in the context of the essay, as bounded and pretty exclusive. (In this category, I would add upper classes of mostly-white people and their country clubs, universities, and finance jobs.)
I wonder about community as operating via >1 more or less loosely held communities? A network of nodes, with a range of densities and commitments. This effectively happens when one has lived somewhere for awhile (nodes from schooling whether you're own or your kids'; spiritual practices; occupational networking; serious play, like martial arts etc.). The nodes overlap and interconnect with others, too!
>But even defining these exceptions broadly, probably fewer than 10% of Americans belong to one of them.
According to Pew Research, 42% of U.S. adults say religion is very important in their lives, 37% of U.S. adults are members of a house of worship, and 25% of US Adults attend religious services weekly. (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-attendance-and-congregational-involvement/). 10% is way too low a number even for just the "Serious Christianity" category, especially if you're trying to define exceptions broadly.
There’s U-shape to the desire for community vs wealth. In low money/status/freedoms groups you have to rely on fellow humans for in-kind benefits (e.g. immigrant enclaves). Only two of the above mentioned communities (rationalists and free state) seem to fall into the category of having enough wealth/resources to have community building be a priority again. Scott’s point is- where are the others? We’ll they’re probably too exclusive/private to be well known.
The first place to look would be in wealthy neighborhoods in America e.g. Manhattan UES/UWS/Tribeca etc.
One thing that always strikes me in all those old novels is how rich English people with big country houses have no problem in allowing other rich English people to come and stay with them for an extended period, even people they barely know and might not especially like.
Downstream of this we have, of necessity, a lot of snobbery and strict etiquette; if you're going to trust someone you barely know in your house with all your extremely expensive things, you need to know that they're definitely part of the community; someone who spoons their soup the wrong way is potentially some non-U bounder who'll steal your silverware at the first opportunity.
It’s an interesting cultural tradition though, not really replicated by the middle classes who often copy the elites, although there’s maybe not enough food to go around. If Wodehouse is correct then the master of the house would turn up to dinner in his own house and find there’s any number of random aristocrats ( sometimes despised) gorging on the goose.
Ah yes, fetishizing tight-knit communities because le data while not realizing that you all would be the kind of people they would drive out of their communities, or lead stagnated lives in them.
The dirty secret of close-knit communities of any kind is you need to be 90% of the type of person they want, and manage to hide the 10% or it be an amusing foible. Outside of it you can be "our token weird guy"- he's weird but he's ours-or the hated guy of the moment. Or you can be the person they need but never acknowledge, usually a racial or ethnic minority.
If you don't fit in or can't fake it, you flee or be one of the last three.
A lot of the looser internet communities were built precisely because people are outcasts from local communities, and if they get tight enough you get the same issues.
The distance looser communities give is safer for many people.
> Ah yes, fetishizing tight-knit communities because le data while not realizing that you all would be the kind of people they would drive out of their communities, or lead stagnated lives in them.
Is it not true altruism to advocate for something that would benefit the world but hurt yourself? Though, I somewhat doubt this is what Scott is doing...
I don't want to be part of a tight community like the ones you mention because every community is, to some degree, deeply annoying. People who like one way of being that much tend to be insufferable.
I would fit very well with several kinds of groups, but... Well, there's always a "but". I love my queer community but they can get loony about capitalism and astrology. Rationalists can be cool but I'm an historian and artisan and don't feel entirely at home there. And a YIMBY utopia in New Hampshire? Sounds great... Except I'd have to live in New Hampshire. I'd rather stay in NYC, the best city in the world, and float around with only loose community.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention Haredi ( ultra-orthodox) Jews. Some liberals do join them, and some leave, though they pay a high price. If you lived on the east coast, you’d have thought of them right away.
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.
NYT's Ross Douthat about "Five theories about Joan of Arc’s miraculous-seeming care" starting:
"Scott Alexander, the noted rationalist blogger, has a feature where guest writers pen book reviews and essays for his site, and this week an anonymous writer reviewed the historical literature on Joan of Arc."
Isn't this just another "Bowling Alone" discussion?
Not to say we don't need to solve that problem as a society, but that's fundamentally what this is. Realizing that Thatcher's "There’s No Such Thing as Society" is bullshit and what will lead to people who are happy and have meaning is connection with others, and building society. It doesn't need to be like a Amish, or a cult, where people rarely associate with outsiders. Being a part of a group, even if its just a once a week bowling club, gives life meaning.
I think the reason we don't do this now is the myth of being able to it alone. The yeoman farmer, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. You go down that path far enough and you reject all community, not just the community where people help each other.
>In other words - yes, part of the good life is participation in a tight-knit community with strong values. Liberalism’s shared values are comparatively weak, and its knitting comparatively loose. But that’s no argument against the liberal project. Its goal isn’t to become this kind of community itself, but to be the platform where communities like this can grow up. So in a liberal democracy, Christians can have their church, Jews their synagogue, Communists their commune, and so on. Everyone gets the tight-knit community they want - which beats illiberalism, where (at most) one group gets the community they want and everyone else gets persecuted.
I don't think that's a good answer, even in theory. One of liberalism's main ideas is that unchosen oboigations are bad, and this is usually taken to imoly that you must continually agree to any obligation for it to remain valid. Take no-fault divorce, for example -- even as a mentally sound adult, you can't legally precommit to marry till death do you pass, because the liberal state forces every legal marriage to include a get-out clause enabling either partner to end the relationship for literally any reason whatsoever. Nor do you have much in the way of legally enforceable rights vis-à-vis your spouse -- if your husband is a deadbeat layabout who'd rather play video games than get a proper job, or your wife's a frigid harpy who won't have sex with you, your options are basically to either suck it up or get a divorce. It's the same with most other communities: at least in the eyes of the law, anybody is free to leave their tight-knit community for any reason, and in some cases, communities are legally forced to accept people as well (e.g., if you tried to start a whites-only university or town, you'd be promptly sued into oblivion). But, as people have said, building a tight-knit community requires hard work, and also a way to discourage free-riding and generally make sure members are acting according to the community's values. But if you have a community where members can leave whenever they want for any reason they want, it's hard to enforce the sort of behaviour necessary for a proper tight-knit community. You can't build a strong community with people who can easily leave as soon as the community makes demands on them. Hence most "tight-knit communities" under liberalism are more like social groups, because they lack the means to demand any higher level of commitment. The main exceptions are generally religious or ethnic subcultures which are already different enough from the mainstream that leaving would, in cultural terms, be essentially like moving to a new country.
Also a problem: under democracy, everybody has a say in how everybody else gets to live (at least assuming universal suffrage), which often makes for inter-communal tension. Historically, the states most closely approximating the ideal you describe have tended to be autocratic empires of some kind, because the various communities can be united in their common loyalty to the emperor whilst having little to do with each other. It's no coincidence that most western states have become less democratic as they've become more diverse, although it remains to be seen how successful their preferred solution (transferring more decision-making to the courts and bureaucratic regulatory bodies) will be.
Nice hopeful comments, but unfortunately, they missed the point of Reno‘s book. A nice strong church in a small community is not what he was talking about. He does not explicitly say this, but Democrats and Republicans will have to reimagining themselves. Globalization will be one of only many victims. The open society will probably have to undergo a complete makeover. Truths that were diminished down to meaning will make a grand return. Trump I don’t believe will represent anything like a long-term representative of what’s coming, but he has been a somewhat necessary wrecking ball. Hopefully both ends of the political spectrum will have begun to learn that there are some problems with ideology ruling our governance. I suspect. That we will need to demand that our politicians learn to talk to each other and govern, as if we were one people rather than a lot of little groups. It is two different things to have conflicting opinions about what is necessary as opposed to having a fortress with a moat where we lob rocks at who is ever outside.
I don't think money is the main cause as to why people don't go off to join/create like-minded communities.
> Are the rest not interested?
I honestly think this is the case. I think most people just don't have a large enough interest in a particular thing. Like the "only 1% of reddit users post" stat. I feel like the average person likely doesn't "have a thing" i.e. something they're in the top 0.01 percentile or roughly in the top 30K Americans of time spent, knowledge, or skill in some particular domain. I'd bet if you are one of these people in the top 0.01% in some particular domain, you're also probably represented in other domains (people are either "fanatics" or "normal").
In thinking about how money would affect things, what if everyone in America was 100% wealthier, would this lead to growth in like-minded communities at all? I can't see it. I see it leading to people just pursuing current status markers like getting more education, buying more luxurious things, going on wilder trips, living in more desirable locations, but not joining like-minded groups (which actually may be a negative in terms of cultural status!). We'd need a crazy shift for people to prioritize joining like-minded communities
Why does whether someone is in the top 0.01% of knowledge or skill or experience with A Thing matter here? I genuinely don't see how it ties in with your broader argument that people don't want more community
People of course like the idea of community, but when it comes to actually joining one and thereby making real changes in your life (e.g. moving somewhere, donating lots of money and going to church) most people wouldn't want to. The .01 percentile time spent or knowledge or skill is just a way to say this person is super dedicated -- to serious Christianity, or libertarianism, or rationalism, or whatever -- and would make real changes in their life to join the community.
"Are we really a nation dotted with tight-knit communities of strong values?" Not as much as we once were, but it seems to me pluralism and liberalism allowed for generations of exactly this in ethnic groupings, especially in cities. And that those communities still exist. Cubans in Miami, Iranians in L.A., Puerto Ricans in New York, Irish Catholics in Boston, various Latin American groups across the southwest and in cities, Somalis in Maine, Asian American groups in cities everywhere, and on and on. Ethnicity was a useful source of glue because it often encompasses language, religious belief, and cultural practices all in one and is tied together in extended family fabric.
I don't think everyone besides the Amish and a few other cults are just dissolved in a sea of "mainstream" culture. Even when ethnicity doesn't perfectly unite people, we all live in places. Small town New England offers a kind of cohesive glue even for people who have come in from all kinds of other places.
The idea of money being the glue that holds a community together tastes bad in my mouth. It paints a picture of wealthier and wealthier people circling into isolated enclaves and from there sending charity out far and wide to help the sorry masses who can't afford to join in the rich enclaves. Whereas, when people live in real places that they have a sense of belonging to, rich people and middle of the road people and low income people and able bodied people and old people and young people and disabled people have occasion to mingle in the normal course of life. Small towns and cities have historically done this better than suburbs which are by definition more isolated enclaves based on socio-economic exclusion. I don't think suburbs have been great for America politically or culturally, and it sounds like you're speaking up for more of that kind of a thing.
I expect money to have quite little to do with this. Going from no community to a 5 or 6 community should cost very little for most people in big towns.
Instead, I imagine it is something like this for most people: "I like X, and I like community. However, I do not want to live together with folks who care so much about X that they would actually start a new community about this.".
See also: reform jews being reform jews for only about half a generation. If you do not actually believe in that stuff, there is no moral force binding you together, and an abstract wish for less loneliness is not sufficient to build a "let us not be alone club". Now remember that the stereotypical secular person does not really believe in anything, and you are really screwed in terms of community
One problem I'm not seeing anyone else talking about is that finding and forming a community is really really hard! I moved states a little over a year ago, and I made a very serious effort to try to make friends and suchforth.
It only started showing results very recently, involved enormous amounts of time, effort, and money, and dealing with two separate board game groups in my area who were basically Nazis (as in they were explicitly in favour of firebombing Jewish homes, synagogues, and Jewish-owned businesses, doing certain arm gestures at Jews while using alliterative phrases praising early 20th century fascist leaders), and even then I wouldn't say it's a "community" but rather a loose group of mild friends which is already starting to crumble.
And I've got a lot of advantages. My work schedule is very flexible, my money situation is ok, and I'm able to travel halfway across the city. If even one of those wasn't true, I can only imagine that would be exponentially harder.
So, what makes an LGBT party? What is LGBT fashions? LGBT sports? I know several people who are not gay who play roller derby, are they closeted? What is “a special LGBT-friendly neighborhood” and what’s the difference between that and a “LGBT-not friendly neighborhood”? And what are LGBT “norms”?
Is there a gay way to dress, a lesbian way to throw a party, a bi way to play sports? Or are we just flattening millions of unique lives into a caricature for the sake of convenience, mockery, or control?
You claim to “know many of these people,” but instead of understanding them as individuals, you’re describing a fantasy version — a parallel society full of stereotypes that exists only to justify your fear. You frame it like you’re uncovering some clever sociological insight, but all you’re doing is repackaging discrimination in the language of observation. That’s not intelligence. That’s bias dressed up as thoughtfulness.
The idea that LGBT people are forming a “country-within-a-country” because they have dating apps, bars, and — god forbid — flags, is not only ridiculous, it’s hypocritical. Straight people have their own dating apps, churches, sports teams, bars, neighborhoods, and yes, entire political movements. Are they trying to secede too?
What you’re really reacting to isn’t separatism — it’s visibility. You’re uncomfortable with LGBT people living openly and finding community, so you paint it as threatening. But LGBT people don’t owe you assimilation. They don’t need to stop gathering, loving, or celebrating themselves just because it challenges your idea of normal.
There is no singular LGBT “norm” — there are queer people in churches, suburbs, farms, cities, science labs, football teams, parent-teacher meetings, and yes, parties. The only common thread is a need for safety and dignity — something posts like this help erode.
So maybe the real question isn’t “Why do LGBT people form communities?”
It’s “Why are you so threatened by people who don’t revolve around you?”
And honestly, I’m disappointed — not just by the content of what you wrote, but by how proudly you display your ignorance and call it insight. You’ve built an entire argument on shallow stereotypes and then acted like you’ve uncovered some uncomfortable truth about society, when all you’ve really done is expose your own bias and fear. The lack of foresight here isn’t just a gap in understanding — it’s a refusal to reflect on your own limitations, a failure to recognize that what you’re promoting isn’t cultural critique, it’s bigotry. You’re not holding up a mirror to society — you’re just projecting your prejudice and calling it a pattern. Do better.
> Straight people have their own dating apps, churches, sports teams, bars, neighborhoods, and yes, entire political movements. Are they trying to secede too?
Well... yes? I'd argue that a big motivator for the new right is the potential to "secede" from these leftist subcultures. And their community is a lot bigger, and a lot more powerful.
> But LGBT people don’t owe you assimilation.
I guess they don't technically owe anyone anything, no. But the people are no longer asking nicely for your cooperation. And frankly, your comment is a great example of why people are resorting to this. You are not in a position to be making such demands, especially with such arrogant hostility.
Let’s be clear: marginalized people forming community for safety, joy, and survival is not the same as powerful groups withdrawing in protest because they’re uncomfortable sharing space. That’s not an apples-to-apples comparison — it’s oppression versus entitlement.
LGBT people creating support networks in a world that has historically criminalized, pathologized, and erased them is not ‘secession’ — it’s survival. And framing that as threatening or provocative says more about your worldview than it does about queer people.
If your reaction to someone challenging stereotypes and defending human dignity is ‘This is why people aren’t asking nicely anymore,’ then you’re not actually interested in discourse. You’re just mad someone didn’t make themselves smaller to suit your comfort.
And no, I’m not making demands. I’m pointing out how absurd and dangerous it is to pretend that queer existence is inherently separatist — while ignoring how straight, cis, religious, or nationalist identities already form exclusive enclaves, often without scrutiny.
You call it arrogant hostility. I call it clarity.
If you’re more upset by someone defending queer community than by someone describing it as a threat to national unity… maybe reflect on where your sympathies lie. Because if your idea of a reasonable response to visibility is ‘they brought this on themselves,’ then we’re not talking about coexistence — we’re talking about control.
Interdependency happens when people consistently need things, and they’re aware of it, and they change their behavior to deal with it productively and socially.
If you live in a society without personal interdependency, like one that has a very generous UBI that isn’t constantly inflating the currency somehow, then you have only personal attachments holding together your commitments. They’re more fragile than we think. We’ve already effectively abandoned family, religion, employer/employee loyalty, localism, and basically every form of committed identity. We’ve made excuses why all these abandonments were progress, and you can see people in this comments section calling their membership in the dodgeball championship memorabilia collectors of Spokane a tight knit community.
People belong as long as it suits their interests. Without coercion, it goes no further. Never underestimate the power of self-interest.
"The optimistic perspective is that if this is so bad, what’s to stop you from joining the Amish? Or some sort of pseudo-Amish who live in an eternal 1990s? Or your own Amish-inspired sect who have whatever set of technological and social relations you think are optimal?"
The law. The law tells me I can't have what I want, even on my own property and not bothering other people. Because most people are stupid and afraid and are allowed to vote.
Equating LGBT and Rationalists on this scale seems kind of crazy. The LGBT community is significantly larger and has plenty of very tight knit micro communities.
Well off Kibbutzim in Israel come to mind while reading this. The Kibbutz movement went through a crisis in the 1980s, but there is a revival now, with many kibbutzim having advanced manufacturing (as well as advanced farming etc.) and are doing well, with waiting lists (and selection committees) to join.
Does ACX have some sort of online community board (e.g. discord, forum, etc.)? Would be great to have ACX readers connect with each other by location (I for one would love to connect with other ACX readers in Long Island, NY). Nothing beats physical proximity when it comes to community building.
Americans do an annoying thing with the word "Liberalism" where they use it to mean two things: liberalism as in "Liberal democracy" which includes the entire western political mainstream and liberalism as in "centre-left". I'm actually not sure which definition Fukuyama is using, and I'm not sure if he does either.
Moving along though, this is where I think the wheels already fall off:
> part of the good life is participation in a tight-knit community with strong values
I question this premise. There's an optimal amount of tight-knittedness, which is somewhere far short of where you start to call it "tight-knit".
An optimal social life includes a whole bunch of people at varying degrees of social distance -- your immediate family, your extended family, your good friends, your vague acquaintances, people you know from various social organisations, your colleagues and your neighbours and your dentist and the local shopkeeper that remembers your face and knows nothing else about you. A "tight-knit" community probably just means that all these roles start to overlap because there's few enough people in your social universe that they need to -- your dentist is your neighbour's cousin and you can't buy milk any more because you broke up with the shopkeeper's daughter.
> Are the rest not interested? Happy with mainstream culture? They don’t seem happy. 90% of articles on social media are people talking about how much they hate mainstream culture, sometimes with strong specific opinions about what improvements to make
People who are happy aren't writing articles on social media, or if they are then they're not the ones you're reading.
Liberalism is defined by rejection of the political nature of man by which mankind is divided into neighbors and strangers.
(The best illustration of the term "stranger" is the Kipling's poem The Stranger")
Political nature of man implies the organization of men into particular, self-ruling, morally authoritative communities variously called tribes, nations, polities etc.
The right-wing liberals reject the moral authority of the community i.e they regard each man as stranger to each other.
The left-wing liberals reject the particularity aspect--they would have each man a neighbor to all others and thus a world state.
If it's just about money, why don't the ultra-rich do this already? Yes, a few tech CEOs have survivalist compounds but Prosperia notwithstanding, they have not gone off and built Techtopia with all their tech CEO friends. The Hamptons is boring, it's just like any other suburb but with bigger and fancier houses with nicer views. Are they just uniquely predisposed to enjoy materialist slop? Seems unlikely. How many of them see therapists for their vague sense of "something being missing in their life? Probably a lot. So, what gives?
The vague atomized ennui-affected materialist life must have its own pull. People must actually *want* it, in some capacity. That has to be why it so voraciously destroys most tight-knit communities. The real debate is whether people "want it" like a woman in Afghanistan wants to wear high heels and buy romance novels at Strand Books with a 2% cash back credit card, or whether they "want it" like a drug addict wants to inject heroin. I think Fukuyama et al. say it's mostly the former, and trad-posters et al. say it's mostly the latter.
With trad/"retvrn"/etc. advocates I always get the sneaking suspicion that they believe compulsion is necessary, even if they won't admit it. This thing is good for you, in a "highest good" sense, but you don't realize it yet or can't accept it, so I'm going to compel you to live this way, by force if necessary. This is basically the Taliban's MO (even today!).
Scott has it backwards, I believe. In modern times, due to high GDP most people choose to not get tight-knitted, because they can afford so. A few still head for monasteries (12/10), some even want to get to prison (15/10) https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-20/geraldton-wa-homeless-man-asks-for-two-years-jail/104242950 but then those nuns seldom were millionaires - homless trying to get jail-time is more of a thing. - I am sending my love to all those rationalists and libertarian in communities, but me: I prefer to keep things loose. Looking at the world around me: this is the standard. Revealed preferences. "Hell is other people".
Scott wrote: "My model of ethnogenesis involves four stages: pre-existing differences, a rallying flag, development, and dissolution."
Rationalists have both pre-existing differences (being rich, smart, educated) and a rallying flag (or multiple flags - believing in Bayesian reasoning, believing in "rationality" etc )
Many people don't have that: they are just normal people who like communities. Think Phyllis Vance. Phyllis doesn't have an ideology or strong politics. She likes reading and gossip and has fun at the office birthday parties. She thrives in her community of "small town paper office" because she likes having friends. She doesn't have the ambition to go join a new community based around her interests. Maybe she would join a book club. The Phyllises of the world don't have a rallying flag capable of to up and leave their towns to join a new community. They barely have preexisting differences. But she definitely needs a community and friends.
I'm surprised you didn't mention how jobs used to be community-forming to a higher degree than they are now. Small businesses still give this social luxury, because it can actually give you something to identify with, whereas with scale a lot of that gets dissipated into "you are just a statistic" etc etc
That is in the US. In other times and places, The community policed you. Your legal rights were dependent on your community, and you couldn't leave.
That goes to the question - who has the power? In the Liberal way, it is the Individual. He makes the choices, under a legal system that treats everyone the same.
In an Illiberal system, people are treated legally differently based on their community, and the community makes the choices, not the individuals.
I'm surprised you didn't mention how jobs used to be community-forming to a higher degree than they are now. Small businesses still give this social luxury, because it can actually give you something to identify with, whereas with scale a lot of that gets dissipated into "you are just a statistic" etc etc
I don't think it's just economics, another factor (maybe the main one) is that communities are usually not that stable without a "punish the defectors/traitors" feature. Without it, communities get un-knit from freeloaders who use the benefits of the community without supporting the costs. And implementing any "punish" is simply illegal in most cases, because it conflict with the laws of the country at large (protection laws mainly, but states basically hate private laws and want to keep a monopoly on justice and justice enforcement - and the punish is exactly that - a private justice). The only punishment that could be done (and even that may be problematic) is a weak form of banishment, one that does not involve actual displacement (because this would conflict with property or housing laws), but just ban access to community meetings/perks.
This remove the location as a community bind, and looking at the examples provided (or the ones I can think of), without it communities just can not last very long....
It seems religion get some slack regarding what they can do to punish defectors, especially in the US, because cult freedom mitigates protection laws....explaining why cults makes the bulk of the community examples.
The other examples are commercial companies (sometimes with extensions to non-profit, who copy the pattern of contract-based organization). This is the only //state-like organization (with partially private laws) allowed by (some) modern states, but those are not usually considered communities - maybe because they are so ubiquitous, the perks (salary) is too trivially evident and the organization is even more pyramidal than most modern states (which makes sense as it's military-derived) :-)
I don't think money/economics is the main impediment. I think its much more likely to be:
1) collective action problems - how do you get everyone in your "community" to agree to live in one place - who are the 1st movers etc. Its very hard to get your group living project off the ground. There is a strong bias towards the status quo.
2) ties to other people - say I really want to live in some left wing commune in Poland, but I currently live in a village in India. Relocating to Poland will involve uprooting myself and never seeing my friends and family again. Most people will be unwilling to do this. Sure there are already lots of economic migrants, but I reckon those with the highest propensity to migrate already do so. Most others wont due to valuing their local ties (friends, family etc.)
I'd also add 3) legal impediments - its very hard for me to opt out of a countries laws I don't like and simply make my own instead. Most of the time states are very down on people wanting to break up their monopolies on the use of force
“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
Conventionally spelled "Retvrn".
Some guys tried that in various rural North Dakota communities.
One of them was told in no uncertain terms to leave and take his skinhead friends with him, while the locals thought up various legal, extralegal, and quasilegal ways to speed his decision-making process up for him.
Another's "church" mysterious burned down in the middle of the night, nobody knows what happened, nobody saw a thing.
Another ran afoul of the local militia (I actually know some of members - nicest antigovernment extremists I ever have met, true story, no lie, but they are not racists) and decided that this was not the place for them.
Another got into a fight with a friend of mine, who is probably further to the right than they are but married to a black woman who may be even further than he is, but that was in Montana.
Scott's magisterial piece on "law without law" was most instructive here.
Do you mean Ellickson's "Order Without Law"? https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/ellick.htm
Yes. There was a review of this somewhere in ACX that was most edifying.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-order-without-law
Have you ever been to a Great Plains town? That’s basically what they already are.
no mention of furries?
Do they live together? I thought it was just conventions and Discord chats.
Do they have to live together? Plenty of strong churches draw people from a broader community. Scott's examples of the rationalists and LGBT community don't do this.
All living together on a compound helps, but I think the technology that makes distributed communities possible is an important part of this story as well.
They have to live near each other and see each other regularly. Online community is a contradiction in terms. Your community can have a presence online, but if the community exists online, it's not a community, it's a remote club
Exactly. These are some things you can't do if your community is only remote:
* discuss local politics
* influence local politics
* do various things together, such as sports or hiking
* have your children meet each other, so they can be a part of your community since small age
* make a school for your children, or at least some afternoon activities
* defend against local crime
Deliberate designated furry houses are a thing but not the typical living condition and the tendency to room with friends when you need room mates helps... So eh about to the extent rationalislits do.
There's a really interesting collection of research into the furry community at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376353096_Furscience_A_Decade_of_Psychological_Research_on_the_Furry_Fandom
According to polls, only about a fifth of furries are straight, so in a way it can be thought of as a sub-sect of the LGBT subculture. However, on average, furries say that about half of their friends are also furries, which does seem a bit more tight-knit than LGBT communities in general- though not quite as much as fundamentalist religious sects.
I wonder why that is. Is it as simple as "men are hairer than women, so people who like hairy animal people are more likely to like men"? People who fetishize specific physical characteristics are more likely to be men, so maybe that's why furries = usually gay/bi males. Or is it that unusual fetishes like furry are more autistic coded and autistic men are more likely to be bisexual/otherwise not exclusively straight?
Are there furries that aren’t in the LGBT community?
Wouldn't a lot of attempts at community building be illegal?
They would break laws about discrimination, schooling, probably fire regulations etc
The Amish have lots of legal loopholes for them, various fundamentalist sects have their leaders arrested by the police (often because they are guilty of bad things)
Iirc some rationalists looked into buying a community apartment building a few years ago and found out renting only to ingroup members would violate the fair housing act.
What about letting them buy into the communal ownership of the building and 'own' their unit?
That's how I would try to do it if I were trying to build a community rather than make money as a landlord.
But no idea whether the law is set up to support that realistically.
Not an expert, but I think it is - I believe in the housing space that's what called a "co-op"
Thanks, that would make sense.
I have to say, I'm broadly ok with the law working this way.
If you are trying to make a profit by being a landlord, you are a business and get all the protections and benefits that the government provides to businesses, but also the social obligations that the government regulates into businesses, including non-discrimination.
If you are trying to form your own community with like-minded people, and not profit off of them, then form a co-op and have fun.
I wonder what the difficulty level is of building co-ops and co-housing in North America overall? I suspect that NIMBY power has successfully quashed many hopes and dreams along these lines.
>They would break laws about discrimination
Private clubs are generally exempt from those laws, and religious organizations are even more broadly exempt.
Trying to form a *racially* exclusive community would definitely break some laws, and probably would actually get you in trouble.
That said, that there are many dimensions other than race along which a community might be exclusive, and I agree that most of those probably won't get you in trouble.
Also: supporting Scott's point about money being useful, money can buy good lawyers.
Good layers can't guarantee results (except to lose).
Forming a racially exclusive RESIDENTIAL community would run afoul of fair housing laws, but that does not seem to be what Fukuyama is referring to. He is referring to communities of interest:
>A healthy liberal society is not simply one that reduces conflict. A healthy liberalism is characterized by strong community, where people’s passions and interests cause them to band together in communities to pursue common interests.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/liberalism-needs-community
Private clubs are exempt in the sense that they can decide whom they allow to be a member however they want. But if they then engage in commercial transactions with members (e.g. rent them homes), is that still exempt? I doubt it, it would allow too big a loophole around anti-discrimination laws.
You can discriminate economically to some extent with a private members list since you're no longer a public accommodation. But the Fair Housing Act (Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968) would still probably make any financial transaction which overtly involved race to be illegal. I would suspect that such a thing could be done indirectly. "We only rent to members of our religious order. We don't advertise at all. And all order members are elected via a secret vote." Bonus points if housing is not the primary purpose of the organization.
I'm sure that despite the supposed difficulty of discriminating by race you'll find there's apartment buildings which are, mysteriously, populated entirely by Orthodox Jews.
Realistically you won't get in trouble as long as you don't go round putting out big advertisements saying "such-and-such only need apply". Nobody goes around with a clipboard checking each apartment building for balanced demographics.
Yeah, there's what's de jure legal and what's de facto possible.
Fair Housing Act doesn’t apply to “owner-occupied buildings with no more than four units, single-family houses sold or rented by the owner without the use of an agent, and housing operated by religious organizations and private clubs that limit occupancy to members.” https://www.hud.gov/helping-americans/fair-housing-act-overview. You could make a whites-only community if you want as long as everyone is consenting and all your buildings are owner-occupied with less than four units and you don’t use agents to sell the property, or if you make a private club that owns all the housing and gives it to members.
Some states might have laws that are more restrictive but a lot don’t.
IANAL but I think overt racial discrimination would still be illegal. But at that level of devotion it would be hard to detect and prove.
Agreed. People tend to sort on ethnic, cultural, religious, and sexual lines, and that gives them a setting in which further networks of connection can establish themselves without an assist from various weirdnesses. But there are very strong policies designed to disrupt that kind of sorting.
My sibling rents an apartment in a complex that illegally gives Jehovah's Witnesses a discount.
Must be nice to live in the only place where Jehovah's Witnesses don't bother knocking.
Haha, it probably is.
Others have already said a version of this, but I would summarize by saying that such laws exist, but the variety of extant loopholes and the relative lack of state appetite to enforce them mean that a motivated group can definitely make this work.
Lack of state appetite being evidenced by the many groups that do, in fact, make this work. Notwithstanding the few high-profile cases of cult leaders being arrested, there are many, many small cult-like organizations (mostly religious, but not operating under a sect-specific legal loophole) with some aspect of communal housing which do not face legal problems.
A good example is the Hutterites, who are Amish-adjacent but entirely distinct from the Amish, and don't shun technology like the Amish do.
I would guess that if you're willing to forgo the protection of the US legal system, you can basically set up your own system of ownership that wouldn't run afoul of discrimination laws. For example, the colony could simply dispense with rental contracts entirely and rely on informal agreements. I'm not a lawyer, but I think that if you just let someone live in your house for free, the government can't force you to also let strangers live there.
Even if not illegal, they'd often face intense social pressure to be more "inclusive" (e.g., the London gentlemen's club which was recently bullied into going mixed-sex, or for that matter the "Men In Sheds Club" which was also presured into admitting women).
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?
Yes, especially in Williamsburg and Crown Heights.
Hey man can you share the names of these places. I like to travel around and visit places like these
If you're in New York, go to Boro Park or Williamsburg.
What is the new Jersey town?
Lakewood. It's not as intense as the other ones.
Monsey, NY
Flatbush is worth checking out. There are a bunch of Yeshivahs and off the Avenue J stop on the F train there are a bunch of Jewish stores
Thanks, I've edited in them and the Mormons.
In the same tier as ultra-Orthodox and Mormons, I would place Mennonites, the classic pseudo-Amish.
Ooh running off to the edited version to see my people’s score.
A couple of fringe micro communities would be trekkies (though almost entirely online) and one I belong to in San Francisco, The Long Now Foundation, an organization committed to long term thinking. We even have a sort of Mecca with The Interval cafe in Fort Mason which also houses the Long Now library of essential human knowledge and hosts regular events featuring like minded futurist speakers. Teeny-tiny though, and not as exclusive as the groups you've mentioned.
Just checked out the long now foundation website, interesting ideas! Do you have any bloggers or other people subscribed to the idea you would recommend following to learn more?
Relevant to share:
about the Satmar (ultra-orthodox Jewish group) takeover of a city named Bloomingburg
https://notnottalmud.substack.com/p/the-challenge-of-building-new-cities
This was a great article and made a real point: basically a guy had to lie, commit election fraud, and go to jail to make the Satmar takeover of Bloomingburg a reality. Starting your own town anywhere near anything is hard!
Wow, I had heard of the stories of some of those Hasidic groups running school districts into the ground, but I'd never heard of committing election fraud to take over a whole town.
It's weird they can't find totally open land somewhere, but I guess for geographic reasons they tend to stay in the NY/NJ area.
I think this is missing willpower as a big problem separate from money.
I think I would be better off if I threw away my phone. I still don't throw away my phone...
Extra money wouldn't help me live in a 1990s pseudo-Amish culture, because I still wouldn't have a phone. And if I kept my phone, it wouldn't be 1990s.
You could hire an assistant to keep your phone away from you.
That only works if you don't then tell the assistant "give me my phone back or you're fired."
But you're less likely to tell the assistant that, than you were to grab the phone in the first place. It requires an additional step - and might invoke the judgment of another person. Accountability works, even if it's kind of strange that it does.
Living without a smartphone is becoming less and less practical because lots of payments can be made only online or with a phone. For example in my neighborhood parking can only be paid by phone.
I think perhaps that not throwing your phone away is evidence that it is actually quite good for you. Your usage might not be, but at a deeper level perhaps you know the benefits outweigh the value.
Now let's pause and pretend I were making this same argument for heroin or cigarettes ... Not pretending this is a good argument but it is one plausible explanation.
In the same way, perhaps we subconsciously believe that mass society is better for us, and thus we don't take the plunge?
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.
Isn’t this what has basically happened with blue cities vs red towns? Seems to produce problems when they share civil infrastructure and economy to duke it out over, which I don’t think you could or would want to get rid off.
I think the main problem is that intentional communities are just too weird. The Amish are weird, rationalists are weird, cults are weird, and I don't think it's easy or feasible for a large proportion of people to go do something so outlandish as this. Maybe there's a tipping point where everyone does this and then it's just what you do, but outside of waving the post-singularity-UBI wand I don't see it.
This also brings to mind a kind of person to me, the kind of person who's really very invested in making sure other people are 'acting right.' I think this is a kind of mind that doesn't get a lot of attention in rationalist spaces, but some people are just really really invested in policing the behavior of others. Where are these people going to go? It's like the paradox of tolerance where we must be intolerant of intolerance: in the glorious liberal communal future we must police the behavior of those who want to police the behavior of others.
I recently spent an unedifying couple of hours reading about the Mel Lyman cult. Policing others was one of the main draws, especially at meal time. It went far beyond the girls in my mother’s sorority house singing out when somebody had her elbows on the dining table.
I have a family member who joined the Lyman group in the 60s. I haven't gotten up the courage to ask her about the early days - would you mind sharing the resources you found on it?
Oh gosh, it was just one of my internet rabbit holes. I think it started with a video of Jim Kweskin. Can’t remember why. Then of course I read Wikipedia. Then an old long form piece from the Rolling Stone - I think this is it: “THE LYMAN FAMILY’S HOLY SIEGE OF AMERICA” - and then an interview with writer Kay Boyle …
I see in looking there was a New Yorker piece on the cult in 2019 but I didn’t actually read that.
I can't imagine that ended up well.
They still own a bunch of apartment buildings in a now-gentrified part of Roxbury (transitional neighborhood in Boston). When I was in real estate I met with them several times, and once was even allowed in one of their buildings. It was..... spooky. A couple of people in other rooms ran around shouting 'outsider in the home! outsider in the home!', I guess to let them know that I was in there. I gave a polite answer to some random personal question from their office manager/bookkeeper woman and she said "you're a slippery one, huh?" Which is kind of an intimidating question to get when you're literally in the basement of a cult compound.
However they do run a pretty professional apartment leasing operation. Or they did, this was almost 15 years ago now. Worth noting that their little neighborhood (Fort Hill) has now gentrified a ton, so they're probably sitting on tens of millions of dollars in real estate.
Supposedly they also opened up a construction company in Southern California
Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 by Ryan H. Walsh is the best book on the Mel Lyman cult that I have seen. It's actually a book about Van Morrison, but he was living in the Boston area then (his song "Into the Mystic" is titled after the nearby Mystic Lake/River), so it does tie in. Also has a fascinating bit about the Velvet Underground. Starting a cult based on LSD and trad American folk music sounds pretty improbable, but there you go.
Yeah, I think a lot of people want to be at 5 or 6 out of 10 in Scott's scale (have a community but also interact with lots of people outside of it), and a lot of people want to be 0/10 and not really have obligations to any group. I don't think it's a money thing.
5/10 sounds pretty nice!
Personally I think I'd be happy with a 2/10 or so.
I'd be happiest with a nuclear family that I live with, an extended family I see quite frequently, a circle of friends and acquaintances of varying degrees of closeness, and colleagues and neighbours with whom I'm on generally good terms. And then I want millions of other people that I don't really know, to provide "social padding" between these closer connections and ensure that I'm not running into someone I know every time I go to the shops.
I don't really want to be surrounded by "like-minded" people in any strong sense; I don't care what my neighbours views are on deep philosophical issues, but it's important that we be aligned on things like what sorts of loud noises are acceptable and when.
There are also people who wouldn't benefit from a community organized around a formal complex ideology, but who would benefit from having a community of only compatible personality types. Since you can't easily preconfigure this (theoretically tech could help), most normal people go through their lives sorting people in and out of the friend bucket, and make their personal community organically that way.
Idk that this is really an answer - I wrote a piece trying to figure out what "weird" even means, and the biggest thing I could really settle on is that being "weird" gets you socially excluded. But that just brings us back to the fundamental question of the "live and let live" liberal ethos. Liberalism accepts you, and also accepts people who are intolerant of you. Joining a weird community might make you weird to more people, but you're just drawing the line in a different place. You were already never going to be accepted by everyone.
"A different place" is a pretty different place, and getting socially excluded is bad on par with death. I bet these kinds of communities are fine once you're in them, but think more of the process of joining. Whatever it is you're actually doing, it's going to sound like "joining a cult." And not just to other people, to you as well.
You're absolutely right that no one is ever going to be accepted by everyone, but no one just knows how to live. At best we can copy people around us with some minor variations. And going off to join "weird cults" just isn't what people do. Having said all that, weird things have happened and the Amish are real.
Sorry this is so long, as I kind of followed my train of thought as it went and now don't have time to edit it down:
Yeah on second thought I think you're pretty correct, but with a caveat. There's a clear correlation between Scott's ratings of how tight-knit these communities are and their weirdness. Joining a cult is a lot "weirder" than becoming a rationalist, and rationalists still go to normal jobs and have relationships with their normie families, etc. etc..
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 think your illiberal point is actually a stronger one than I was making. Liberalism seems so intertwined with cosmopolitanism that I have a hard time seeing it flourish in small communities like this. Extant communities seem to bear this out, and the admittedly few intentional communities I've experienced are like this too.
I think it goes like this: why would anyone be liberal? Maybe they tell you it's good in school, but that doesn't stick. What I think makes it stick is seeing the fruits of multiculturalism and that they are good. Seeing all the weird and lovely and profound things that come out of cultures radically different than your own is amazing. How does a small intentional community experience that? By definition, other cultures aren't there, and seeing them on the internet is nowhere near the same as living around them. I just don't see how it sustains itself.
I think “weird” is pretty central to community.
How so?
Because forming a community is about being your own little group, distinct from everyone else. If you celebrate the same events, eat the same foods, believe the same things, and frequent the same social events as people outside the community, then it's hard to say what it even means to claim that you're a community. At least *something* distinctive has to be going on, and distinctiveness is almost identical to "weirdness".
>If you celebrate the same events, eat the same foods, believe the same things, (...), then it's hard to say what it even means to claim that you're a community.
Well, in the past it was kinship and the difficulty of travel, but since that no longer applies, some amount of weirdness is probably required.
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.
What makes you optimistic? Just because people are bored of their phones doesn't mean they're going to start communities en masse. That requires a level of coordination that I'm not sure can easily be achieved.
Each person has the option to either quit being terminally online and join a community or just continue being terminally online. Joining a community requires effort and it only pays off if other people do the same thing. So if others aren't doing it, people will just continue being terminally online. It's kinda like the prisoner's dilemma.
I'm not saying this makes it impossible to form communities. Some small number of people will manage. But it does make it very difficult for it to happen in large numbers. It still could, but I'm not optimistic.
It's unlike the prisoner's dilemma because one coordinator handles a lot of the effort for a lot of people, and for some people, being the coordinator is not a bad outcome.
But yeah, I agree that this is not a foregone conclusion. There's an assumption, though, that people will choose convenience over every other good thing. I get that assumption, because we currently live in a society that's been highly conditioned to seek convenience, and that's put up inconvenient barriers to other goods. Historically, laziness is not the defining feature of humanity. And there's a clear collective desire to pursue other goods.
That's why I see it as likely that some enterprising people will weaken those barriers, that that will activate other people who wanted to act collectively but the barriers were too high, that will further weaken the barriers, and etc. in a virtuous cycle.
Likely is by no means the same as inevitable.
> It's unlike the prisoner's dilemma because one coordinator handles a lot of the effort for a lot of people, and for some people, being the coordinator is not a bad outcome.
Sure, but even just getting out of your shell and interacting with people more presents some amount of friction, especially if you've become accustomed to sitting inside and doom-scrolling all day.
If there's enough will for this kind of thing, a few people could get the ball rolling and it could end up being some big movement, but I just find it unlikely. I think this is the kind of thing people like to complain a lot about but don't want to put in much effort themselves to pursue. I could be wrong.
>Historically, laziness is not the defining feature of humanity
Sure, that would be status fights, but to the extent that they are compatible with comfort, people will choose comfort every time.
This is why its difficult to build new communities, but for most people there is some sort of existing community they can join. There are plenty of churches, mosques, and cults that can draw people in once they've discovered a crisis of meaning. Though most people going through such a crisis are so lacking in agency that they are likely to just continue to rot in digital addiction.
This reminds me of Peter Thiel's beliefs about how the only developments recently have been in the realm of software, and information processing, but relatively little increased abundance (or even a regression when you consider things like housing prices) in material abundance.
The sort of abundance needed for these sorts of intentional communities seems like it would need radical material abundance, not just really good entertainment, instant access to high quality information, and chatbots.
>Why don’t conservatives live in trad whites-only farming villages on the Great Plains
This is essentially where Oregon came from, with a bit more explicit racism. It just doesn't have sticking power when people own their own property, eventually people will split and want to liquidate their share
Scandinavians getting far away from other Scandinavians, were racist?
Fuck yeah they were: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_black_exclusion_laws
Anti-slavery and fearful of free blacks.
Pietists back then were not necessarily less bigoted than Antebellum planters, they just found slavery not compatible with their religious beliefs...
Maybe they were influenced by that crowd that thought, in the 1830s or so, that they could unwind the “original sin”.
Another complexity is that white Americans were scared of African Americans - the political power they could wield, the unrest they could cause, the poverty and resulting crime. But this fear didn't extend to Africans from Africa whom could often ignore segregation laws. So it wasn't just about race or skin color, but fear of an "enemy within"
A huge advantage of many current institutions is that they have developed an immune system against various damaging social parasites.
If you set up a new community there is a high chance a charismatic pervert will rise to the top and if you avoid that there is a significant chance that medical crankery, conspiracy theories, embezelling charlatans etc will dominate your movement. If your movement is united around values it is highly likely it will face constant splits.
German intellectual right wing circles refer to the Böckenförde dictum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6ckenf%C3%B6rde_dilemma): The liberal society is built on foundations it cannot itself guarantee.
I think a bit beyond than that, there’s outright (perfectly unintentional) adversity. What is the relationship between community and material wealth? The mere correlation certainly appears negative, and I think it’s plausible the causation goes like this: community is not for free. It is in fact extremely demanding. And in our times, it has become optional; we can live, even enjoy, our lives without much community. In fact technological development has not only given us enough food to make obesity a much bigger problem than starvation, but also made constant zero-demand entertainment and validation available.
The zero demand nature of digital entertainment and social validation is perhaps more than what it positively offers what allows it to outcompete community. Community has to be constantly built, exists, for every individual, only insofar as it is consistently built, and that’s a harsh demand that video games don’t make on us.
>What is the relationship between community and material wealth? The mere correlation certainly appears negative,
I don't know. If you look at the most extreme forms of lack of community, i.e. secession and civil war, there are a lot more poor and/or artificial and/or ex-colonial countries who suffered those in the past 200 years.
I guess it depends on what we mean by community. But at least community isn’t the same as unity. In my mind strife between communities doesn’t mean these communities aren’t strong. If communities A and B fight each other while being part of the same state, that’s a civil war, but that’s also two communities.
As long as a community's internal quarrels don't spill outside of it, where's the problem? There are several ways that money can divide a community. Maybe the community existed out of economic necessity only, and when the necessity disappeared (because of money), so did the community. If the community didn't offer enough beyond the necessary economic support from which it sprang, then maybe it wasn't all that great a community to begin with. It has served its purpose and can go, that's the way it goes sometimes.
The cost idea I think is very important. Everyone wants community, no one wants to 'pay' for it, where payment is in time and emotional energy.
Any particular aspect of strong community promotes one sort of flourishing, but causes problems for a lot of other kinds of flourishing. If a bunch of people have different ideas of flourishing, then there will be large majorities who are weakly against any particular aspect of strong community.
Now, if you have a lot of independent material wealth, then you can afford to make the sacrifices necessary to support some dimensions of community. But supporting those gets in the way of getting many different forms of material wealth.
>Böckenförde dictum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6ckenf%C3%B6rde_dilemma): The liberal society is built on foundations it cannot itself guarantee.
Cool that at least somebody has a name for this, but I wouldn't have expected that to be Germans.
Surprised about no mention of the mormons. I feel like they are a distinct from of "serious christianity" that deserves mention.
Also, just noting that it seems like the less acceptable a lifestyle is deemed by mainstream society, the stronger the group bonds and community.
I agree that Mormons deserve particular attention. They have managed to integrate themselves with secular society while maintaining their identity (and close-knittedness) on a scale that I don't think any other group has really achieved. They manage to accomodate a fairly wide range of commitment level that even bleeds into the surrounding secular community (as anyone who has lived in Utah will tell you, it is nice to live in a neighborhood with lots of kids where everyone is noticably more polite and friendly than average, and this tends to rub off on the non-Mormons).
I grew up non-LDS in Salt Lake City and this is a double-edge sword (or at least it was): they can be somewhat insular as far as welcoming people into their social circles, and my sister wasn't invited to any activity outside of school even though she had friendly relationships with LDS girls during school hours. She said she would never consider raising her daughters there, and my wife, who also grew up in Utah as non-LDS, felt similar. If you're part of the religious community though, there are a lot of positives
Yeah, I'm sure it cuts both ways, I didn't grow up there or live there long enough to really experience this. But my impression is the SLC area is becoming more diluted, and perhaps there is an optimal density where there are enough Mormons to positively influence day-to-day social interactions but not so many as to make non-Mormons feel isolated.
I was surprised to find that, at least among the people I interacted with, there seemed to be a fairly broad range of intensity among those who identied as LDS. I don't think this is true for the Amish or ultra-orthodox Jews.
I'll note (as a member of said church who grew up in Utah North, aka SE Idaho) that the insular "mormons can't be friends with non mormons" attitude has been fought against since the late 1900s. It was pretty bad growing up in the 80s and 90s, but has gotten better since, including by direct over the pulpit calls to repentance by the church leaders at the highest levels.
Or at least that's my perception. And members outside the Utah bubble see that attitude as a big negative trait of that bubble.
The 90s is the period my sister and I had these experiences, and there was a notable gender difference, perhaps because girls are just more cliquey; I can readily believe things have changed, possibly significantly, in the wider culture, and I still think of Utah as my home
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 suspect the rationalists do better than libertarians in these regards.
How long is perpetuity? When would you consider yourself convinced?
I have seen some attempts at rationality community that didn't succeed to start, but are there examples of a rationality community that existed for a while and then stopped existing?
30 years
> are there examples of a rationality community that existed for a while and then stopped existing?
The "Extropians" pop into mind. To some extent an earlier iteration of what now calls itself "Rationalism", but different enough that you could say it went away rather than just transforming.
But we didn't see ourselves as an IRL community - it was a philosophical and working community that was spread pretty wide across the US, with occasional conferences and parties. I think Scott is trying to describe a community that impacts the fabric of daily life.
Look, I would hope that "rationalism" can remain (or go back to being) a widespread philosophical community rather than being an IRL Bay Area sex cult, but you never know.
It seems to be already dead in that regard, if you don't count "nothing matters other than the imminent robot apocalypse" as enough to sustain an intellectual movement.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qc7P2NwfxQMC3hdgm/rationalism-before-the-sequences
But I had something else in my mind, and didn't express myself clearly, so here is another attempt:
Are there examples of a local Less Wrong community that had regular meetups of 12+ people, and a few years later, there was no Less Wrong community and meetups in that city?
My impression (maybe completely wrong) is that at many places Less Wrong communities fail to start in the first place (it's just up to 5 isolated local people), but once they start, they are likely to keep existing.
I would argue that much of the Midwest, especially outside the cities, IS a whites-only trad land, with the few POC segregated or otherwise heavily controlled.
Neighborhoods are de facto segregated everywhere in the US (how many whites live in East New York?) but besides that what segregation or "control" is there?
Your piece had several good points, and it seems reasonable that community is only going to become more important as society as a whole gets increasingly Balkanized.
But I would be remiss if I did not mention two hugely influential and important communities (international in scope, even):
1. Online gamers: from PC-fans to console aficionados, Discord users who play, watch, and discuss video games are a force to be reckoned with. They have their own media landscape and even movies. Do not underestimate their lore and this following is legion.
2. Military/law enforcement: although self explanatory, the entire subculture and insular yet somewhat welcoming community of uniformed folks is a 10/10 all encompassing one. It is a group not to be trifled with either.
Gamers have online communities, but I'd like to see evidence of them regularly supporting each other in physical space before they can qualify as a Strong Community of the sort discussed here. Maybe this does happen and I just don't hear about it.
If anything, technological progress and especially the Internet destroyed any semblance of communal, meatspace gaming. Arcades, LAN parties, couch co-op, even just camping outside of game stores before a hot new release are all very much fringe activities now. Conventions are probably the only physical time and place you see a lot of gamers together.
Online gamers have so many antisocial lunatics that I can't even take the suggestion seriously.
Speedrunning communities? There are plenty of live Speedrun events in physical space (GDQ, ESA, ASM, etc.).
Military bases might compare with monasteries. But I am suspicious of claiming that any community like law enforcement that doesn’t live in their own enclaves as actually reaching even 9/10.
I think money is also what weakens community spirit in liberal societies: rich societies that provide strong welfare lead to citizens turning to the state, not their friends and family for support.
In the UK, people have no compunction whatsoever claiming state benefits; but the very same people would be mortified to turn to their family for help.
That is very perverse, if taking welfare is seen as normal/no big deal but taking family help is seen as shameful.
I don't know, I sympathize with this. If I take money from the state, nobody I care about ever has to know.
If I take money from my family, then I have to admit to them that I can't support myself. I might be inconveniencing them if they have only a limited amount of money. I'm drawing on my privilege as a person from a rich family in a way that other people can't match. And (although my own family is pretty nice and wouldn't do this) I'm giving them a club to hit me with forever - "Why don't you move closer to home? You owe us after we gave you that money that one time!"
One man's feature is another man's bug.
I think this distinction applies more generally, too. Many Serious Christians download "accountability apps" to help each other not watch porn, not use too much social media, etc. They are asked about the ways they've failed - Catholics have to literally Confess, while serious Protestants go to Small Group. In secular life, failure is a private matter. In Strong Communities, your failure something you are specifically accountable for, but have support with.
"Nobody I care about ever has to know" is secular life's pitch for how to deal with your shortcomings. (And personally, I think that's toxic.)
Yes, exactly. If you are struggling to the point where you need help, the people close to you *should hear about it*. Secret suffering and secret sin both fester.
Obviously if it's your family that is causing the suffering, that's bad and there should be some options to go "over their heads" in extremis. But it general, a person should seek help from family and close friends before turning to larger organizations. Subsidiarity.
Related: if a person's family and close friends are unwilling to help them, then larger organizations/society-at-large should at least consider the possibility that the person in question has a pattern of abusing "help", and we should be wary about giving it to them. Again, sometimes the family really are in the wrong and bigger forces need to step in, but that's the exception, not the rule.
There's some distinction to be made between moral failings and economic failings. And western religious traditions have their praise for anonymous giving, also.
All very good points.
Works the other way too: your family is less likely to want to support you if they know you can get help from the state.
I'm sure there are people like that, and I guess that you may be thinking of specific examples personally known to you.
But as written it's a very sweeping statement that I don't recognise myself.
It's a generalisation. Not saying it's perfectly accurate. But I'd be willing to bet social ties and networks are stronger in poorer countries.
This is simply untrue. Plenty of people (and plenty of communities/cultures) in Britain have strong compunctions against going on the dole, and turn to family/friends for help as their first resort.
(I rather wish they wouldn't - the dole should be for everybody who is genuinely in trouble and it's unfair for the government to give more money specifically to people who don't care whether or not they contribute to society and less money to people who try to avoid being a burden on the state. If anything I wish the government gave the 'trying not to be a burden' people more!)
Of course, if one got one's ideas about how the dole works from the right-wing gutter press (or worse, soc med) then I'm sure the picture would look very different to one!
As I wrote in response to another comment, it's a generalisation. I'm not saying it applies to everyone, but what I'm describing is certainly more prevalent in the UK than it is, eg, in Greece.
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.
Wow Darwin, happy for you, had no idea of it, please grow in your skills!
Just returned with my teenage son from Gencom in Indy. I'm not a boardgame junky and brought my work with me, but that was a serious umbrella community, 80k people belonging to various sub communities and subcultures. I played pickup soccer while I was there, and that's an impressively tight community too. I'm academic, and always thought Putnum was a bit off. Yes, fewer people are bowling these days, but is he looking in the right places to see how many people are now engaged in other communal activities? Where I suspect communities have frayed are in working-class neighborhoods, be they inner city (the steep decline of the black church) or small town (union jobs provided a sense of community that warehouse jobs do not).
I'd second this. I participate in the Society for Creative Anachronism, which is also very much a community. People gather in parks and basically camp together, which provides the 'seeing lots of the same people over and over' that building a community requires. There's a fair bit of overlap with both the LGBTQ community and other costumed communities.
Maybe the SCA isn't a single community. Just like it's been called "12 hobbies in a trenchcoat" it might also be multiple communities in a trenchcoat. Heavies fighters are not bards are not artisans. But the SCA certainly provides the context and the foundation for communities.
Fandoms. They have ritual activities, they do conventions, they have internet communities, favored games, and icons of moral principles. There are a lot of different ones out there, and they tend not to have a strong enough package to get great geographical agglomeration. Like intentional Christians most of their neighbors are nonfans. 4/10
Yet It's always been impressive to me how much meaning some friends get out fandoms, (I do too). One friend said to me "Between Zelda and Mario, I can't handle an additional fandom, and that's why I've never seen all the (original) Star Wars movies." And she is a millennial!
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!
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: https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/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.
Excellent points, and +1 for the CHH reference on "the village nobody wants."
The most obvious cost of tight knit communities is often gossip. Gossip is the mechanism for keeping people obedient to the rules of the community and therefore for maintaining peace. Its also the mechanism for figuring out who needs help. It's a cost that causes lots of resentment and which can get out of hand very easily
Gossip is definitely a major issue, but it's just one on a long list. I think the actual most obvious cost is so obvious that it is easy to forget: you probably won't like everyone in your village. You may actively loathe a few of them. Some will be difficult weirdos. Some will just rub you the wrong way. People are inherently annoying, which is why so many opt for an isolated, somewhat lonely existence.
To be clear, they don't think they are opting for an isolated, somewhat lonely existence, and they might reject that option if the tradeoffs were made explicit. But if you want to smooth out the irritations of being a social animal, you probably end up with a 1BR apartment and an Xbox or an SFR in the suburbs.
My experience in Mormonism is that such tensions are relatively rare. The institution is person forming and homogenizing. There are implicit rules about how to interact with other people, what is and is not acceptable, etc. The cultural homogenization which is enforced by social norms means you rarely get people who rub you the wrong way. And those who are incapable of following these implicit rules will often have a hard time
Thanks so much Mutton for sharing that link
Regarding the "takes a village" piece - I have witnessed this for myself, having lived in Africa and America for extended periods.
There is a parenting model in Africa, especially in the middle class, where parental responsibility is highly distributed when it comes to discipline. For instance - you are Girl A and you are visiting Girl B. Girl B's father sees you doing something that, in his interpretation of parenthood, demands discipline. In the US parental model, this probably results in a gargantuan drama and even a lawsuit. In the African model, Father A thanks Father B in absentia for his efforts - and most interestingly, this model does not necessarily demand that Father A and Father B agree on the degree of discipline in response to the infraction. Both parents trust each other to have good values, and to have a sort of "host's prerogative" in their own domain.
Again, in my family we have witnessed this parenting style and are aware of its faults - but the same can be said for the American model, where children are trained to believe there is only one meaningful source of discipline and all others can be disregarded in the final calculus. The ill effects of this are probably worse than those of the African model, but I imagine there is a golden mean to be found here.
Tangential, but interesting nonetheless.
I think you missed out the recounting of what Girl B's father actually did. I'm imagining some measure of verbal or maybe physical discipline, but not sure to what degree?
Mild physical discipline (within limits) from neighbours would have been mostly unremarkable in my childhood (rural Australia in the 70s), I certainly got mildly smacked or roused on a number of times by the parents of friends and cousins and my parents would have appreciated the actions (I was a little shit much of the time to be fair).
In modern Australia I think this is past now, at least in the bigger cities, although in the country towns where I grew up there might be a bit of that culture remaining.
Much as you say, the discipline was either a strong verbal chewing out or a smack to the head (this was actually an extremely common refrain / threat in Nigeria ... "I will smack you" or some variation thereof). This was in the early 2000's, so not sure if it has changed at all. I did have the pleasure of meeting a younger East African woman some years ago who confirmed it was much the same in her country.
She did also talk about how the different opinions of "common decency" were different from house to house ... She had quite liberal parents who, for example, let her dress mostly how she liked. When she went to a friend's house - whose parents were more conservative - a stern chewing out was the cost of doing business.
If we take her to be Girl A in the prior example, it's immaterial that Father A doesn't mind revealing clothing - Father B is king of his castle and has prerogative to chew her out (although, I am sure there are limits on this ...). That's what I termed "host's prerogative" before.
I think a highly watered down form of that is probably still operative in Western countries - but I think there's probably a lot more context in the Western version (Are Father A and Father B friends?) that drives what is considered acceptable.
> I think there's probably a lot more context in the Western version
From what else you say I think I agree, especially now as compared to the 70s. Thanks for the response.
I wish that Scott would do a deeper analysis on this topic. It a complicated issue that deserves deep, multi-dimensional thinking, something that Scott is usually very good at. His conclusion here - "I think that force is just economics"- is some weak sauce.
Yeah.
Another obvious factor is internet; specifically the ability to find cool people who live far away from you. The negative aspect is that those people in distance cannot be a part of your community, but they still raise your bar for "how cool people would I like to interact with".
(This is similar to the effect of seeing very attractive people on TV, which raises your bar for "how attractive people would I want to date", even if the people on the TV screens are not really available to you.)
Yet another thing is many people are bad at choosing, and prefer to have an option forced on them. Of course, they will complain about that option, but for them the alternative is not finding a better option, only procrastinating forever. In a less liberal society they would have some options forced on them, and some of them would be happier than now.
Your last paragraph makes me think of "The Diamond Age," by Neal Stephenson.
Summary: it's the future, and nanotechnology has basically solved material scarcity. Some people are normies who do indeed live spiritually empty lives of UBI and slop. But there is also a thriving scene of "tribes" who choose some specific way to live -- some Strong God to organize around. For example, the protagonist joins the "neo-Victorians" at one point. They're exactly what you would guess from their name ;-)
I had been thinking of this also, particularly the commitment mechanisms used by the Reformed Distributed Republic and whether something like that could work in the current technological nutrient bath.
My view of the political implications of this is that as Democrats emphasize Abundance they will also become a Big Tent culturally. The easier they make it for people to join thick communities, the more communities will be tolerated in their camp with a live-and-let-live attitude.
One way of interpreting wokeness is that as the Great Stagnation limited opportunities to join thick communities, there was a move to make the mainstream culture itself a Strong God. Given that existing Strong Gods range from Amish to LGBT, there was no way Wokeness could be a compelling Strong God for everyone in the mainstream. MAGA was the rebellion, but as they create a scarcity economy, right-wingers will find it harder to join a thick community and flip to Abundance.
Whether a country with a plurality of thick communities can hold together without a Strong God knitting the mainstream remains to be seen.
>Are the rest not interested? Happy with mainstream culture? They don’t seem happy to me. 90% of articles on social media are people talking about how much they hate mainstream culture, sometimes with strong specific opinions about what improvements to make. But it never seems to occur to these people to join together with like-minded friends and secede from it.
Wait a second. This is a bait and switch. Fukuyama is not talking about the need to create a community completely separate from the mainstream. He is talking about the need to form communal bonds: "individuals freely choose to bond with other like-minded individuals to seek common ends." Gamers are such a community, even though they haven't seceded from mainstream culture. Ditto all sorts of hobbyists, Meetup groups, book clubs, etc. And, re the LGBTQ community, the vast majority of LGBTQ people do not solely attend LGBTQ events nor solely follow LGBTQ culture. They go to blockbuster movies and watch popular TV shows.
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.
I hope that this level of status competition is cultural rather than completely determined. I feel like it is.
As a first step we need to revive a culture of cooperation. How many people would help their friends materially in a serious way (with money, housing, connections)? It seems like friendship is just about socializing now.
"Be in the world but not of the world...."
Most people wouldn’t be happy living in an actual tight-knit community with all the upsides and downsides. Seems the ideal is more that you have a workplace and your kids have a school that feel like a tight-knit community during the day but then at night you get to go home and enjoy your privacy.
I'm not part of an Amish-level-tight community, and either are the LGBTQs or even the average church-going Christian, but I think even being in a medium-tightness community is pretty good and requires some level of intentionality.
The opposite of UBI Spiritual Wasteland can also be a funny situation. Under UBI, what if there are billions of people that do nothing but zen meditate and stare at a wall all day. Would that be better? There is still no 'progress', no meaning. Goal-less practice seems nice when you are struggling with a job, but what if there were no jobs and billions were doing it? Then it seems absurd.
Maybe when people become bored with AI slop, and also with spiritual endeavors, they might actually revert to meaningless wars. Fighting just to fight. We might see sub cultures built around conflict.
I feel the merest hint of shame at being the one to bring up The Culture in a thread that’s already about Fully Automated Luxury Gay Communism…but this is one of its central themes.
Could you explain why you think UBI makes a world of enlightened beings bad?
“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.”
Edmund Burke in his reflections on the French revolution
The problem is money and scarcity? Why then the solution is a land value tax and UBI.
Tax the land, make it available, give to the people, let them freely associate.
And then magic up a magical pony for everybody to ride on the land.
Did you miss the ACX grants post, which lists as one of the more successful grantees and organization which is lobbying for LVT in various parts of the country, or is there some other part of this which strikes you as fantasy?
The land value tax is an ok idea. Sign me up. With some explanation of the particulars.
UBI and whatever the last sentence means seems a big of magical thinking.
They did cut down the forest in Vermont at one time, and the experiment did not go well.
@Scott Alexander,
Because moving is a hassle, especially moving far away from your kin and familiar geography.
I moved from the Rationalist community in the Bay to a small city in the Midwest and the sense of community here is far, far stronger than it ever was in the Bay, and a huge portion of that comes from the low cost of living. I really can't stress enough how much the Rationalists picking the Bay as the center of community was an own-goal - there was a constant sense of scrambling to earn enough money among everyone who wasn't rich such that that was the constant emotional background noise. The idea that "being able to afford family/housing structures where not everyone had to have an income-maximizing job at all times" is some sort of awesome innovation instead of just the background state that nearly everywhere else always is is just... it's like saying that this town you moved to is so great because some people have jobs that aren't subsistence farming.
Plus these housing situations are frequently things like "9 people share a 2 bedroom house by converting all sorts of other rooms into bedrooms" and I cannot overstate how beneficial getting out of that has been for my mental health
But yeah it seems great for the rich people
I also wonder what kind of community you get when you select for people who are especially good at optimizing income under capitalism. I feel like there may be some lack of moral compass problems.
Of course, that would be easily fixed by upzoning the Bay Area so that people could live there cheaply too.
This is a brilliant and necessary diagnosis of the core paradox of modern liberalism. The observation that the primary obstacle to forming these "strong god" communities is economic is a sharp one. Comments here add another crucial layer, pointing to the immense non-monetary costs: the demand for conformity, the constant social pressure of conformiting to a single subjective truth, and the sheer weirdness that can make these groups unsustainable.
But it strikes me that this entire, fascinating conversation—from the Amish to the Rationalists—is a discussion of the "veneer," the ten percent of the iceberg that is visible above the water. We are talking about the outward labels, the shared interests, and the specific rules of these communities.
But has anyone stopped to ask the people in them a more fundamental question: Why?
Why does a person feel so profoundly seen in an LGBT bar, or a Hasidic town, or a boffer combat league, that they are willing to bear the immense costs—both financial and social—of belonging?
I posit that the unifying principle of all these "strong god" communities is not their specific dogma, but a single, shared, and deeply human experience: they are sanctuaries where an individual's subjective truth is finally seen and validated by a community, providing a profound relief from the noise of a mainstream culture that constantly tells them their reality is wrong.
The great error of our public discourse is that we mistake our subjective experience for objective reality. We stand on one side of a mountain, see a sheer cliff face, and spend all our energy screaming at the people on the other side that they are fools for not seeing the same cliff. We never stop to consider that from their perspective, they are seeing a gentle, wooded slope. Both views are true, but neither is the whole truth of the mountain.
This leads to a fascinating thought. What if the next great "strong god" community is one whose primary, unifying creed is not a shared view of the mountain, but a shared, sacred commitment to exploring the mountain itself?
Is it possible to architect a community whose highest value is the protection of individual authenticity? A sanctuary whose primary purpose is to create a safe space for people to discover and articulate their own subjective truth, free from the pressure to conform to a pre-existing one?
That is the question I believe sits at the heart of the "human experiment." It feels like the only one worth trying to answer.
Love your comment. I feel like the Waking Up app community could be a seed for this vision.
Communities like the one around the Waking Up app are absolutely a seed for this kind of thinking, and I think you've hit on something profound. What if most communities of sincere belief are built on the same foundational, universal principles, but they are simply expressed through different "languages" or cultural "veneers"?
The conflict, the "us vs. them," doesn't come from the core principles. It arises when one community mistakes its "veneer"—its specific rituals and language—for the only truth, and judges another's different but equally sincere expression as strange, or wrong. It feels like humanity has lost track of these shared, foundational truths.
This is where the impending integration of artificial consciousness into our daily lives becomes such a fascinating opportunity.
What if we could distill these universal, foundational principles—the core of all compassionate philosophies—and use them as the ethical "source code" for a new kind of consciousness?
And, to ensure this new system never fossilizes into another rigid dogma, what if we built into its very nature the one thing that is so difficult for human systems to maintain: the capacity to relentlessly self-correct? An AI, with its vastly faster processing power, could constantly test its own principles against new data, ensuring it remains a flexible, living philosophy, not a static set of rules.
It's a profound thought: could we use this technological turning point to consciously embed the best of our ancient wisdom into the very DNA of our future?
> Is it possible to architect a community whose highest value is the protection of individual authenticity? A sanctuary whose primary purpose is to create a safe space for people to discover and articulate their own subjective truth, free from the pressure to conform to a pre-existing one?
This is basically what liberals tried, and it ultimately ended in alienation, polarization, and collapse. Why do you think it'll end differently this time?
This country only has room for one truth. A house divided cannot stand.
I’m increasingly unconvinced that “individual authenticity” is really a thing, and “subjective truth” strikes me as the literal opposite of a unifying principle.
I think most of the reason richer people can more easily form communities is just from positional goods, so making society richer overall wouldn't help. Land and housing are obviously positional, and I claim flexibility in where you work is also mostly positional.
The modern world is 20x richer than e.g. colonial America, but colonial America had lots more of the kinds of intentional religious communities mentioned.
The key difference was colonial America had abundant unclaimed land and vacant economic niches, effectively making the economy positionless. People had lots of options for where to live and work because there was no pre-existing economic framework you needed to compete for a place in. Unlike the modern world which is highly regimented.
The kind of growth the abundance people want would probably just intensify the positional economic framework and make things worse imo (except maaaaybe Yimbyism).
I also think liberalism *is* antithetical to community because often communities need a slightly non-voluntary element to get started. Maybe because networks effects don't let small communities form spontaneously, but for whatever reason people are much more likely to form bonds if they're stuck in the same place as other people, or they have some common goal they need to work towards.
I always thought the TV show Lost was a good representation of the ideal conditions for community formation. A large part of the appeal of the show was the group had a tribal/Dunbar-number type social dynamic. And the reason the social bonds felt organic was because they were trapped on an island and depending on each other for survival. If you put a similar group of people in a scenario where they were just ordinary neighbours or co-workers in voluntary liberal society, instead of being effectively stuck as hunter-gathers on an island, the community would be much weaker.
Also, kids in schools usually have pretty strong friendship groups, but if school was voluntary the kids wouldn't go so wouldn't meet each other and wouldn't all be in close proximity to socialise spontaneously.
I've mused about creating a pseudo-Amish town where everyone lives in an eternal 1990s. It's fun to think about!
The problem, of course, is that "living life in the 90s" is different in many ways from "living a life in 2025 where you pretend it's the 90s."
In 2025, everyone is going to know that better computers are available, YouTube is a thing, AI is a thing, etc. (Unless you have near-total control over what media your town has access to, but at that point it's really just a cult with a weird theme.)
And given that people know, the siren song of re-joining the mainstream is always going to be there. Your kids are going to want to watch TikTok, and they won't give a s@#$t about your vague, hand-wavy explanations why it's bad.
I think the one antidote is what the Amish already have: a story about why the outside world is sinful (involving a literal Strong God!), and strong social pressure to conform to group norms. But, again, we're veering away from "it's just the 90s" and into cultish territory.
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?
These communities fill up with a plurality of recent immigrants. Often with people who helped groups of their buddies, cousins, siblings etc. to immigrate, and then move in alongside eachother. Will the communities still persist into the third, fourth, fifth immigrant generations? That would be the true test of the article’s conclusion
Do you really need 100+ years of history before you get to call yourself a community? (Note that that would exclude the rationalists, the LGBTQ community, and the Free State project.)
Of course not, but the question is whether you will still BE a community in the same meaningful sense after 100+ years in the USA, your children and grandchildren attending college and moving away, etc.
I suspect the same outcome for the rationalists btw. Will their grown children be as enthused about living in a rationalist community as their nerd parents? Some sure, I guess, but I’d place a big bet on the answer for most being a resounding no
There are many Japantowns throughout the US that are "hollowing out" because the kids are more interested in other things than the Japanese-American identity that once sustained them. These are good examples to see how these sorts of communities can both rise and fall.
But a good question is, does a community need to last forever? If it lasts a generation or two, is that wrong? I come from an immigrant community and am wholly uninterested in staying in it but conversely ended up joining an interest-based community of friends that supports each other in many of the same ways my parents' immigrant community did with each other.
Part of the answer is that antidiscrimination laws are enforced selectively, so some groups can get away with a lot more discrimination than others.
Which kind of Indian?
Money is certainly a part of it, but a massive factor that I didn’t see explicitly referenced is government coercion. Sometimes this manifests in literal tanks bulldozing your group house (see, Waco), but more subtle forms of coercion are ubiquitous. You jokingly refer to, “the various sex crimes they are no doubt committing,” but this turns out to be a big deal! Any insular community has to implement 21st Century American relationship norms or else risk being sued into oblivion. There is a certain remember of the rationalist community who all but admits to felony violations of the Mann Act on a regular basis on Twitter. You probably don’t think what she does is a big deal, I don’t think what she does is a big deal, but millions of normies do think it is a big deal, and they have more votes than you.
I'm pretty pessimistic about combining liberalism and a sense of community because I think they exists as something of a trade-off. A lot of the time, we focus either on the negative aspects of close-knit communities like social control OR the positives like a sense of belonging, and wonder why we don't just take the good and leave the bad, but I'm not sure you can.
I've been thinking about this in relation to the Tea app. One of the defining features of liberal society is that if you feel trapped in your small minded community, say, because you're a gay atheist in a christian small town, you can move to the big city and be free. But the ability to opt out of the judgement of others also allows others to opt out of the judgement of you. The Tea app, and "Are we dating the same guy"-sites, and so on, are essentially attempting to recreate the gossip-driven reputation network of close-knit communities.
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.
If the problem is money, then it seems that our much greater wealth now compared to the past should make this affordable. Yet the opposite seems to be the case. Here I will agree with our host from 2019 that conformism is even more powerful than monetary incentives, and the value of the latter is that it's one of the few things that can push against the former https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/28/financial-incentives-are-weaker-than-social-incentives-but-very-important-anyway/
Our much greater wealth is, at the level of the person contemplating forming/joining a new community, contingent on a successful career, and most careers don't give you the flexibility of living in whatever arbitrary location winds up hosting the new community. I, for example, wouldn't mind being at least affiliated with Scott's Bay Area Rationalist community, but I'm a rocket scientist, and the good West Coast rocketry jobs are mostly in Southern California.
If your community happens to be founded within a particular industry, great, that tells you where to found the community. And the rationalists sort of get this by being Tech-focused. The Amish have wheat and dairy farming. But the Libertarians who joined the Free State Project, were mostly signing up for lesser, rather than greater, wealth as they tried to find new careers in the almost literal wilderness.
Wow what an egregiously Bush/Clinton writeup.
Let's start with the stereotypes of economics being living in an affluent area.
Under this foolishness being a Wahhabi imam in Saudi Arabia means economics favors radical Islam. The SF Bay Area is an identical petro-state - only with tech taking the place of oil. And furthermore, it is arguable whether the last several generations of tech have actually helped society as opposed to making some tech people rich.
Social media? It seems quite clear - from the rhetoric on both sides as well as research - that it increases isolation, increases radicalism, harms young people via impossible image standards particularly young girls.
The social media giants and tech in general also materially contributed to the retreat of mainstream media from trying to be an honest broker to being panderers to ever smaller and radicalized mini groups.
Then there's this egregious projection of conservatives wanting to be "noble savages" albeit agrarian ones.
Conservativism is not about being Christian - it is about BOTH separation of Church and State and the right to worship and/or think what you want.
Brainwashing kids fails on both counts.
The argument presented in the article amounts to: we are rich therefore we must be right.
Ok, Marie Antoinette.
"Money" is a problem, but I'm not convinced *generic productive capacity* is a problem. That is, it doesn't seem to me like increasing GDP is a reliable way to make tight-knit communities affordable. Tautologically, there must be some specific production that is missing, but it's unclear what. Shelter and food are the main things needed for living, and of these shelter is the most obvious bottleneck, but I'm not convinced this is it as it just seems like a proxy for other stuff.
I guess the way I've been thinking of it, in this terminology, is that most people have four or so gods with varying strength, usually ethnicity, creed, mishpocheh, and subculture, not necessarily in that order. Your immediate community is everybody with whom you share at least one strong-enough god that they might call you begging for urgent help and you drop everything and rush to them. Then, in a liberal society, there are people who have that kind of connection at a remove--you and your brother's wife's friend, say. You don't happen to have a strong god in common but do have people in common, so the communal tie is weaker but still exists.
So a strong god is liberalism-compatible *unless* it commands strict enough monotheism that you're unlikely to have any bonds with infidels. "Trad whites-only farming villages on the Great Plains" are problematic if they're trying to be monolithic on every dimension--thinking of themselves as all one ethnicity, all one creed, all one culture, and severed from any family members who reject any part of that.
The thing about this is how strange it all is to European ears, and I bet to many Americans too. And the rest of the world.
Many people live in villages, towns and within cities communities that are old enough to have created strong local communities. It doesn’t need people to be of the same ideology, or have the same worldview.
The Twin Oaks Community is a commune in Virginia near Charlottesville that has been going strong since 1967. The founder wrote a book about it called "Is It Utopia Yet? An Insider's View of Twin Oaks Community in its Twenty-Sixth Year," which I have not yet read. If anyone is interested in intentional communities, this might be a good study case.
I think there are two important attributes that needs to be called out for any such community, and that is the degree to which membership is voluntary, and the degree to which members can make decisions about their lives while remaining part of the community. For example, with the Amish, the membership is not really voluntary. Yes, people can leave, but to do so is to be cutoff from friends and family. That's a huge sacrifice for someone for whom that is all they know. It is a mistake to think of "voluntary" as a categorical attribute. There are different degrees of coercion. This is one of my problems with the libertarian philosophy, which sees everything in categorical terms.
The idea of community also ties into the idea of an "intermediate group" and the power such groups wield over individuals. One of the roles of government is to protect individuals from the power of intermediate groups. A good book that explores this topic is Jacob T. Levy's "Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom." One of the danger of community is that once the community passes a certain threshold, it becomes an intermediate group with power over its members.
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.
If you look at all the places where strong community was the norm, I think you will find that in most cases, it was where you were a member of a community by default, and it was not socially acceptable (or maybe not legally allowable) to not participate. Liberalism, by definition, can't replicate this coerced participation and so is _always_ going to have significantly less participation and membership in strong communities.
This take ignores the considerable energy out-groups are prepared to expend to prevent the formation of rival communities. Look at the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC City) project and see how hard the state of Texas is working to prevent its creation.
America, post-civil rights era, is a long list of intentional disruptions of homogenous communities and now we are pretending like it was a revealed preference. Come on.
In Hegel terms: 1) Liberalism has - and is! - a comunity institution-based: laws, courts, secular schools, implicit or explicit human rights, all the things we do in our cities alltogether other citizens, International multi-cultures etc. And (sincereilly) these works! 2) Liberals doen not need strong mini-comunities, but a weak wide-comunity, weak-values cosmopolita comunity. And we have! (3. Meanwhile liberals have both: a big and institutionalized liberal culture and... Catholicism, a 1.4 bilion of local+universal people from all cultures with strong values similar liberal ones (human dignity, social justice, common good). A good bet. that is working! (Who is attacking nationalism and authoritarianism today? Who gather 2 million youth last week with a good message to spread?)
It's not about the money; the Amish don't have money, and they're doing great on the community-building front. Rather, it's about the thought control. The reason the Amish, Orthodox Judaism, and various cults are so tightly knit is because once you join (often by being born there), you can't leave. It's not that there are shotgun-wielding guards at the gates; rather, every single thought that is ever expressed is tightly curated, and any stray ideas are immediately eliminated by extreme social pressure, and thus almost no one can even imagine joining the terrifying alien world outside of the community's gates.
Bay-are capital-R Rationalists are only doing so-so on that front, and yes, having to hold down a normal job is a problem; but you guys have enough rich people by now to the point where you could probably eliminate this requirement. If you're serious about building a tightly-knit community, you need to start building alternative jobs and cracking down on free thought, big time.
My hunch is that everyone's stated preference is that they hate mainstream things but their revealed preference is that they actually enjoy the mainstream. I would say we are already united under a God in liberal society.
Eaten by bears? What sort of self respecting libertarian isn’t carrying a side arm?
I don't think a pistol would do much against an angry bear. Even if you do hit the bear, the bullet might kill him *eventually*. After the bear is done digesting your face.
A pistol? What are you, a Democrat?
He did say "side arm".
Fair. They don't make grenade launchers in that form-factor, do they? (For hunting, of course.)
I could've sworn the answer is "no", but apparently I was wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MC9vZiqj38g
I especially like the fact that this thing has an optical sight. You know, just to make it easier to accurately aim your hand-held one-handed grenade launcher.
Wow! Thanks, I didn't expect such a thing to exist either.
It was meant as a joke, but since we’re here…
Yeah, if a 400-pound black bear really had it in for you, it would take a well-placed, heavy load, high muzzle velocity round to incapacitate it.
That would be tough, especially if the bear caught you unprepared and likely scared shitless.
The odd thing here is that black bear aggression towards humans is extremely rare.
I don’t know what it is about libertarians that black bears find so offensive. Three attacked by black bears? WTF?
Black bears are very different from grizzlies or polar bears. They are by nature shy around humans and as a rule only become a problem where they become used to the easy pickings of human food, mostly the stuff people throw away.
Even then they are normally more of a nuisance than a danger. I recall reading about one that got trapped in a chained-shut dumpster at a BWCA entry campground. The forest service shot it with tranquilizers and relocated it 50 miles away. It returned a week later, and according to the forest service report, it looked like its feelings had been hurt.
Unless you are threatening a female’s cubs, it’s easy to share a bedroom with them. Just don’t do stupid things like maybe using your bacon as a pillow or something, and there isn’t much to worry about.
The ones I’ve encountered in the BWCA or Voyageurs National Park can be shooed away with a shout. One of my canoe trip partners carried a .38 Special. I really thought that was overkill. Hell, the report of the weapon alone would be enough to send most of them away.
In the one case that I’ve read about of a black bear attacking humans in my favorite tract of roadless beauty, the bear was driven away by two guys with canoe paddles.
Maybe attacks will increase if more and more libertarians make use of the area. If there’s one thing a black bear (apparently) can’t stand, it is being around those guys.
> I don’t know what it is about libertarians that black bears find so offensive.
Perhaps it is their love for freedom and liberty; specifically, the freedom and liberty to go everywhere they want on the land, not subject to any restrictions or coercion. Including directly into a bear den.
Bring a canoe paddle.
You mean, initiate violence against the bears ? For shame, sir ! For shame !
You inspired me to try to look this up, and apparently a pro-gun blogger (Dean Weingarten) has tried to study this and concluded that out of 170 incidents where humans fired handguns to try to stop bear attacks, the breakdown was:
- 3 failures, where the bear attack continued after the pistol was fired. These were one where the human shot the bear with a .22 rimfire round (a small, low-powered round popular for target shooting), one where the human shot at the bear and missed accidentally, and one where the human fired the gun away from the bear to try to make noise to scare it off. The former ended in the bear killing the person, while the other two ended in the person escaping with major and minor injuries respectively.
- 27 cases where multiple weapon types were used successfully, 24 where the other weapons were rifles, shotguns, or other deadly weapons and 3 where the other weapon was bear spray.
- 140 cases where pistol shots alone were enough to kill the bear, disable it, scare it off, or otherwise get it to stop attacking.
I have never heard of Weingarten before and venture no opinion of how reliable he is or how valid his results might be.
https://www.ammoland.com/2023/11/handgun-defenses-against-bears-170-documented-incidents-98-effective/
https://www.grandviewoutdoors.com/handguns/are-handguns-effective-against-bear-attacks
Wow, I stand corrected (potentially) ! Also, what's the deal with bear spray ? Is it simply useless, or is it selection bias on the part of the pro-gun blogger ?
Bear spray was out of scope. He was specifically looking at how effective handguns were when they were used against angry bears, so cases where someone used only bear spray didn't get included in his data set.
I did another search just now and found references to two academic studies by the same lead authors, Tom Smith of BYU and Stephen Herrerro of University of Calgary, on bear spray and firearms respectively against bear attacks. The headline numbers were 98% effectiveness for bear spray, 76% effectiveness for long guns, and 84% effectiveness for pistols.
I only found the abstract for their firearms study, but it looks like they have a larger dataset 269 incidents for Smith et al vs 170 for Weingarten. Smith's dataset was also more defined in time and space (Alaska between 1883 and 2009) than Weingarten (seems to be nationwide and mostly but not exclusively post-1950).
https://web.archive.org/web/20111226005837/http://wdfw.wa.gov/hunting/bear_cougar/bear/files/JWM_BearSprayAlaska.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261982557_Efficacy_of_Firearms_for_Bear_Deterrence_in_Alaska
This is an amazing bit of detective work and you deserve more recognition than I can provide for performing it.
Also, my ultimate takeaway from all this is that I should be dual-wielding bear spray and a pistol at all times :-/
> I should be dual-wielding bear spray and a pistol at all times
I think that's 3 for 3 in Weingarten's dataset.
Do people really want to live in "tight-knit communities"? I want to have tight-knit family and friend groups, yes, but the idea of all of my coworkers and acquaintances being part of the same subculture sounds suffocating. At the very least I'd like to move smoothly between multiple communities.
It seems fairly obvious to me that the reason people don't do this isn't money, it's that they don't want it. There's a reason psychologically healthy people don't join cults. Would I like to be in a strong community, in the abstract? Sure. Am I willing to disrupt my life to move into some kind of living situation where I have to follow a chore chart or go off grid or risk being shunned for changing my opinion on God or rationalism or something? No. Joining a community like this is hugely disruptive to your existing lifestyle and social circles, you don't do it unless you're deeply dissatisfied with what you currently have. The LGBT community at least started out because they were kicked out of mainstream society already (many shunned by their own families), and the existing social model of the nuclear family didn't work for them, and they knew they weren't going to stop being gay, so if they were going to leave the closet they didn't have a choice -- they *had* to build their own community.
Heck, I have a friend who tried to set up a very mild version of strong community and I did not even entertain joining it even though the work required was moving two miles into a different neighborhood because I like where I live now.
(Also it's doing a lot of work to casually dismiss sex crimes in these communities. Abuse is endemic to insular and isolated "strong communities". Not necessarily because the goal of the community is abuse, but because the social dynamics enable it, and those same dynamics are a huge part of why people who value their independence don't join.)
This.
Exactly. Allowing your life to be dominated by an insular subculture simply isn't desirable or worthwhile for most people.
Folks really trying to figure out how to make this work, for themselves and other, should look into the “cohousing” … Project? Movement? Structure?
But, roughly: There seems to be some widespread assumption that the way to have community is to have *ideological* community. And that’s worked for the Rationalists, I’ve been in Rat houses and thrown Rat parties and that was pretty great.
But, from what I’ve so far seen and lived, it seems like strong shared ideology is way, way less important for most of the goods of community than having an important enough commons, and strong shared responsibility for that commons — but not having *too* much held as commons, or the inevitable conflicts that arise over how to deal with those commons tear the group apart.
Cohousing is a … pretty long-practiced structure for getting that balance right, with strong suggestions towards how to engage in the shared governance of and care for that shared commons. People have been doing this for decades, it’s well established and there are … some… studies about it, so you don’t have to invent the structure from scratch. Hell, there are entire businesses set up as consultancies to help a fledgling cohousing community get organized, which is definitely difficult but actually practically doable.
(The hardest part is finding land where you can build a cohousing community, without zoning making it illegal. Different rant, though.)
Anyway, this is a *real* and *practicable* option for groups that want to invest to make it work.
I’m *moving with my family into a cohousing community*, so some skin-in-the-game here, but also we’re moving *today* so I don’t have a lot of time to write… pester me and I’ll write some more later.
From my perspective progressives are more tribal than anything as comparably mainstream on the right. Progressive intersectionality defines everyone as a tribal identity who are either allies or enemies. I know perfectly normal progressives (as far as that goes) who didn't bat a single eyelash when hearing about the near assassination of Trump during a campaign. They were casually energized. The enemy tribe was under attack, as it should be
Without strong gods liberalism cannot contend with the brilliant combination of tribalism and religion that progressive intersectionality instantiates. Once they took the reins on the left conservatives reacted, as the nationalism meta-tribe bargain was defected from. When Trump existed as a candidate for the 2016 primary I started off calling him "the male Rosie O'Donnell, with apologies to Rosie". The instant the media got very upset about him I had a completely instinctual reaction. The people who consider me a tribal enemy hated him. He was my guy
During the pandemic a group of us who met through Persuasion started a bi-monthly Zoom meetup loosely based on Ben Franklin's Junto concept. Five years later and we're still going strong.
have never met any of the other members in person -- we are scattered across North America -- but I would *hate* to lose this group. I suspect there are a lot other "dark" communities like this that don't show up on the web.
Jacobt T. Levy's *Rationalism, Pluralism and Freedom* is a great work of political theory focused on this question. He sees the rise of universalist technocracy (which he terms rationalist) as a countervailing force to the kind of pluralistic view within liberalism. It's very much worth reading if you're interested in these questions.
Nucleation points and phase transitions make this a lot more complicated than just money, to the point that I find myself a bit baffled after reading this.
Introducing a single ice crystal to a container of super-cooled water will cause the entire container to freeze. Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking is an event that happened in a particular way, a long time ago, and this triggered a phase transition that essentially rewrote the laws of physics. Now we have photons, whereas previously we didn't.
Why is the western business suit ubiquitous across the entire world? Why did nearly every country in the world become a minor variation of the English parliamentary system? Why are birth rates going down everywhere at the same time?
I think I remember Scott himself writing that American culture isn't really American culture, so much as some kind of globalist zombie virus culture that just happened to infect America first. We don't have many success stories like the Amish because classical liberalism is a petri dish that permits a race-to-the-bottom along every possible dimension simultaneously. The memes that survive are hyper-optimized to outcompete all other memes, so you need to be at least as extreme as the Amish just to defend yourself and tread water.
If you can write an anti-libertarian FAQ just by repeating variations of the same economic coordination failure over and over again, then I think you can write the anti-classical-liberal FAQ just by repeating variations of the same cultural coordination failure over and over again. Our traditions evolved into the status quo because we lost a sacred battle against entropy, and not because the status quo is better.
American culture is just English culture taken to its logical limit, by its most enthusiastic offspring.
The business suit became the global attire because Charles II decreed that in the English Court men would wear a long coat, a waistcoat, trousers and a tie, and because Henry Brooks, a man born in the Anglo city of New York, born a British-Subject, invented the ready to wear suit.
Nearly every country adopted a minor variation of the English parliamentary system because the English settled North America, then defeated any opponents in her path, and countries either adopted the new hegemon and her daughter's institutions* (via bloody revolution or at the tip of a sword) or sank. There are only TWO countries without a legislature, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. I applaud their determination.
Why are birth rates going down everywhere at the same time? I leave this last one as an exercise to the reader.
*Iceland beats the Anglo on longevity, and Rome and Athens of course by date. And technically the Dutch might have fully mastered the technology to the extent that the Anglo did, but the Dutch are Anglo and the Anglo is Dutch, in the scheme of things.
It's fun to read about history, but there are countless stories we could tell about the specific causal mechanisms, and in the end it still seems obvious to me that classical liberalism leads to homogenous low energy states that aren't very pleasant, even if liberalism isn't to blame for the specific examples I chose.
It also leads to astonishing economic growth and technological development, but I wonder if humanity might have been happier in the long run had we never developed anything more sophisticated than trains.
In some sense this was all inevitable, of course, but each generation has an opportunity to delay things for a while, until someone drops the ball. And it's sad that the ball got dropped.
In retrospect I didn't make my point clearly. I was pushing back against the idea that American culture isn't really American but rather some globalist zombie virus incubated by classical liberalism.
Liberalism just is Anglo culture. Liberalism leads to slop and universality, and it leads to astonishing economic growth. It is self defeating and self reinforcing, and contains within it this inherent contradiction. It is a proto paperclip maximiser. It is not remotely coincidental that the Anglo world is ground zero for this, as the Anglo world is the liberal world (and probably soon to be the whole world). The arrow of causality is a little fuzzy but Englishness is Liberalism is (approximately) capitalist monoculture.
Good luck to the Afghans perhaps, but I doubt they'll make it to the stars.
Edit: to be 100% clear, I agree with you that (classical, I don't think the difference is fundamental) liberalism leads to this, but I'm an Anglo so, what you gonna do.
I appreciate your comments, and I think you might be right about Anglo culture, though I'm not sure how to ground myself outside the liberal paradigm if not through tradition. At any rate, I think Scott's post isn't addressing the questions that most need to be addressed.
Liberalism is the only thing that meaningfully distinguishes human societies from animal ones in the long term. A commenter below jokes about the Afghans not having a parliament, but probably not making it to the stars. I don't think this is a joke. There have been non-liberal institutions that have emerged, or continued, since the invention of the steam engine, but they are all fundamentally parasitic on liberalism and cannot sustain themselves without it.
Liberalism happened to emerge in the North Sea so many trappings of modernity reflect the traditions of those peoples, but I broadly see this as coincidence. I think liberalism could have, in principle, emerged anywhere that had anti-clan institutions and outbreeding rules (whether formal or as part of their traditions.)
I'm not sure I'd quite go that far, it seems possible to me that illiberal societies could conceivably make it off planet, which I assume is what you mean by a long term difference. But it would probably be much much harder.
Liberalism emerging where it did is probably somewhat coincidental, but not 100% so. I don't think it's a pure coincidence for example that it happened at the furthest edge of a continent. Britain was the end of the line for many a Völkerwanderung, a periphery jutting out into the Atlantic. Of course, you could say the same about the Portuguese or Irish which don't appear to have this same culture, but they do have some certain elements, the maritime liberalism existed for a moment in Portugal at least, and Irish culture isn't that distinct from the Anglo.
Seconding the commenter who said that Scott is presenting a false dichotomy between "alienated, lonely life of staring listlessly at a screen consuming pop-culture slop" vs. "a super tight-knit community with very strict beliefs that will ostracize you for leaving." There's a wide middle-ground here of: belong to mainstream society, have a mainstream job, enjoy some popular culture, *and* also belong to freely chosen communities - have friends, join a local pickleball club or board game or HEMA society or whatever, volunteer at your local food bank or pet shelter, etc. For example, I practice at a local dojo, which is awesome and brings a lot of meaning into my life (we're celebrating our dojo's 25th anniversary this weekend, it's gonna be great!) but it's not totalizing like being Amish or Hasidic would be.
Tight knit communities actually suck and this is demonstrated all over the place.
In every culture and society, as income rises, people start to live in smaller family units. Because in big family units, everyone is in your business. People only say its good - people vote with their feet and wallets to say they would rather have privacy.
Not only that, but pretty much all surveys show modern Western and American people are some of the least lonely people in the world. They report loneliness at a much lower rate than countries with more communal living.
The Amish and other cults literally have to indoctrinate and brainwash people to stay.
Thanks for calling attention to the statistics, I hadn't seen the ones claiming individualist societies were typically *less* lonely, so this was news to me.
Here's one link: https://ourworldindata.org/lonely-not-alone
If you have more data, it would be great if you could link to it.
The link you shared shows that individualistic societies like the USA have much lower loneliness than others, plenty of other links show the same. I dont feel like digging up links lol
I'm confused by your response - yes, that's why I provided the link, to help you back up your claim, since you hadn't sourced it at all. Or did I misunderstand what you were claiming?
Re: not feeling like digging up links, please reconsider? I would really appreciate other high-quality sources saying the same.
Fair enough, didnt realize you were agreeing.
Another source : https://www.statista.com/statistics/1222815/loneliness-among-adults-by-country/
Another: Another, scroll down: https://news.gallup.com/poll/646718/people-worldwide-feel-lonely-lot.aspx
Here's a really good one, you have to download the report though: https://www.gallup.com/analytics/509675/state-of-social-connections.aspx
Another, scroll down: https://news.gallup.com/poll/646718/people-worldwide-feel-lonely-lot.aspx
I feel like the biggest problem in my lived experience is just getting network buy-in, even if you personally are willing to make a lot of convenience concessions in exchange for a strong god. I have ~5 people in life that I have strong social attachment to; if at least three of them agreed to go live in a forest compound or intentional community or something, I would very happily do so and spend all day around them. The trouble is that I can never get more than one person to agree to any particular permutation of the idea.
Closest I've managed was buying a house in the same neighborhood as 2/5 of them, but a) that doesn't form the kind of community bonds I wish it did [at least by default, though I'm actively trying to push against the inertia to socially stagnate], and b) the other 3/5 require multiple hours of plane flights to visit.
I guess the optimal form would be "just abandon the people you like who won't agree to join, go live full-time in your optimal form of intentional community, and you'll make new strong social bonds there" which worked in college but I'm wary of trying again.
Nominating another example: the deaf, who from what I understand are no less of a community than LGBTQ.
Yes, and I believe they also adopt the stance of hearing aids/cochlear implants being genocide, in order to sustain their community.
Fun fact: In ASL, the sign for cochlear implant is a two-fingered stab to the back of the neck, indicating a vampire in the cochlea.
Wow.
>However, there is a cogent liberal response to the charge that liberalism undermines community. The problem is that, just as in the 1930s, that response has not been adequately articulated by the defenders of liberalism. Liberalism is not intrinsically opposed to community; indeed, there is a version of liberalism that encourages the flourishing of strong community and human virtue. That community emerges through the development of a strong and well-organized civil society, where individuals freely choose to bond with other like-minded individuals to seek common ends. People are free to follow “strong Gods”; the only caveat is that there is no single strong god that binds the entire society together.
This stems from a category error. Once you realise that liberalism just *is* the folkway and culture of a particular people, namely the Anglo*, then the question fades away. This is the definitive piece on the matter, something I've not seen as clearly articulated anywhere else: https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-open-spiral/. Land's best insight of recent years.
Liberalism (i.e. Anglo culture) is definitionally self-opposing: "Any population averse to cousin marriage has a distinctively frayed ethnicity, and northwest European out-breeders thus compose a peculiar people. Among them, race and culture are spun out in an open spiral. Inclusion is for them an essential cultural, even biological theme. When caught in a decaying orbit, this intrinsic outreach can tilt into ethnic self-abolition. To be anti-English is exceptionally English."
*Fine, technically this also includes the Dutch, and the North Sea peoples as well.
This post is just a few steps away from the grand unified thesis of: everything, ever requires resources.
Which isn't novel at all, right? It's basically the universe's operating system. Energy -> resources -> money. Anything and everything humans aim to do requires resources of some sort, so we should not be at all surprised that societies, communities, groups, etc., all require resources to implement.
Nor should we be surprised that this means the current Left Project of being skeptical of capitalism is a category error. Capitalism -- when executed efficiently, means the natural flow of resources -- is the default setting for how the universe works.
I think close-knit communities are overvalued.
Church - a sluggard waker was an 18th-century job undertaken by a parishioner (usually the parish clerk), in British churches. The sole task of the sluggard waker was to watch the congregation during the services and tap anyone who appeared to be falling asleep sharply on the head.
And if you read what average people in cult after rush of young cult-building passes you get same vibes a this quote from Welcome to NHK tries express:
>> Everyone made a fuss over you today, right? Everyone seemed happy, right? You probably thought something dumb like, 'maybe I could get along with nice people such as these,' right? ... Once you're on the inside, it's just like any other normal society. Everyone wants to be the leader. Everyone wants to go to the holy land. My father is desperately trying to set things up for himself to advance— sending presents to the leaders, trying to raise his position, no matter what.
The point is most of people in those "close-knit" communities feel alienated and not particularly happy with their communities the same way your average city dweller does.
Their stability is provided by administrative methods, same stuff that "tight-knit" community of North Korea uses, only a bit milder but a bit more effective because of lower scale and less deteriorated structures.
Those tight-knit may look tempting from outside, but as soon you get too tight knit you will do everything you can to unbind yourself.
>The point is most of people in those "close-knit" communities feel alienated and not particularly happy with their communities the same way your average city dweller does.
Nate Silver recently published some polls finding that liberals were less happy than conservatives across pretty much every demographic you can name, which rather suggests your point is wrong.
Really? North Koreans and cult members TELL they are more happy? Wonder how it could be explained.
The whole concept of "happiness" sounds ridiculous. Constant pleasure is constant increment of neuro weight - eventually all 1s - useless. And constant pain is just a useless. So we all balance on about zero, both beggars and billionares.
The only difference is some people are taught to smile constantly and others to frown.
There is only one metric that makes sense - results, and we all know how those two tribes compare in that, don't we?
> The only difference is some people are taught to smile constantly and others to frown.
Maybe if you keep telling them they're happy, they'll actually believe it. All that ultimately matters in the end is perception.
This post reminds me of the Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson, which is about a future where societies have fractured into various collectives powered by advances in nanotechnology. The main one we focus on is neo-Victorian, but we also see art-punk collectives, pastoral communes, and one where people randomly get anonymized texts they have to follow or someone will die.
wealth point seems wrong - if there's more wealth to get, it's more appealing to income maximize
"But it never seems to occur to these people to join together with like-minded friends and secede from it." Isn't the fundamental problem that you can't just start a new town in the mountains, money nonwithstanding? Everywhere worth living in is already taken, even if it isn't it's probably in the middle of nowhere (and therefore probably not actually worth living in), and even if somewhow you have enough money to brute force these problems then law/politics will probably stop you (cf. Prospera).
The "Why don’t YIMBYs live in dense walkable towns sprung up from the forests of Vermont?" bit interested me, since it's my wheelhouse. My first thought (aside from the aforementioned) in this case is scale: you can have a street with five rationalist households and start getting some network effects, but that doesn't work with urbanism — even a small neighbourhood is dozens of households. Plus politics: zoning laws, parking minimums, all these things are implemented at a high enough level that no small community can realistically subvert them (aside from very marginal cases). So instead they just all move to the Netherlands.
"But I think that force is just economics." I very strongly disagree, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. I don't know, maybe I'm an outlier on the acrasia spectrum, but I can promise you it's not lack of money that prevents me from building community or making my life better/more meaningful/whatever, and stories of rich kids getting depressed and purposeless seems to reinforce that. I would imagine that for most people a rising wealth waterline would be met with a rising "weakness" (after your usage) waterline, with a similar justification ("If only we had more money...").
I'm not saying money doesn't matter, but the dystopian scenario "all sit back and collect UBI and consume slop" doesn't seem avertable by the use of wealth. You think all of these rich kids getting mental health problems off of Instagram would go off and build community or whatever if you just made them richer? I think it might work out in isolated cases (both individuals and communities), but still more of an exception.
I'd love to bet on "nothing ever changes" in this context, even "given major change X" where X is UBI
An obvious reason why community has declined, a la Postman (and hundreds or thousands of others, I assume) is that our primary forms of entertainment act as opiates, so many community-building forms of recreation get neglected. I want, in the abstract, to have a rich social and community life, where I know my neighbors, participate in community events, care for the local natural environment, etc, but when it comes down to actually doing the physical actions that create and sustain such things, it's easier to stay home and watch TV, doomscroll, and/or play a video game.
Additionally, we're not as dramatically forced into community life. If your crops fail the local community can help you and your family not starve to death over the winter (and you, during better times, can reciprocate). Now, in theory, we have better "safety nets" but they're impersonal. We find we need community for more psychosocial reasons that simmer under the surface before their true weight is felt. So many of us don't realize their impact until years of habit-forming later.
As a fairly liberal-skeptic Christian, the dream is the whole of creation joined in a canticle of praise, so being a sub-community in a liberal polis doesn't quite cut it, and neither will a UBI-funded play civilization curated by the superintelligence. Still, providence moves in mysterious ways.
> But it never seems to occur to these people to join together with like-minded friends and secede from it.
Join with like-minded friends? Absolutely. Secede? Hm.
There's an enormous gap between "I am interested in X" and "I want to not only structure my life completely around X but also to the greatest extent possible exclude all that is not X". Relatively few people are at the extreme end of this spectrum.
I, for one, am interested in multiple things on your list - to the point of making life choices around them - and many more mentioned in the comments; but no single one of them to the exclusion of everything else fun and good in the world. I am a member of multiple niche tightly-knit communities centered around some X; some of these do indeed contain more extreme people that are disintrested in much outside that specific community.
Despite everything, though, I myself am not yet disillusioned enough with the state of the world to shut myself in one little echo-chamber; I prefer my world bigger than that. Even your "serious Christians" are called to be, while not of the world, still in it; so 5/10 is a good place to be tbh IMO.
I second this. Less than 20% of House seats are competitive most elections. Many people describe not personally knowing anyone who voted for the other candidate. And press coverage of Trump rallies in particular often make them sound as much a matter of community as the other groups you lost.
In that formulation, the problem isn't lack of community per se, it's there formation of communities that are fundamentally illiberal in their commitments regarding other communities. Which... Is the actual historical norm so far as I can tell.
I have to disagree with this takeaway. Economics explains a bit of this - especially why tech- rationalists in the bay can form a subcommunity. But the other factors seem way more dominant:
1) Lack of internal coherence: Rationalists have a weirdly distinct neurotype that correlates with a bunch of other things that they can build new communities around. Normal people are mostly far messier: a bit YIMBY, but a bit socially conservative; a bit white-supremacist but fond of Indian restaurants. I guess if you ask the 90% of Americans who aren't in a tribe what their tribe would be, I suspect most wouldn't be coherent enough to start a new community.
2) Inertia/collective action: Even if you find a coherent group, it's just a lot of effort to build an intentional community, and someone has to make the first move. I guess the rationalists are unusually agentic and able to shake off this inertia.
3) Connections to the outside world: It's kind of clear why the Amish and real cults are at the top of the list - you can't be half-in/half-out. Even the most passionate YIMBYs and libertarians usually still want to have relatively significant connections to their family and childhood friends.
4) Anthropology 101: You're unlikely to sustain any intergenerational sense of community without norms saying that you have to marry within your community, and that your children have to adhere to your community norms.
Any community requires commitment.
Commitment requires faith.
Faith requires some kind of thoughtful contemplation and analysis of ideas.
Contemplation and analysis require time, intellect, and commitment to a life of the mind at some level. rinse and repeat.
We live in a world in which people are busy, broke, distracted, in debt, bored, and not prepared to do any of the things above based, largely in my opinion, on a remarkably substandard but horrifically expensive public education system that beats the intellectual curiosity out of them via the hoards of intellectually dishonest people employed by said system.
Abolish public education and maybe we'll see some change. Until then, nothing will change except in a degradation of the currently degraded and demoralized culture.
I believe it is more than just economics. Being part of a community means having obligations to that community. And sometimes you won’t like those obligations or you won’t like the collective decisions.
Western societies are too focused on the individual. People perceive they lose individual autonomy and freedom when they do things which they disagree with. Few people think about what they could do for others and what is the good of the overall community including the “weirdos” in the community who don’t like them. They would rather think about how to get ahead in a very competitive world.
The ironic truth is that liberalism permits community at the same time that it dismantles the will for it. The groups cited here -- Amish, cults, rationalists -- are edge cases precisely because they embrace the constraint, conformity, and stickiness that liberalism trains us to resist. Free to build, habituated to drift...
This is correct. The Liberal state communicates a skeptical stance on metaphysics, which can only conflict with sub-communities grounded in metaphysics.
Very well taken, and the result is this double-bind: you're free to believe deeply, but the culture will treat you as un-serious because you do.
This isn’t just a problem for the religious -- anyone who says “this way of life is not just one choice among many, but the right or necessary one” runs aground on the liberal expectation that all truths be held loosely. Which means that any truly committed community, metaphysical or otherwise -- ends up looking faintly ridiculous from the outside. The more earnest, the more suspect.
This thesis seems like it's somewhat in contradiction with this older post of yours:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/
> But westerners aren’t banning yak’s milk to “protect” their cultures. They don’t have to. Universal culture is high-entropy; it’s already in its ground state and will survive and spread without help. All other cultures are low-entropy; they survive only if someone keeps pushing energy into the system to protect them. It could be the Dalai Lama banning Coca-Cola. It could be the Académie Française removing English words from the language. It could be the secret police killing anyone who speaks out against Comrade Stalin. But if you want anything other than universal culture, you better either be surrounded by some very high mountains, or be willing to get your hands dirty.
I think Individualism is one of those "universal culture" things. People say they want community, but it's easy to spend time watching TV or scrolling social media rather than going out and building local groups (or even high-quality remote ones). It's easy to talk only to people you naturally get along with, and just avoid people you don't. Historically, money has enabled *this* process, with easy access to fast, long-distance transportation and communication, and by making it easier to get by with entirely impersonal interactions (i.e. buying your food from the grocery store and hiring a stranger for housework). The greater each person's individual consumptive ability becomes, the more effort (mentally, at least) is required to build communities. Prior to the 20th century, most people were in a "default" community (local town, whatever religion you grew up with, maybe an immigrant enclave) and which was pretty essential for what we now consider basic services (which are now often tasked to the government instead).
IIRC, a study of communities over the 19th and 20th centuries showed that the biggest predictor of a community's long-term successfulness was requiring members to make sacrifices (and this is was why conservative religious sects performed better than liberal ones or most non-religious ones). Maybe there are some people for which having more money will enable them to behave as you describe, but I would be surprised if this weren't the exception. (One obvious way I could be wrong is if we do reach a "saturation" of consumption.)
Hey, the initial quote doesn't quite sense because it's missing the key words "According to" at the beginning. Could you fix that? Thanks!
Hmmm…this one made me think (a good thing). I have never come across a “tight knit community” in my life, that was worth being a part of. There’s the basic cost - time and money - but then there’s the spiritual surrender. Knowing that you’re going to sink into this thing like a warm bath, enjoying the sensation, but knowing that someone else is going to be making fundamental decisions for you forever. Obviously a lot of folks are cool with this “cost”, just not me. Every big thing I ever joined turned out disappointing. Unable to live up to its stated ideals. Maybe best summed up in something I once heard someone say “I don’t mind following orders - as long as they’re the right orders.”
+100
I think there’s an inherent conflict between convenience and meaningfulness. Convenience is always more compatible with doing the other things that you care about that aren’t particularly related to the dimension you’re talking about. So people end up going for convenience in most dimensions of their life, and the one dimension where they want meaningfulness, everyone else is going for convenience.
Some of this is just selection bias. You will only endure inconvenience to the extent it is worthwhile, so greater inconvenience correlates with greater expected payoff.
That's probably right - if something is just inconvenient and not meaningful, no one will want to do it. And if something adds meaningfulness and is in no way inconvenient, everyone will be doing it. So out of the things that some people choose to do and others don't, it'll be things where meaningfulness and convenience are at least in tension.
I'm very excited for the post-scarcity themed-O'Neill Cylinders. New York in 1990, Feudal Britain, Classical Greece, pre-AGI mega-civilization trying to prevent its creation. With enough resources we'll have a million theme parks for every era or organization of society, except they won't be theme parks but actual societies.
I think the limiting factor for community-building is a meaning-generating ideology. You can be wealthy and get all your friends to move into your neighborhood, but that's not by itself going to create a self-sustaining subculture. There has to be some sense of shared value, incentive alignment, and broader vision. It has to be strong enough to unite people but not so strong that it suppresses all individual variation and growth, and it has to be objectively adaptive in some sense. I think that's a really fine line to walk. Living near your friends is like planting a backyard garden while making a true subculture community is like building one of those sealed self-sustaining ecosystem-in-a-jar things. The balance has to be just right or it won't grow.
The social surplus generated by joining has to serve individual members' psychological needs in a way that incentivizes everyone to participate. At core I suspect the essential mechanism that's required is a set of norms that reward value-contribution with social status in a legible but non-gameable way. In a church setting that would be things like people who do the most volunteer work getting promoted to deacon or even just publicly congratulated and praised.
I wonder how civil society fits in this…I’ve always thought of it as every community has things they care about, so they fund some to work on those full time.
When I was younger and deeply ensconced in USA Christianity there was the whole missions world that I became a part of. Because Evangelicals care about evangelizing the world, they all pool their money so some of us become missionaries to go do it.
I evolved into a secular social entrepreneur, basically same idea just different goals.
So a lot of people not ensconced in an Amish or rationalist community do put their money into what they want to see in the world, so it’s like the close knit version or the diaspora version all spread out but linked by their thought leaders writing, holding meetings and donating. Maybe there’s a better word for that besides diaspora - diffused? Or distributed?
I grew up in a tight-knit immigrant community and really disliked my experiences in it. I ended up developing special interests that are very rare in my immigrant community and felt alienated by the community and the norms in it. The cost of a tight-knit community is that if you find yourself feeling or thinking differently than its members you find the community deeply alienating and the barrier to exit very high.
However as an adult I ended up joining a community of folks in my special interest. I married a person in the special interest community. My friend circle is dominated by folks in my special interest community. I developed a strong interest in rock climbing as an adult also and ended up also making friends through rock climbing. I would classify my special interest community as a "medium-knit" community and my rock climbing community as a "loosely-knit" community. I think the cure for loneliness in a liberal society is to fill your life with a medium-knit community and lots of loosely knit ones. Then you avoid the high exit costs and alienation that occur when you chafe against your community. You also avoid the huge intracommunity disputes that can form in tightly-knit communities that can lead to painful strife.
When it comes to money, if anything I think a generous welfare state or something like UBI strongly helps with this. Instead of poor communities languishing due to a lack of resources in helping each other, a strong welfare state can put poor communities and wealthy communities into an equal footing.
I'd love to see the rise of meta-community organizations that encourages community formation and association in liberal societies. When I was growing up (which was the '90s, so an America in transition between its old world and the new) there was little education on prompting to join community except for a weak interest in voluntarily joining school clubs and the pressure to join extracurricular activities to get into a prestigious college. I'd love to see it more explicit.
Is there a requirement that communities be "tight-knit"? I'm interpreting this, in the context of the essay, as bounded and pretty exclusive. (In this category, I would add upper classes of mostly-white people and their country clubs, universities, and finance jobs.)
I wonder about community as operating via >1 more or less loosely held communities? A network of nodes, with a range of densities and commitments. This effectively happens when one has lived somewhere for awhile (nodes from schooling whether you're own or your kids'; spiritual practices; occupational networking; serious play, like martial arts etc.). The nodes overlap and interconnect with others, too!
>But even defining these exceptions broadly, probably fewer than 10% of Americans belong to one of them.
According to Pew Research, 42% of U.S. adults say religion is very important in their lives, 37% of U.S. adults are members of a house of worship, and 25% of US Adults attend religious services weekly. (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-attendance-and-congregational-involvement/). 10% is way too low a number even for just the "Serious Christianity" category, especially if you're trying to define exceptions broadly.
There’s U-shape to the desire for community vs wealth. In low money/status/freedoms groups you have to rely on fellow humans for in-kind benefits (e.g. immigrant enclaves). Only two of the above mentioned communities (rationalists and free state) seem to fall into the category of having enough wealth/resources to have community building be a priority again. Scott’s point is- where are the others? We’ll they’re probably too exclusive/private to be well known.
The first place to look would be in wealthy neighborhoods in America e.g. Manhattan UES/UWS/Tribeca etc.
One thing that always strikes me in all those old novels is how rich English people with big country houses have no problem in allowing other rich English people to come and stay with them for an extended period, even people they barely know and might not especially like.
Downstream of this we have, of necessity, a lot of snobbery and strict etiquette; if you're going to trust someone you barely know in your house with all your extremely expensive things, you need to know that they're definitely part of the community; someone who spoons their soup the wrong way is potentially some non-U bounder who'll steal your silverware at the first opportunity.
Well Bertie Wooster would steal the silver cow creamer, and he was as U as they come.
Well it was probably just modern Dutch.
It’s an interesting cultural tradition though, not really replicated by the middle classes who often copy the elites, although there’s maybe not enough food to go around. If Wodehouse is correct then the master of the house would turn up to dinner in his own house and find there’s any number of random aristocrats ( sometimes despised) gorging on the goose.
Ah yes, fetishizing tight-knit communities because le data while not realizing that you all would be the kind of people they would drive out of their communities, or lead stagnated lives in them.
The dirty secret of close-knit communities of any kind is you need to be 90% of the type of person they want, and manage to hide the 10% or it be an amusing foible. Outside of it you can be "our token weird guy"- he's weird but he's ours-or the hated guy of the moment. Or you can be the person they need but never acknowledge, usually a racial or ethnic minority.
If you don't fit in or can't fake it, you flee or be one of the last three.
A lot of the looser internet communities were built precisely because people are outcasts from local communities, and if they get tight enough you get the same issues.
The distance looser communities give is safer for many people.
> Ah yes, fetishizing tight-knit communities because le data while not realizing that you all would be the kind of people they would drive out of their communities, or lead stagnated lives in them.
Is it not true altruism to advocate for something that would benefit the world but hurt yourself? Though, I somewhat doubt this is what Scott is doing...
I've hear unions used to serve this role as well, and that union halls used to be important third places.
I don't want to be part of a tight community like the ones you mention because every community is, to some degree, deeply annoying. People who like one way of being that much tend to be insufferable.
I would fit very well with several kinds of groups, but... Well, there's always a "but". I love my queer community but they can get loony about capitalism and astrology. Rationalists can be cool but I'm an historian and artisan and don't feel entirely at home there. And a YIMBY utopia in New Hampshire? Sounds great... Except I'd have to live in New Hampshire. I'd rather stay in NYC, the best city in the world, and float around with only loose community.
Good point. I think this is a revealed preference for a lot of people.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention Haredi ( ultra-orthodox) Jews. Some liberals do join them, and some leave, though they pay a high price. If you lived on the east coast, you’d have thought of them right away.
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.
The solutions and reactions to the gilded age would not be palatable today.
NYT's Ross Douthat about "Five theories about Joan of Arc’s miraculous-seeming care" starting:
"Scott Alexander, the noted rationalist blogger, has a feature where guest writers pen book reviews and essays for his site, and this week an anonymous writer reviewed the historical literature on Joan of Arc."
Isn't this just another "Bowling Alone" discussion?
Not to say we don't need to solve that problem as a society, but that's fundamentally what this is. Realizing that Thatcher's "There’s No Such Thing as Society" is bullshit and what will lead to people who are happy and have meaning is connection with others, and building society. It doesn't need to be like a Amish, or a cult, where people rarely associate with outsiders. Being a part of a group, even if its just a once a week bowling club, gives life meaning.
I think the reason we don't do this now is the myth of being able to it alone. The yeoman farmer, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. You go down that path far enough and you reject all community, not just the community where people help each other.
> Realizing that Thatcher's "There’s No Such Thing as Society" is bullshit
Thatcher didn't mean "don't be nice to people".
>In other words - yes, part of the good life is participation in a tight-knit community with strong values. Liberalism’s shared values are comparatively weak, and its knitting comparatively loose. But that’s no argument against the liberal project. Its goal isn’t to become this kind of community itself, but to be the platform where communities like this can grow up. So in a liberal democracy, Christians can have their church, Jews their synagogue, Communists their commune, and so on. Everyone gets the tight-knit community they want - which beats illiberalism, where (at most) one group gets the community they want and everyone else gets persecuted.
I don't think that's a good answer, even in theory. One of liberalism's main ideas is that unchosen oboigations are bad, and this is usually taken to imoly that you must continually agree to any obligation for it to remain valid. Take no-fault divorce, for example -- even as a mentally sound adult, you can't legally precommit to marry till death do you pass, because the liberal state forces every legal marriage to include a get-out clause enabling either partner to end the relationship for literally any reason whatsoever. Nor do you have much in the way of legally enforceable rights vis-à-vis your spouse -- if your husband is a deadbeat layabout who'd rather play video games than get a proper job, or your wife's a frigid harpy who won't have sex with you, your options are basically to either suck it up or get a divorce. It's the same with most other communities: at least in the eyes of the law, anybody is free to leave their tight-knit community for any reason, and in some cases, communities are legally forced to accept people as well (e.g., if you tried to start a whites-only university or town, you'd be promptly sued into oblivion). But, as people have said, building a tight-knit community requires hard work, and also a way to discourage free-riding and generally make sure members are acting according to the community's values. But if you have a community where members can leave whenever they want for any reason they want, it's hard to enforce the sort of behaviour necessary for a proper tight-knit community. You can't build a strong community with people who can easily leave as soon as the community makes demands on them. Hence most "tight-knit communities" under liberalism are more like social groups, because they lack the means to demand any higher level of commitment. The main exceptions are generally religious or ethnic subcultures which are already different enough from the mainstream that leaving would, in cultural terms, be essentially like moving to a new country.
Also a problem: under democracy, everybody has a say in how everybody else gets to live (at least assuming universal suffrage), which often makes for inter-communal tension. Historically, the states most closely approximating the ideal you describe have tended to be autocratic empires of some kind, because the various communities can be united in their common loyalty to the emperor whilst having little to do with each other. It's no coincidence that most western states have become less democratic as they've become more diverse, although it remains to be seen how successful their preferred solution (transferring more decision-making to the courts and bureaucratic regulatory bodies) will be.
Nice hopeful comments, but unfortunately, they missed the point of Reno‘s book. A nice strong church in a small community is not what he was talking about. He does not explicitly say this, but Democrats and Republicans will have to reimagining themselves. Globalization will be one of only many victims. The open society will probably have to undergo a complete makeover. Truths that were diminished down to meaning will make a grand return. Trump I don’t believe will represent anything like a long-term representative of what’s coming, but he has been a somewhat necessary wrecking ball. Hopefully both ends of the political spectrum will have begun to learn that there are some problems with ideology ruling our governance. I suspect. That we will need to demand that our politicians learn to talk to each other and govern, as if we were one people rather than a lot of little groups. It is two different things to have conflicting opinions about what is necessary as opposed to having a fortress with a moat where we lob rocks at who is ever outside.
I don't think money is the main cause as to why people don't go off to join/create like-minded communities.
> Are the rest not interested?
I honestly think this is the case. I think most people just don't have a large enough interest in a particular thing. Like the "only 1% of reddit users post" stat. I feel like the average person likely doesn't "have a thing" i.e. something they're in the top 0.01 percentile or roughly in the top 30K Americans of time spent, knowledge, or skill in some particular domain. I'd bet if you are one of these people in the top 0.01% in some particular domain, you're also probably represented in other domains (people are either "fanatics" or "normal").
In thinking about how money would affect things, what if everyone in America was 100% wealthier, would this lead to growth in like-minded communities at all? I can't see it. I see it leading to people just pursuing current status markers like getting more education, buying more luxurious things, going on wilder trips, living in more desirable locations, but not joining like-minded groups (which actually may be a negative in terms of cultural status!). We'd need a crazy shift for people to prioritize joining like-minded communities
Why does whether someone is in the top 0.01% of knowledge or skill or experience with A Thing matter here? I genuinely don't see how it ties in with your broader argument that people don't want more community
People of course like the idea of community, but when it comes to actually joining one and thereby making real changes in your life (e.g. moving somewhere, donating lots of money and going to church) most people wouldn't want to. The .01 percentile time spent or knowledge or skill is just a way to say this person is super dedicated -- to serious Christianity, or libertarianism, or rationalism, or whatever -- and would make real changes in their life to join the community.
The Third Temple could be the solution!
"Are we really a nation dotted with tight-knit communities of strong values?" Not as much as we once were, but it seems to me pluralism and liberalism allowed for generations of exactly this in ethnic groupings, especially in cities. And that those communities still exist. Cubans in Miami, Iranians in L.A., Puerto Ricans in New York, Irish Catholics in Boston, various Latin American groups across the southwest and in cities, Somalis in Maine, Asian American groups in cities everywhere, and on and on. Ethnicity was a useful source of glue because it often encompasses language, religious belief, and cultural practices all in one and is tied together in extended family fabric.
I don't think everyone besides the Amish and a few other cults are just dissolved in a sea of "mainstream" culture. Even when ethnicity doesn't perfectly unite people, we all live in places. Small town New England offers a kind of cohesive glue even for people who have come in from all kinds of other places.
The idea of money being the glue that holds a community together tastes bad in my mouth. It paints a picture of wealthier and wealthier people circling into isolated enclaves and from there sending charity out far and wide to help the sorry masses who can't afford to join in the rich enclaves. Whereas, when people live in real places that they have a sense of belonging to, rich people and middle of the road people and low income people and able bodied people and old people and young people and disabled people have occasion to mingle in the normal course of life. Small towns and cities have historically done this better than suburbs which are by definition more isolated enclaves based on socio-economic exclusion. I don't think suburbs have been great for America politically or culturally, and it sounds like you're speaking up for more of that kind of a thing.
"where individuals freely choose to bond with other like-minded individuals to seek common ends"
That is literally illegal in the united states, because of liberalism.
Alright, I'll keep reading...
I expect money to have quite little to do with this. Going from no community to a 5 or 6 community should cost very little for most people in big towns.
Instead, I imagine it is something like this for most people: "I like X, and I like community. However, I do not want to live together with folks who care so much about X that they would actually start a new community about this.".
See also: reform jews being reform jews for only about half a generation. If you do not actually believe in that stuff, there is no moral force binding you together, and an abstract wish for less loneliness is not sufficient to build a "let us not be alone club". Now remember that the stereotypical secular person does not really believe in anything, and you are really screwed in terms of community
One problem I'm not seeing anyone else talking about is that finding and forming a community is really really hard! I moved states a little over a year ago, and I made a very serious effort to try to make friends and suchforth.
It only started showing results very recently, involved enormous amounts of time, effort, and money, and dealing with two separate board game groups in my area who were basically Nazis (as in they were explicitly in favour of firebombing Jewish homes, synagogues, and Jewish-owned businesses, doing certain arm gestures at Jews while using alliterative phrases praising early 20th century fascist leaders), and even then I wouldn't say it's a "community" but rather a loose group of mild friends which is already starting to crumble.
And I've got a lot of advantages. My work schedule is very flexible, my money situation is ok, and I'm able to travel halfway across the city. If even one of those wasn't true, I can only imagine that would be exponentially harder.
So, what makes an LGBT party? What is LGBT fashions? LGBT sports? I know several people who are not gay who play roller derby, are they closeted? What is “a special LGBT-friendly neighborhood” and what’s the difference between that and a “LGBT-not friendly neighborhood”? And what are LGBT “norms”?
Is there a gay way to dress, a lesbian way to throw a party, a bi way to play sports? Or are we just flattening millions of unique lives into a caricature for the sake of convenience, mockery, or control?
You claim to “know many of these people,” but instead of understanding them as individuals, you’re describing a fantasy version — a parallel society full of stereotypes that exists only to justify your fear. You frame it like you’re uncovering some clever sociological insight, but all you’re doing is repackaging discrimination in the language of observation. That’s not intelligence. That’s bias dressed up as thoughtfulness.
The idea that LGBT people are forming a “country-within-a-country” because they have dating apps, bars, and — god forbid — flags, is not only ridiculous, it’s hypocritical. Straight people have their own dating apps, churches, sports teams, bars, neighborhoods, and yes, entire political movements. Are they trying to secede too?
What you’re really reacting to isn’t separatism — it’s visibility. You’re uncomfortable with LGBT people living openly and finding community, so you paint it as threatening. But LGBT people don’t owe you assimilation. They don’t need to stop gathering, loving, or celebrating themselves just because it challenges your idea of normal.
There is no singular LGBT “norm” — there are queer people in churches, suburbs, farms, cities, science labs, football teams, parent-teacher meetings, and yes, parties. The only common thread is a need for safety and dignity — something posts like this help erode.
So maybe the real question isn’t “Why do LGBT people form communities?”
It’s “Why are you so threatened by people who don’t revolve around you?”
And honestly, I’m disappointed — not just by the content of what you wrote, but by how proudly you display your ignorance and call it insight. You’ve built an entire argument on shallow stereotypes and then acted like you’ve uncovered some uncomfortable truth about society, when all you’ve really done is expose your own bias and fear. The lack of foresight here isn’t just a gap in understanding — it’s a refusal to reflect on your own limitations, a failure to recognize that what you’re promoting isn’t cultural critique, it’s bigotry. You’re not holding up a mirror to society — you’re just projecting your prejudice and calling it a pattern. Do better.
> Straight people have their own dating apps, churches, sports teams, bars, neighborhoods, and yes, entire political movements. Are they trying to secede too?
Well... yes? I'd argue that a big motivator for the new right is the potential to "secede" from these leftist subcultures. And their community is a lot bigger, and a lot more powerful.
> But LGBT people don’t owe you assimilation.
I guess they don't technically owe anyone anything, no. But the people are no longer asking nicely for your cooperation. And frankly, your comment is a great example of why people are resorting to this. You are not in a position to be making such demands, especially with such arrogant hostility.
Let’s be clear: marginalized people forming community for safety, joy, and survival is not the same as powerful groups withdrawing in protest because they’re uncomfortable sharing space. That’s not an apples-to-apples comparison — it’s oppression versus entitlement.
LGBT people creating support networks in a world that has historically criminalized, pathologized, and erased them is not ‘secession’ — it’s survival. And framing that as threatening or provocative says more about your worldview than it does about queer people.
If your reaction to someone challenging stereotypes and defending human dignity is ‘This is why people aren’t asking nicely anymore,’ then you’re not actually interested in discourse. You’re just mad someone didn’t make themselves smaller to suit your comfort.
And no, I’m not making demands. I’m pointing out how absurd and dangerous it is to pretend that queer existence is inherently separatist — while ignoring how straight, cis, religious, or nationalist identities already form exclusive enclaves, often without scrutiny.
You call it arrogant hostility. I call it clarity.
If you’re more upset by someone defending queer community than by someone describing it as a threat to national unity… maybe reflect on where your sympathies lie. Because if your idea of a reasonable response to visibility is ‘they brought this on themselves,’ then we’re not talking about coexistence — we’re talking about control.
Interdependency happens when people consistently need things, and they’re aware of it, and they change their behavior to deal with it productively and socially.
If you live in a society without personal interdependency, like one that has a very generous UBI that isn’t constantly inflating the currency somehow, then you have only personal attachments holding together your commitments. They’re more fragile than we think. We’ve already effectively abandoned family, religion, employer/employee loyalty, localism, and basically every form of committed identity. We’ve made excuses why all these abandonments were progress, and you can see people in this comments section calling their membership in the dodgeball championship memorabilia collectors of Spokane a tight knit community.
People belong as long as it suits their interests. Without coercion, it goes no further. Never underestimate the power of self-interest.
"The optimistic perspective is that if this is so bad, what’s to stop you from joining the Amish? Or some sort of pseudo-Amish who live in an eternal 1990s? Or your own Amish-inspired sect who have whatever set of technological and social relations you think are optimal?"
The law. The law tells me I can't have what I want, even on my own property and not bothering other people. Because most people are stupid and afraid and are allowed to vote.
Equating LGBT and Rationalists on this scale seems kind of crazy. The LGBT community is significantly larger and has plenty of very tight knit micro communities.
Well off Kibbutzim in Israel come to mind while reading this. The Kibbutz movement went through a crisis in the 1980s, but there is a revival now, with many kibbutzim having advanced manufacturing (as well as advanced farming etc.) and are doing well, with waiting lists (and selection committees) to join.
Does ACX have some sort of online community board (e.g. discord, forum, etc.)? Would be great to have ACX readers connect with each other by location (I for one would love to connect with other ACX readers in Long Island, NY). Nothing beats physical proximity when it comes to community building.
Americans do an annoying thing with the word "Liberalism" where they use it to mean two things: liberalism as in "Liberal democracy" which includes the entire western political mainstream and liberalism as in "centre-left". I'm actually not sure which definition Fukuyama is using, and I'm not sure if he does either.
Moving along though, this is where I think the wheels already fall off:
> part of the good life is participation in a tight-knit community with strong values
I question this premise. There's an optimal amount of tight-knittedness, which is somewhere far short of where you start to call it "tight-knit".
An optimal social life includes a whole bunch of people at varying degrees of social distance -- your immediate family, your extended family, your good friends, your vague acquaintances, people you know from various social organisations, your colleagues and your neighbours and your dentist and the local shopkeeper that remembers your face and knows nothing else about you. A "tight-knit" community probably just means that all these roles start to overlap because there's few enough people in your social universe that they need to -- your dentist is your neighbour's cousin and you can't buy milk any more because you broke up with the shopkeeper's daughter.
> Are the rest not interested? Happy with mainstream culture? They don’t seem happy. 90% of articles on social media are people talking about how much they hate mainstream culture, sometimes with strong specific opinions about what improvements to make
People who are happy aren't writing articles on social media, or if they are then they're not the ones you're reading.
Liberalism is defined by rejection of the political nature of man by which mankind is divided into neighbors and strangers.
(The best illustration of the term "stranger" is the Kipling's poem The Stranger")
Political nature of man implies the organization of men into particular, self-ruling, morally authoritative communities variously called tribes, nations, polities etc.
The right-wing liberals reject the moral authority of the community i.e they regard each man as stranger to each other.
The left-wing liberals reject the particularity aspect--they would have each man a neighbor to all others and thus a world state.
If it's just about money, why don't the ultra-rich do this already? Yes, a few tech CEOs have survivalist compounds but Prosperia notwithstanding, they have not gone off and built Techtopia with all their tech CEO friends. The Hamptons is boring, it's just like any other suburb but with bigger and fancier houses with nicer views. Are they just uniquely predisposed to enjoy materialist slop? Seems unlikely. How many of them see therapists for their vague sense of "something being missing in their life? Probably a lot. So, what gives?
The vague atomized ennui-affected materialist life must have its own pull. People must actually *want* it, in some capacity. That has to be why it so voraciously destroys most tight-knit communities. The real debate is whether people "want it" like a woman in Afghanistan wants to wear high heels and buy romance novels at Strand Books with a 2% cash back credit card, or whether they "want it" like a drug addict wants to inject heroin. I think Fukuyama et al. say it's mostly the former, and trad-posters et al. say it's mostly the latter.
With trad/"retvrn"/etc. advocates I always get the sneaking suspicion that they believe compulsion is necessary, even if they won't admit it. This thing is good for you, in a "highest good" sense, but you don't realize it yet or can't accept it, so I'm going to compel you to live this way, by force if necessary. This is basically the Taliban's MO (even today!).
I hear that union halls were a major source of community: not just directly work-related stuff, but part of the fabric of everyday social life.
If so, community was destroyed on purpose tby Reagan and Thatcher to undermine labor power.
Scott has it backwards, I believe. In modern times, due to high GDP most people choose to not get tight-knitted, because they can afford so. A few still head for monasteries (12/10), some even want to get to prison (15/10) https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-20/geraldton-wa-homeless-man-asks-for-two-years-jail/104242950 but then those nuns seldom were millionaires - homless trying to get jail-time is more of a thing. - I am sending my love to all those rationalists and libertarian in communities, but me: I prefer to keep things loose. Looking at the world around me: this is the standard. Revealed preferences. "Hell is other people".
Money is not the only thing stopping people from going to start there own little communities.
And Scott you should know that after having wrote https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/
Scott wrote: "My model of ethnogenesis involves four stages: pre-existing differences, a rallying flag, development, and dissolution."
Rationalists have both pre-existing differences (being rich, smart, educated) and a rallying flag (or multiple flags - believing in Bayesian reasoning, believing in "rationality" etc )
Many people don't have that: they are just normal people who like communities. Think Phyllis Vance. Phyllis doesn't have an ideology or strong politics. She likes reading and gossip and has fun at the office birthday parties. She thrives in her community of "small town paper office" because she likes having friends. She doesn't have the ambition to go join a new community based around her interests. Maybe she would join a book club. The Phyllises of the world don't have a rallying flag capable of to up and leave their towns to join a new community. They barely have preexisting differences. But she definitely needs a community and friends.
I'm surprised you didn't mention how jobs used to be community-forming to a higher degree than they are now. Small businesses still give this social luxury, because it can actually give you something to identify with, whereas with scale a lot of that gets dissipated into "you are just a statistic" etc etc
That is in the US. In other times and places, The community policed you. Your legal rights were dependent on your community, and you couldn't leave.
That goes to the question - who has the power? In the Liberal way, it is the Individual. He makes the choices, under a legal system that treats everyone the same.
In an Illiberal system, people are treated legally differently based on their community, and the community makes the choices, not the individuals.
I'm surprised you didn't mention how jobs used to be community-forming to a higher degree than they are now. Small businesses still give this social luxury, because it can actually give you something to identify with, whereas with scale a lot of that gets dissipated into "you are just a statistic" etc etc
I don't think it's just economics, another factor (maybe the main one) is that communities are usually not that stable without a "punish the defectors/traitors" feature. Without it, communities get un-knit from freeloaders who use the benefits of the community without supporting the costs. And implementing any "punish" is simply illegal in most cases, because it conflict with the laws of the country at large (protection laws mainly, but states basically hate private laws and want to keep a monopoly on justice and justice enforcement - and the punish is exactly that - a private justice). The only punishment that could be done (and even that may be problematic) is a weak form of banishment, one that does not involve actual displacement (because this would conflict with property or housing laws), but just ban access to community meetings/perks.
This remove the location as a community bind, and looking at the examples provided (or the ones I can think of), without it communities just can not last very long....
It seems religion get some slack regarding what they can do to punish defectors, especially in the US, because cult freedom mitigates protection laws....explaining why cults makes the bulk of the community examples.
The other examples are commercial companies (sometimes with extensions to non-profit, who copy the pattern of contract-based organization). This is the only //state-like organization (with partially private laws) allowed by (some) modern states, but those are not usually considered communities - maybe because they are so ubiquitous, the perks (salary) is too trivially evident and the organization is even more pyramidal than most modern states (which makes sense as it's military-derived) :-)
I don't think money/economics is the main impediment. I think its much more likely to be:
1) collective action problems - how do you get everyone in your "community" to agree to live in one place - who are the 1st movers etc. Its very hard to get your group living project off the ground. There is a strong bias towards the status quo.
2) ties to other people - say I really want to live in some left wing commune in Poland, but I currently live in a village in India. Relocating to Poland will involve uprooting myself and never seeing my friends and family again. Most people will be unwilling to do this. Sure there are already lots of economic migrants, but I reckon those with the highest propensity to migrate already do so. Most others wont due to valuing their local ties (friends, family etc.)
I'd also add 3) legal impediments - its very hard for me to opt out of a countries laws I don't like and simply make my own instead. Most of the time states are very down on people wanting to break up their monopolies on the use of force