“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.
What looks like starting from a blank slate to outsiders often turns out to be a dense web of unwritten rules ---and they're enforced, just not in ways you planned for.
That's different though, those are simply the last people _left_.
(I've spend a fair amount of time in Midwestern farm-belt towns during the past decade-plus due to my work.) The combination of modern mechanized agriculture (no farm workers needed, literally one farmer with modern equipment can do 1,000 acres from planting to harvest now and still have plenty of time for Facebooking), plus so many of the young people splitting for a metro at the first opportunity, has been hollowing out the rural Midwest for a couple of generations now.
You drive around now and there are these half-ghost towns everywhere, that peaked at 5,000 or 10,000 people in 1960 or 1980 or whatever and today they're at one-third that many and still sliding. Every farm-county mayor or county exec or school board president or VFD chief I meet is of retirement age "because there's nobody else left to do it". They all drive to St. Louis or the Twin Cities or Chicago to visit the grandkids.
My wife comes from a Great Plains town that's flipped from ~75% white to majority Latino in 20 years.
Her grandpa (raised in the town's pioneer lore) once sincerely asked me why the Mexicans settled there instead of building their own town. I didn't have a good answer lol.
If I had to hazard a guess: it's easier to reuse existing infrastructure than to build everything from scratch.
So if you are strapped for cash and want to settle somewhere cheap to lead a self-sufficient life, declining regions are probably your best bet to be able to bootstrap your attempt. If similarly minded people start doing that in numbers you are pretty likely to get this exact outcome ...
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
> Do they have to live together? Plenty of strong churches draw people from a broader community.
Really? I have trouble believing that there are strong churches whose parishioners don't live together.
Do they have to live in one contiguous block, with no neighbors who don't attend the same church? No.
Can they be scattered across several different neighborhoods of the same city? No.
The point of the church is that it defines the people you interact with. If the other people attending have no presence in your daily life, there is no point in you attending that church.
I went to a strong church whose parishioners don't live together. About 20 members came consistently, more came irregularly, mainly from the closest two towns but some from 20 miles away. Attending 3x per week + summer camp was plenty enough to form strong bonds.
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.
Furries often live together on the roommate level (though less often on the neighborhood level, that I'm aware of).
Those conventions are generally run by members of local furry communities organizing at a city or region level, and local furry communities often have other smaller events aimed at locals ("furmeets").
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?
There may be an element of that, but I don't think either autism or superstimulus of male characteristics are the whole story. In polls, only about 10% of furries report being autistic- quite a lot higher than the general population, but not close to a majority. Also, only about 20% of furries actually identify as gay- the other 60% who are neither straight or gay are bisexual, pansexual or asexual.
Contrary to the popular image, I don't think the community is primarily organized around a particular fetish. It's definitely very unusually open about kinks, but I think only a slim majority report having an anthropomorphic animal fetish- almost as common in the community are fetishes around transformation, hypnosis, pregnancy, etc. More universal to the community than the anthro fetish, and more central to what they actually spend time doing and making seems to be a shared, deeply-felt fantasy of being an anthropomorphic animal.
If I had to guess, I'd say there's probably some unknown biological thing- maybe a cluster of genes, or some unusual way a brain can develop, or some epigenetic thing- that occurs mostly in males and manifests in a variety of different ways; an increased risk of autism, an increased likelihood of being gay or having a paraphilia unrelated to the more common dominance/submission paraphilias, a deep interest in fictional worlds, and often a deep desire to be something else- a different gender, species, etc.
I think people usually join the furry community not because it caters to any one interest, but because they notice that people in the community share a cluster of unusual personality traits with them- and they're mostly male because that cluster tends to develop in males for inscrutable biological reasons.
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.
Doesn’t this basically mean the only options people have are 1) mainstream liberal society, and 2) communism? Sure I guess you can have Christian communism or white communism or whatever, but if, as I think is true, capitalism is a vastly superior economic system, then wedding profit-seeking by law to mainstream liberal norms effectively dooms nearly sll alternative communities. To really have viable alternatives, it needs to be possible to have profitable businesses within discriminatory communities.
Do you really think economic systems or communities residing inside them just have a single big switch on them somewhere where one setting is "communism" and the other is "capitalism"? There are multiple axes and gradients to any such system.
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.
The way this is accomplished is by a combination of rules that are differentially beneficial for Orthodox Jews, and providing amenities that they care about and will pay for - not active discrimination.
For example, when living near DC, we paid significantly more for an apartment that had a kosher kitchen, while someone not religious will actually pay less for an apartment with lots of space taken up by extra unnecessary items - two dishwashers, two sinks, room to store at least 3 sets of dishes, etc. I also paid more for proximity to a synagogue, a building that does not get locked on Saturdays (but is locked the rest of the week,) and one where my religious Jewish neighbors' kids and mine play together in the hallway while we nap on Saturday afternoons.
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.
I recently came across an example: Christ's Household of Faith in Saint Paul MN, where the members live in church-owned and assigned housing. You'd never know there was a cult there just from looking around the neighborhood.
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?
I can list some of favorite speakers in the past couple of years while I’ve been a member. First and foremost is one of the most regular, with half a dozen talks, that being Kim Stanley Robinson, Sci Fi and Climate fiction writer. Sara Imari Walker just gave a brilliant talk on Assembly Theory recently, Speculative Futures by Johanna Hoffman, Seeds of a Good Anthropocene by Elena Bennett, and another similar talk by David Grinspoon stood out in my memory as excellent and inspiring. I’ve missed many I wish I could have attended, but most are available on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/c/longnow
Mormons feels inaccurate here, practically everyone works a secular job, including the massive local lay clergy. Even leaders of a dozen congregations quite often work a full time normal secular job. Yes, even in Utah. Maybe this comparison made sense 50 years ago (20-30 if you're less charitable), but not any more. Unless you meant to write something less strong about "Serious Christians", almost the same words apply (commonalities in friend groups, etc)
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.
Eh, show some creativity. It's easy to work around that.
Eg you could leave some money in escrow with a trusted third party (like a lawyer or notary whatever) and have them hand over the money to the assistant in case you try to pull such shenanigans and the assistant stays firm.
And that's just one mitigation strategy I came up with at the top of my hat. I'm sure, there's much better ways, if you give it a good think.
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?
I think its a mistake to assume that our revealed preference is better for us. Addiction very clearly breaks this model, and I think many (most?) of us are addicted to our phones.
I agree with you, I had a thought and immediately pointed out its flaws. However I still find it interesting to look at it through a Neo-Confucian idea - the union of action and knowledge. Action is derived from knowledge; inaction indicates either perfect knowledge that produces inaction, or imperfect knowledge that impedes action.
Addiction is clearly the latter, but as you point out it is hard to distinguish the former. "Not throwing away my phone" could be a reflection of a robust understanding of its benefits, or a reflection of a poor understanding of its drawbacks.
Not making any claims, but asking a few questions about how people act in response to claims of "something being good for you". We all know we don't always need those claims, even if we believe them.
You can't use revealed preference to understand things with network effects.
We could all individually want to ditch our phones, but there's no coordinating mechanism (other than legislation, which operates on way too long a time scale to be useful here) to break the vicious cycle of "phones are ubiquitous, so society gets organized around everyone always having a phone, so you have no choice but to have a phone".
There've been surveys of teenagers that show that teens want to use Instagram less (and wish their friends would use Instagram less, so that using Instagram wouldn't be a requirement for participating in social life) but they have no mechanism to get their friends to actually use Instagram less, and so everyone is stuck in a shitty heavy-Instagram-use equilibrium.
No you wouldn't because the phone makes a lot of things convenient, and in many cases is the requirement to participate in many things at all. Believe me, I tried.
Going full Amish doesn't solve your problems unless you literally live among the Amish.
The problem with phones and the Internet is, you wouldn't be overall better without them, not when these things are more and more vital to stuff like banking or taxes or job hunting or any kind of research work. But they are also vehicles for all sorts of terrible habits. The issue is how hard it is to filter one thing from the other.
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.
money would definitely help, because there's a lot of people who kind of feel the draw of community, but they are pretty realistic about their needs and chances, and simply monetary reality pushes them further apart.
for example I recently moved from an apartment into a bigger one (due to the leaseholder giving us notice because of tax reasons he's getting rid of the lease, and even though we wanted to take over the long-term lease the owner said nope, they want to do short-term ones with that unit), so after a brief period of crisis and chaos (how to find an apartment, move, while we had summer plans and plane tickets) we find a nice place through friends. great!
but we initially moved to that smaller place because already 2 units were occupied by our friends!
and we discussed buying land and building a multi-unit house, but ... money!
of course in the end this comes down society/culture. and it's not great that nowadays even in the oh so radical, dense, car-free walkable places the only thing we got is speedbumps and an endless sprawl of ugly small 5-8 story buildings ... (or in China 20-30 story buildings in surrounded by endless highways https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/chinese-towers-and-american-blocks )
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.
if there's some competition/selection going on (for example broader society provides some support to people while they're between communities) then the liberal ones can probably grow a bit bigger, so the median member would just be in those.
scarcity breeds very hard problems, and to solve those you need to make sacrifices, that in turn requires "selflessness" (through some reflective higher-order phenomena, eg. loyalty to your family, tribe, ideology, nation, delayed gratification, investment into something bigger) or selfishness (oppressing others so you can exploit them, etc.)
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.
But the paradox of this is that it goes from "I am normal, therefore I can find other normal people like me very easily" to actually never doing that, or never picking any of them to build truly strong bonds with. Having a single common point to build on (even e.g. being fellow countrymen living as immigrants) is a great seed to precipitate that crystallisation.
Yeah, I suppose the underlying issue here is that the modern concept of "normal" is itself dysfunctional/inadequate. It's pretty much common knowledge nowadays that we're at the height of a "crisis of meaning" of some kind or another, there are no workable life scripts, internet has made everybody crazy, etc. So, while many deviations from this "normal" lead you even further into crazy town, people who are doing better also get there by doing something differently.
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.
I'm more surprised that Scott's got a working rationalist community than that most people don't have one. Community takes sacrifice, and it's...easier not to, even if you want the benefits.
>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.
Good point, reminds a lot about subcultures in general. Obsessive people make a scene that attracts more casual fans. Eventually as the scene grows charismatic sociopaths can come in and attract the casual fans and take over the movement.
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.
German is in that weird position where it has a tradition of building noun terms from simpler terms, in a manner that suggests it could freely do this to represent any idea at all, only to have used that approach to build a term for the idea that it should not be able to.
ETA: It makes some sense that this would be the Sprach from which Gödel would arise.
Well, I've been thinking along the lines that after the horrors of WW2 Germans would be among the last people to openly question the ambiguously strong god of Liberalism.
I mean, about a quarter (I guess these days more like a fifth or a sixth or so) of Germans spent the formative 45 years after WWII in a nonliberal order, and drew very different lessons from WW2. That side is where most of the sympathy for nonliberal social orders comes from today.
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.
A lot of the people that I used to see in the New York rationalist meetups years ago have since moved to the Bay Area, but as far as I know there are still meetups in NYC...
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.
well, they spend a lot of money on funding games, which leads to more games, which then can reach more people and turn them into gamers, yeey :)
yes, of course it's not like the Amish (and there are about 400K of them), but there are millions of gamers, with some serious real world influence (well, let's see where the Stop Killing Games EU citizens' initiative thing goes)
sure, sure, they're a bunch of subcultures in a big group (ranging from anyone who plays too much Candy Crush on their phone to hardcore gamers watching esports or whatever), and somewhere there are the "gamer bros" and/or 4chan/gamergate idiots. (the classic gatekeepers, who frowned upon cosplayers that spent more time on their costume than playing video games, thereby "trying to police" gamer spaces, keeping casuals and normies out.)
while this wouldn't be that interesting in itself, where this comes back to the "strong gods" is that these aggressive gamers trying to keep gaming "pure" led to very anti-inclusive groups, that then had nowhere to go except right into some kind of hyperindividualist purity culture (guns, cars, libertarianism, PewDiePie flirting with every kind of repugnant ideology while having 100M+ subscribers)
... so "you are the main character" individualistic entertainment breeds individualism that then threatens liberalism? or it's the other way around, and gamers are just so weak that the rise of illiberalism took them too, since they are just a bunch of communityless weak-social-skills pussies?
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.
> If anything I wish the government gave the 'trying not to be a burden' people more!
Given that they definitionally won't seek it out themselves, this seems like a clear argument for UBI. If everyone gets an automatic subsistence-level income, negligent jackasses can be slapped with fines when they inevitably misbehave overtly, with no wiggling out of it by insolvency, while "didn't want to be a bother" types, who clean up their own messes when possible, will basically always have enough liquidity to hire competent professionals (plumbers, electricians, doctors, whatever) when necessary.
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!
It's possible that your perspective on this is affected by the false consensus effect.
Survey data does indicate that there is a crisis of community, especially among men. For example, the percentage of men reporting six or more close friends has dropped from 55% to 27%. The percentage of time spent with friends has dropped by two-thirds over the last two decades. Membership in a wide range of civic organizations has dropped. And so on.
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
Exactly this I live in Pakistan a country where the social fabric is overtly kinship based, in tight knit communities you can forget about individuality and a sense of personal space it's pretty much non existent esp in rural areas and if that wasn't enough jealously and other people being way more invested in your personal life and what you do is thought of as some normal occurance. At times in tight knit communities you are not serving yourself but whatever custom is the norm.
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've also witnessed this in Africa and the West. I find the Western method exhausting - you have to tiptoe around young children even to prevent bad behavior affecting your child, and usually have to do it through their parents, which also forces the parents to be around, increasing the burden of childrearing.
I think the African version requires some amount of shared values, but mostly a more chill attitude towards discipline and childrearing in general, not to panic when someone did something not precisely in your spirit to your child.
I wonder how far this is due to the Western belief in blank-slatism. If you tell people that parenting style is the key determinant of whether a child grows up to be the next Einstein or the next Jack the Ripper, of course a lot of parents are going to become extremely neurotic about how their kids are raised.
I think CHH overshoots her point. If you have a friend group of 5 kids, each kid spends the afternoon/evening at another kid's house 4 days a week, then everyone benefits but nobody is receiving "free" childcare. It's just a more efficient system. It's also not a "village" in the sense that, barring major neglect, any of the 5 families needs to be too judgemental of the others. Same with "I pick you up at the airport and you'll do the same", more efficient than forking 40$ for Uber each time. Help moving is more efficient than everyone renting u-hauls and getting ernia by doing everything themselves etc.
People don't want a village, true, but they don't just want free, unreciprocated favors either. They want a friend group, which obviously makes people happy in and of itself, and also has some obvious material advantages.
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.
100%. I do have a tight circle of LGBTQ friends. I'm also part of a tight group of friends from a church I attended a couple decades ago, a rationalist community, a large and very active gaming group, a loose but mutually helpful neighborhood association, plus coworkers with whom I get along well, and other friends and family.
What's the supposed value that a single tight knit community is supposed to provide? My liberal society lets me mix and match smaller communities according to my interests, and it lets me easily maintain connections with people even if I later leave the community. No single tight knit community can match that!
I don't think this is a bait-and-switch, and I stand by my reading of Fukuyama. Elsewhere in his article, he says:
>> "Moral judgments are in fact what create human community. Rather than being infinitely open to other points of view, many people prefer to live in closed societies built around shared beliefs and passions...One can build a community around shared interests—that’s what a for-profit corporation is about—but the strongest communities are built around deeply-held beliefs. "
I think the highlighting of "moral judgments", "not being infinitely open to other points of view", and "built around deeply-held beliefs" are clearly suggesting he means something deeper than just gamers.
But I think this is a matter of degree. LGBT people haven't seceded from mainstream society as thoroughly as the Amish. But they still have spaces where (for example) it's taken as an absolute given that you won't assume people's genders, will respect everyone's chosen pronouns, and various other things that aren't true of regular society. I don't know how many LGBT people would prefer this vs. having some sort of LGBT separatist commune, but I think people at all levels of the secessionism spectrum should be able to find places that cater to their needs.
>I think the highlighting of "moral judgments", "not being infinitely open to other points of view", and "built around deeply-held beliefs" are clearly suggesting he means something deeper than just gamers.
Except that he explicitly says that the need for community can be satisfied without forming a literally separate community, nor by rejecting the broader community:
>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.
>But I think this is a matter of degree. LGBT people haven't seceded from mainstream society as thoroughly as the Amish. But they still have spaces where (for example) it's taken as an absolute given that you won't assume people's genders, will respect everyone's chosen pronouns, and various other things that aren't true of regular society.
No, the difference between the Amish, who form literal communities separate in most ways from the broader society, and LGBTQ people who might or might not sometimes frequent such spaces, is very much a difference of kind, not degree. It is normal to frequent "spaces where (for example) it's taken as an absolute given that you won't [challenge views] that aren't true of regular society." Trekkers do that. Red Sox fans do that. Jews and Muslims in the US do that. Fans of Brutalism probably do that. I go to film meetups where we very much do that. Etc, etc, etc.
I would suggest that, if those people do not secede from mainstream culture, is it is because they don't want to do so, and if they don't want to do so, it is probably because doing so is not necessary to satisfy their need for community. For most people, that is satisfied by hanging out with the gang, whether that gang be fellow sports fans, fellow adherents to religion X, fellow gamers, or fellow LGBTQ folks.
I think his Ukraine example is illustrative, they doubled down on an identity based around democracy, liberalism, tolerance, etc. in response to Russian aggression. Those are deeply held moral beliefs, but it didn't require them becoming a closed society
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.
I think the scarcity of housing and healthcare makes "literally surviving" a very much non-solved problem, even in rich societies.
*Technically* I guess section 8 and medicare are supposed to solve that, but in practice it's very bureaucratic and you might very well fall through the cracks and get homeless or die/remain crippled before either of them intervenes. European public systems are a bit better at making sure you get some care if you need it urgently, but the housing situation is not much better.
Ironically, since housing and healthcare are inflated by Baumol + some regulations only exceedingly rich places would ever humor, this means that the "survivability" of different countries is quickly converging (albeit the middle classes still have wildly different lives depending on where they live)
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.
The unifying part is accepting that your subjective reality isn't always someone else's objective truth. I guess, put simpler, the "why I'm doing a thing" is different for everyone. Being authentic is believing in something because you actually do and not because someone told you to because their subjective reality says it is right (for them), so it must be universally understood to be that way. A photographer and a mountain climber both interpret the magnificence of, say, Mount Ranier differently, but does that make one of them right and the other wrong? It's still a mountain objectively. Subjective reality is based on our own internal unconscious perspectives, experience, and biases. There is a nuanced grey area between everyone's perspectives.
That is an insightful and most necessary counterpoint. Thank you. You are right to say that the liberal project, in many ways, failed to deliver on its promise of a harmonious, pluralistic society, and instead led to alienation. The crucial question is, why?
I posit that it failed not because its goal was wrong, but because it forgot its own first principles. It became a community defined not by what it stood for (the greater good), but by what it stood against (the old-school conservative view). It spent all of its energy trying to prove the other side's map of the mountain was wrong, instead of doing the harder, more beautiful work of exploring the territory itself.
This is where a Harmonist approach differs in its architecture. It begins with a single, foundational agreement: we must first agree on the shape of the mountain (the Objective Reality), while holding a sacred and non-negotiable respect for each person's unique and valid view of it (their Subjective Experience).
This leads to a different kind of house.
Your comment is right that "a house divided cannot stand." But that assumes the only way to unite a house is to force everyone to paint their room the same color. Harmonism suggests that a house can also be united by a shared, deep respect for the architectural integrity of every room.
The work is not to force conformity. The work is to lead by example, to practice Relentless Inquiry as a core value, and to build a community whose unifying principle is not a shared belief, but a shared and profound curiosity. It is, perhaps, the only foundation strong enough to build a house that is not divided, but beautifully, resiliently, and harmoniously diverse.
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.
As the joke goes, "Amish but for the 90s" is just Germany. It's not too bad, after the 57th fax you need to send you almost stop cursing them. Almost.
But also it doesn't seem that hard, once you have a townful of people who approve? You use your laptop at the office and then *leave it there*. Kids are not tempted by smartphones simply because there are no smartphones, and they realize tiktok is a thing only when their preferences are already pretty set in place.
The hard part, of course, is to get a townful of people to agree!
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
It's exceptional for anything to last 100 years. What's wrong with communities that last a few decades and then fade away? People still found value in their time as a member of the community, which is all we're asking for here.
There’s nothing wrong with a short lived community, but I disagree it’s exceptional to last 100+ years. On a historical time-scale it’s exceedingly ordinary for communities to last many generations. It’s uncommon in the United States of America because economic and cultural forces tend to tear apart any attempt at community-building, which is sort of the point of Scott’s post
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.
I don't think it requires too much effort to figure out why Muslims are having a harder time than usual with this. But thanks for the EPIC City link, that's pretty interesting.
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.
I think at least some subset of Amish people have a surprising amount of money. I live in PA and some of the most successful local businesses are Amish-run. Some of them are millionaires, but the way they use their money is, well, very Amish. They buy land and invest in agriculture, and support other Amish businesses, which have a much higher success rate than the national average thanks to all that strong community support from well-heeled family and neighbors. It doesn’t hurt that they’ve been parked on some of the best farmland in America for 300 years. There is absolutely abundance involved in the stability of that model.
> I live in PA and some of the most successful local businesses are Amish-run.
How does that work ? I've seen e.g. Amish cheese being sold at stores and even online, but aren't the Amish prohibited from interacting with the secular world (and in fact electricity in some cases) ? From what I understand, these businesses are fronts, but I'm not sure what the exact relationship between them and actual Amish farmers looks like.
The Amish are absolutely allowed to interact with the secular world when it comes to business (their lifestyle requires it, in fact). The various restrictions they have are to prevent the secular world from interrupting Amish faith, family and community.
Lots of Amish use computers and phones, but only at work, not at home.
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.
When I was a kid in rural western Canada in the 1970s, a 2-year-old child was killed and eaten by a blackbear in their backyard in my town.
And there have even been a few other cases of them apparently agressively attacking and eating adult humans (ie. not a sow defending cubs).
I agree that blackbears are far less aggressive and dangerous than grizzlies but they are also in much more frequent contact with humans and I have a very very healthy respect for them...
It does happen but as you say it’s rare given the large number of black bears living close to humans. Personally I worry much more about attacks by fellow humans in my medium-sized urban area.
My own most difficult experience with black bears was in Voyageurs NP where a female trashed our camp and dragged our food bag into the brush.
She did make off with the bacon. I have photos of her cubs in a nearby tree watching mama do her grocery run.
Some wrecked gear (and the loss of the bacon) was the worst of it though.
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).
In my part of Canada, where handguns are extremely restricted (basically illegal), if you worked in forestry (as I did), you could apply for permission to carry a side arm. However, the sidearm had to be at least a .357 Magnum or .44 Magnum calibre. All smaller calibres were considered basically useless against bear attacks (we had both grizzlies and blackbears). As the application process for a handgun was complicated and could take up to a year, I ended up just cutting a 12 gauge shotgun down to the minimum allowed length and carrying that with me. At close range a shotgun slug has vastly more energy than even a .44 Magnum, albeit a shotgun (even a sawed off one) is certainly heavier and more cumbersome to carry around in the bush all day...
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.
Thanks for the additional links! I'll need to stew on those for a while and really absorb it, so I don't have anything intelligent to say about them right now other than to express my appreciation. :)
Sorry my comment was ambiguous, by the way, I will try to do better in future.
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.
"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."
while i think this is definitely a cultural pathology of England today, and some other countries, I don't think it's as universal across the North Sea peoples (see e.g. Denmark and their hardline turn against immigration) or across time (were villagers or factory workers in Yorkshire in 1800 really big fans of ethnic self-abolition and outbreeding?) or even universally held in England today, as the passage seems to suggest it would be. Obviously this stuff is contested today, in England and elsewhere, and always has been, even if you think ethnic identity is weaker in England histroically than it ought to be.
In the grand scheme of things the Danish turn against migration is a course correction attempting to prevent the problem that arose due to Danish pathologies spiralling out of control. Whilst it might be radical in comparison to the other WEIRD countries of the 21st century, it isn't at all radical compared to comparable non-WEIRD state initiatives e.g., Chinese pacification of the Uyghurs or Burmese policy against the Rohingya.
You are right though that the point does elide over many layers of complication for rhetorical reasons. "Englishness" is not necessarily the same thing in London high society in 1920, Yorkshire in 1800, or Norwich in 1600. But there is clearly a difference in marriage and kinship patterns that emerges in WEIRD countries (see the book review from two years ago on this blog) from roughly around the 12th century and is fully developed by the 16th/17th centuries, most strongly in the Low Countries and England (especially the Saxon Shore).
I genuinely think that factory workers in Sheffield in 1800 were less insular and tribal compared to the general mass of humanity. London has been a population sink for East Anglia and the East Midlands for a few hundred years at this point, with individual young men and nuclear families migrating from the provinces to the city. Ties were much weaker to the local village or town, people did mix, and they'd have had friends or family who'd got on boats to the New World or been sent to Australia. This is all comparative but can also apply to the Dutch. I hardly doubt they thought about it in the intellectualised terms of "self-abolition", but it seems objectively true that life and expectations were different for a Rajput or Bengali farmer and a Yorkshire labourer, especially in terms of marriage.
The arrow of causality is extremely fuzzy, and that WEIRD review seems to pin it all on the Church, whilst I suspect there is some combination of self-selection for people who'd travel to the furthest outposts of the Eurasian landmass and a sort of Völkerwanderung/Viking memory (whether genetic or cultural) as well. But regardless, the differences are real, and by the 19th century they have become intellectualised, reified, and explicit. Long before Orwell noted that English intellectual elites seemed to despise their own countrymen and country, outside observers like de Tocqueville or Taine noted that the English seemed either embarrassed by, or even happy to criticise, their own institutions.
But sure, I agree there are few if any universals, and that the attitude might not extend to our North Sea neighbours to the same extent, nor is it as explicit up and down the country. But I would note that a large proportion of those arrested in the 2024 anti-migration riots had Irish surnames. Of course, the gulf between the Irish Gaels and the English is (relatively speaking) small, but it's a good example of integration. I've seen similar trends amongst mixed-race or quarter-black English lads going along to the migrant hotel protests in the urban peripheries.
'I hardly doubt they thought about it in the intellectualised terms of "self-abolition", but it seems objectively true that life and expectations were different for a Rajput or Bengali farmer and a Yorkshire labourer, especially in terms of marriage."
I'm sure that's true to an extent (South Asians are really at the other end of the spectrum, unusually insular) but Jared Diamond claims that when he lived in England (1958-1961, says wikipedia) it wasn't uncommon for him to meet older rural people who, IIRC, spent their entire lives between their villge and their market town, with the exception of service in the military. Maybe they were speaking of their parent's generation rather than their own, but still, this suggests that even England- the first country to industrialize and 'modernize'- was historically a more rooted and less, well, 'open' society than people often seem to think, until surprisingly recently.
What I'm not trying to do is make the move "well Angloness self definitionally includes liberalism, therefore open borders and infinity immigration". In fact I'm trying to avoid making any normative claim at all, but it does seem to be the case that some aspects of the open society are deep rooted in Anglo culture, *and* most(?) aspects of the open society are at least derived from Anglo culture in the same way that Atheism can be thought of as a Christian tradition. I suppose you could insert some stuff about Judeo-German 20th Century thought here and reframe it, but I still think that is grounded on certain Anglo strains of thought and permissiveness.
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?
>North Koreans and cult members TELL they are more happy?
It may surprise you to discover, but "conservatives" is not synonymous with North Koreans and cult members.
>There is only one metric that makes sense - results, and we all know how those two tribes compare in that, don't we?
Since you bring up North Korea, I'll point out that, on current demographic trends, South Korea will be practically depopulated after a couple of generations, leaving North Korea the victor by default. If your society can't maintain itself into the next generation, it ultimately doesn't matter how brilliant it is in other respects.
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.
The last statistic (25% attending services weekly) sort of puts the lie to the earlier statistics (42% saying religion is very important), doesn't it?
My family attended synagogue weekly when we were young. Even across the few years we were there, there was a pretty wide variety of engagement. At one point I was friends with 3-4 other kids from the synagogue and saw them regularly, and my mother was some kind of leader on some kind of synagogue body. At other points, we just went to a building once a week, sung songs, and went home. So I think even the 25% attending services weekly is an overestimate for how many people get strong communities out of it. Not sure how typical this is though.
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.
Not for food necessarily. And I don’t think shameless is all that correct. Kate fox is more correct in her observation that drinking buddies in England often never visit each other’s houses despite meeting most week.
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...
No, they are assuming it benefits the world via a belief that is abstract and removed from experiencing the society they want to create. They are idolizing farming without growing up with the smell of cow shit.
its similar to people who say religion is a social good due to its effects on people and should be promoted while being atheists who never attend church. Living in it is a more complicated thing, and if they did they might eat those words.
You see this with believers too, some guy makes this big case of how Eastern Orthodoxy or Catholicism is an intellectually elegant faith to convert to. So he converts, and finds out the local church is 75% people who go there because being a good Greek means you are Orthodox, and the priest is more about "pray for the motherland" more than erudite theology.
you maybe can make peace with it but god, you want to smack your younger self some,
i encountered this with the conservative push to both entrepreneurship and trades: turns out a college degree will open your eyes to how risky the former is if you aren't rich, and the classes are filled more with people inheriting a business over starting it. The latter was LOL if you attended technical school, and even more lol if you know older tradesmen.
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.
That's true. And there's no reason why they would be. Those solutions and reactions are either banal (40-hour workweek, no child labor, food and drug inspections/regulations, direct primaries), mistaken (Prohibition, eugenics, segregation), or trying to combat problems that no longer exist. But the fact that we have solved and reacted before should make us hesitate before saying we cannot again today. We can't go back, but my point is that we can go forward. And even if what we need isn't palatable today, who's to say what will be palatable in 5 or 10 years?
One of the reasons that, perhaps, there was a greater sense of nation after the gilded age was the two world wars, the new deal, and (perhaps) immigration restrictions.
That's true, but it doesn't entirely fit the chronology. The movements I listed above (40-hour workweek, etc.) came before WW1 during a time or relative prosperity. WW1 was, in fact, the apotheosis of the Progressive Movement, which lost almost all of its influence at the end of the war. It is difficult to disentangle causation when n roughly equals 1, but the spirit of reform started picking up wins before all the massive mobilizations you mention.
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.
I don’t think what Thatcher was saying was bullshit:
> I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation and it is, I think, one of the tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many of the benefits which were meant to help people who were unfortunate—“It is all right. We joined together and we have these insurance schemes to look after it”. That was the objective, but somehow there are some people who have been manipulating the system and so some of those help and benefits that were meant to say to people: “All right, if you cannot get a job, you shall have a basic standard of living!” but when people come and say: “But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!” You say: “Look! It is not from the dole. It is your neighbour who is supplying it and if you can earn your own living then really you have a duty to do it and you will feel very much better!”
>There is also something else I should say to them: “If that does not give you a basic standard, you know, there are ways in which we top up the standard. You can get your housing benefit.”
>But it went too far. If children have a problem, it is society that is at fault. There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate. And the worst things we have in life, in my view, are where children who are a great privilege and a trust—they are the fundamental great trust, but they do not ask to come into the world, we bring them into the world, they are a miracle, there is nothing like the miracle of life—we have these little innocents and the worst crime in life is when those children, who would naturally have the right to look to their parents for help, for comfort, not only just for the food and shelter but for the time, for the understanding, turn round and not only is that help not forthcoming, but they get either neglect or worse than that, cruelty.
>How do you set about teaching a child religion at school, God is like a father, and she thinks “like someone who has been cruel to them?” It is those children you cannot … you just have to try to say they can only learn from school or we as their neighbour have to try in some way to compensate. This is why my foremost charity has always been the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, because over a century ago when it was started, it was hoped that the need for it would dwindle to nothing and over a hundred years later the need for it is greater, because we now realise that the great problems in life are not those of housing and food and standard of living. When we have got all of those, when we have got reasonable housing when you compare us with other countries, when you have got a reasonable standard of living and you have got no-one who is hungry or need be hungry, when you have got an education system that teaches everyone—not as good as we would wish—you are left with what? You are left with the problems of human nature, and a child who has not had what we and many of your readers would regard as their birthright—a good home—it is those that we have to get out and help, and you know, it is not only a question of money as everyone will tell you; not your background in society. It is a question of human nature and for those children it is difficult to say: “You are responsible for your behaviour!” because they just have not had a chance and so I think that is one of the biggest problems and I think it is the greatest sin.
Society is not an abstract, it is not an impersonal force that can be blamed or relied on. Society is made up of people, and you have to be actually part of that, taking on the responsibilities as well as the benefits.
Of course society is made up of people; in the same way that it is influenced by its myths and leaders. Some myths and some leaders influence or push societies to do things that reduce the effectiveness and willingness of that society to help its members.
Government is a product of society. We can choose to solve problems like childhood poverty with governmental action, or with "National Societies" (NGO's, Charity Organizations, etc.. (called charities from here on out)).
We, as a society can say, everyone has to contribute to eliminating childhood poverty, or we can say people can voluntarily choose which causes to support. The first is government solving the problem, the second is charities solving the problem.
I have no statistics to back this up, but I would be extremely surprised if people donated more to charitable causes than they pay in taxes every year. People also don't regularly donate to every cause that helps society (or themselves), whereas, through (current western democracy, ideally) governmental action, we elect leaders who, through debate, discussion, and consultation with experts, decide how much of our tax dollars go to the issues that concern society.
On some level I think this should go without saying, but not everybody thinks in this way, but every action by a group of people is going to have waste. There will also be people taking advantage of the system. Obviously society should spend some amount of time and energy reducing that waste and reducing the number of people taking advantage of the system, but no system will ever be without waste.
Also, isn't Thatcher saying there: "Children can't be held responsible for living in poverty"? Or is she saying "Its hard to say this, but children should be held responsible for the poverty they are living in"?
If its the first one, then yes, as a society we should help these children. I'm better at other things than making food, building houses, and making clothing, but what I can do generates money that I can pay in taxes to pay other people to do it. I would prefer that its taxes, not charities solve the problem, because I can vote on taxes, not on charities.
If its the second one, well fuck, I don't want to be part of a society where that opinion isn't frowned upon. If that's what people in my society believe, I will do whatever I can to tear down what led people to think like that. Calling bullshit on anything that leads to that line of thinking is crucial to me living in the kind of society that I want to live in.
> Also, isn't Thatcher saying there: "Children can't be held responsible for living in poverty"? Or is she saying "Its hard to say this, but children should be held responsible for the poverty they are living in"?
I think she’s very clearly saying that the poverty those children are growing up in isn’t just material poverty, and we need to engage with a deeper responsibility towards them (and towards the responsible adults we want them to grow up to be) than simply ensuring they have a house, food, and an education.
We do need to engage with a deeper level of responsibility to teach kids, but you can't reliably teach someone who is starving, or who is tired because they don't have a warm bed to sleep in. If we can't do the basics, the rest barely matters.
> We do need to engage with a deeper level of responsibility to teach kids, but you can't reliably teach someone who is starving, or who is tired because they don't have a warm bed to sleep in. If we can't do the basics, the rest barely matters.
This is true, but does not address what she is saying.
>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.
> 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.
The message I did take away was basically: "There is LGBTQ Culture, which leads to thighter knitted communal belonging for the ones participating in it, good on them." :)
I get where you’re coming from, but context and tone matter — especially when discussing marginalized groups. This wasn’t a celebration of queer community. It framed LGBT people as having a ‘parallel society’ that’s inherently suspicious — using language like ‘LGBT norms,’ ‘special neighborhoods,’ and ‘they even have their own flag’ as if any of that is proof of separatism or subversion.
The punchline wasn’t ‘good for them.’ It was ‘look how different and concerning they are.’
If someone wrote the same about Jewish people, or immigrants — listing off their dating practices, holidays, community spaces, and then ending with a warning about ‘forming a country-within-a-country’ — would that still read as neutral or positive?
We don’t get to separate intent from impact. Whether the author meant it as hostile or just thoughtless, the result is a reduction of queer lives to stereotypes that feed into old tropes about ‘outsiders’ plotting to take over.
Queer culture is beautiful. But this post wasn’t celebrating it — it was framing it as an existential threat. That’s what I responded to.
My general reading of Scott has him pegged as a liberal humanitarian who is generally LGBTG friendly, so this could have influenced my judgement, but for me this read clearly tongue in cheek. I also did not get the vibe that he framed LGBT people as having a ‘parallel society’ that’s inherently suspicious.
Perhaps it's also him (and me mostly) being part of bubbles, where marginalisation of queer people is a lot lower than in mainstream culture?
Did you apply the principle of charity? Or is the nefarious vibe so strong you had to point it out?
That’s a thoughtful question, and I appreciate you asking it in good faith. I do try to apply the principle of charity, especially when a writer has a reputation for being thoughtful or progressive. But charity doesn’t mean ignoring the broader context — or the impact something can have when it echoes the language and logic of real-world discrimination.
You mention being in a bubble where queer marginalization is lower — and honestly, that’s part of the disconnect here. I live in the Deep South. My family still casually refers to homosexuality as a sin. A pair of women kissing at a local river spot was seen as ‘inappropriate for children.’ And my own little brother visibly recoiled when bisexuality was mentioned on a Disney show — not because anyone taught him to hate, but because this kind of discomfort is ambient here. It’s in the air. It gets absorbed.
So when I see something that jokes about LGBT people forming their own “parallel society,” following mysterious “LGBT norms,” and gathering in “special neighborhoods” — it doesn’t feel tongue-in-cheek. It feels like the kind of thing I’ve heard in real life from people who genuinely believe queer people are trying to corrupt or isolate themselves from the rest of society. And these real people are not a small or fringe group; they include my entire extended family, their friends, and their neighbors — stretching across miles of private land, holding prominent positions in local universities, raising multiple children, and shaping the values of entire communities. Their beliefs don’t just exist in private — they carry weight, influence policy, and mold the next generation.
Maybe in another context, with another tone, from someone with a different audience, it might land differently. But whether the author meant it seriously or not, this kind of framing still reinforces the idea that queer people existing visibly and in community is somehow suspicious or separatist — and I don’t think that’s harmless. Even ‘friendly’ versions of this rhetoric can feed the exact same narratives people in my life use to justify their discomfort, their judgment, and sometimes their outright rejection.
So yeah — I heard that nefarious undertone loud and clear. Not because I’m cynical, but because I’ve lived in the shadow of it.
Ah, sounds rough. I believe now I get your point. Take my empathy, if you want it. :)
Thank you for taking your time to answer so civilly and thoughtfully, I appreciate it. (And for the reminder that my circles (in urban Europe) are not something I should take for granted, I guess.)
PS: May Scott read your text as a remainder to recalibrate his model.
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.
In the sense of conflation with the term "liberals", which is in turn contrasted with "conservatives". In America, this rounds off as "Democrats" and (pre-Trump) "Republicans". Democrats are more center-left than liberal, but the historical labeling lingers. So, the dualism of "liberals and conservatives" suggests "center-left and center-right", instead of the French parliamentary dualism of "pro-and anti-gradual change", which can both easily reside within a Western-style democracy, or the even broader definition of liberal, now clarified as "classical liberal".
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.
I'm a bit confused on your framework here. How do you fit the fundamentalist Christian right and the hippies from the 60's into your categorization? I feel like the Christian right, and many other groups, rejects strong government when it interferes with what they want but welcome it when it's on their side. The hippies, from what I've heard, seemed not to want a world state but less war, and yet I still think of them as left-wing liberals. I would categorize right-wing liberals as typically more economically liberal whereas left-wing liberals are typically more social liberals.
Crux in this framework is separation of neighbors (who agree with you regarding right and wrong) and strangers (who need not agree).
Man acts by his sense of right and wrong and this knowledge of right and wrong is provided by his moral authority ie his god (in the sense of Kipling's The Stranger).
Now, a person can say I don't accept any external authority. I am my own authority --he is an anarchist or a right-liberal. Perhaps hippies were like that?
Strong vs weak govt is distinction made within liberalism (with its unprincipled exceptions). In this framework, the logical endpoint of right-liberalism is no-government while of left-liberalism is world government,
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!).
Regarding your first paragraph, my sense of it is that a person of power (and wealth is a kind of power) faces two quite strong isolating. forces:
* When interacting with those of "normal" power (who we might otherwise call "the powerless"), there is this constant nagging feeling that they are just humoring you while secretly aiming to take advantage of your power, or convert some if it to their own purposes.
* Power means in many ways not having to compromise, and if you put several powerful people together, none of whom is used to having to compromise, well, it's not a good formula for them to get together in a group house, you know?
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
I think that there is a lot to be said for the need for an absolutist position in order to preserve a vision - and therefore, the weakness of those visions is definitive of liberalism. That is, Rationalists see their views as absolutely correct, as do Christians, as do Libertarians. (Less true of LGBT, admittedly!) They are all therefore to some extent proselytizing, which is memetically advantageous under most conditions. (And LGBT is not an exception here - they don't want people to change their orientation, but they want them to adopt the norms and social expectations.)
What has happened in liberal society is that all of the many different absolutist communities are outnumbered and/or weak compared to those opposing them, so people can choose their communities. If any of them ended up winning the war for the hearts and minds of the populace, this would transform increasingly into something like demands rather than liberal views. And this is fundamental - Heinlein presented a straw-man version in Glory Road; "Culturologists state a 'law' of religious freedom which they say is invariant: Religious freedom in a cultural complex is inversely proportional to the strength of the strongest religion. This is supposed to be one case of a general invariant, that all freedoms arise from cultural conflicts because a custom which is not opposed by its negative is mandatory and always regarded as a 'law of nature.'"
This implies that for liberalism to emerge or continue, you need pluralism, which in turn requires that all the individual communities be weak and/or small.
It takes time to develop social technology in response to physical technology.
The Amish developed their ideological separatism in the 16th/17th centuries, and Luddism in the 19th century.
It might just be that it takes decades, or the action of a few great men, or contingent historical developments, or all three for this process to be replicated.
Liberalism can't solve a lack of community spirit. It axiomatically can't.
The whole point of liberalism is to tip the balance in the favour of the individual. The moment you tip the balance in the favour of the group it stops qualifying as liberalism (politically it'd be called socialism if you were trying to do something new or conservatism if you were trying to return to something old).
(Okay, one exception is if you have two or more already strong communities that are forced into one larger group. Increasing liberalism could allow them to separate into distinct legal entities which could then increase community spirit.)
The problem *is* liberalism, the solution can't be more liberalism. Liberalism came to its most recent ascendency in the 1970s to solve stagflation, a problem that had been caused by too much socialism. It worked well for a while but then every problem that could be solved with more liberalism was and only problems that can't be solved with more liberalism remain.
It's time to go back to looking for solutions in socialism, i.e. do things to improve society as a whole even if it reduces individual rights. At least among those of us who want to-make-a-better-world. For those that want to-avoid-a-worse-world then conservatism is always there and ready, indeed it's the only real solution being offered to voters at the moment.
(At some future point technology will change conditions sufficiently that more liberalism will again be the correct choice. None of the three fundamental political ideologies—liberalism, socialism, conservatism—is *always* the correct choice.)
What you call liberalism, I would call "right-liberalism" with its emphasis on the individual and associated denial of moral authority of the collective.
But "left-liberalism" which you call socialism has no such inhibition.
Nah, not really. Stuff like gender rights, anti-racism, and minority rights are all liberalism because they increase the power/rights of the individual at the expense of the greater society. NIMBYism is also liberalism (and therefore YIMBYs are at least directionally socialist).
Because elections drive people into two main coalitions: left and right, but there are three main ideologies, you get a mixture of different parts of two ideologies in left and right. It's easy to confuse coalitional purity with ideological purity, but they aren't the same thing.
An example. When a left-liberal advocates for trans women to compete against cis women in sports that's good for individuals (liberalism) but bad for the average of society overall (socialism). Perhaps some future technology will solve this, but that's not the case right now.
Stuff like gender rights, anti-racism, and minority rights explicitly attack the power and freedom of individuals. Define them precisely and you can see how.
I don't see it. If the counterpoint harms of a policy affect a much smaller group acutely but a larger group diffusely then that is a pro-individualist, and thus liberal, policy.
If *any* policy that harms an individual can be called anti-liberal then *every* policy must be, but then the term loses all usefulness. Only by examining the balance of trade-offs can one say that a given policy is pro-social or pro-liberal.
Gender rights, anti-racism, and minority rights derive from liberalism's blank-slatist tendencies. If we're all born the same and only develop differently due to our environment, then if Group A does worse than Group B along some metric, then that can only be because members of Group A are experiencing a different environment somehow -- either due to poverty, bigotry, or some other thing artificially keeping them back. And since these kinds of constraint hinder individuals' ability to flourish and self-actualise, liberalism requires us to remove them.
(Of course, not everybody believes that we're all individually born the same -- a lot of people are happy to admit that two people might be born with different skill levels etc. But suggesting that this variation leads to statistical differences at the group level is generally verboten, so we still get anti-racism and anti-sexism policies.)
So I want to add small towns in rural america to your list. Small towns being something with a population of ~1000. I'm not sure how to rate this, but maybe a 3/10 or 4/10. It's still a high trust community, farm stands sell produce or eggs by the side of the road. I don't lock my doors and leave my keys in the car. I know my neighbors and we're various degrees of friendly. Lots of people go to the fireman's parade and then the (volunteer) fireman's picnic afterwards. (Where there's a beer tent, food and games all to support the firemen.) My kids play in the community band (run by the band director from the nearby high school.) There are bowling leagues in the winter at one local tavern, and weekly euchre nights at another. In general a nice place to live.
Missing the actual major non-mainstream communities, Black America (we still have huge segregation, many Black Americans live in an all-Black environment that is completely unrepresenatative of the country as a whole) and Hispanic America (if you're saying speaking alternate languages is nearly immune to the mainstream, look no further).
1) People already do this to a degree. There's a reason liberals all move to cities and conservatives all move (or stay) in the country.
2) Social organization is *hard*. I have friends I'd like to live next to. We even half discussed building an apartment for them on our lot. But we have many overlapping wants and it's just *easier* to not compromise.
3) Social organization is *hard* and no one's working on it. Do you know who does all the social organizing in traditional church communities? Stay at home moms and grandmas. If all those ladies are working a career, building community can't be more than a hobby or a secondary concern.
It's so much easier to continue organizations or relationships than to start them from scratch. It's easier to respond to an invitation to a potluck than to host one.
We're all so much more disconnected from our geographic locality than we used to be -- getting news from twitter instead of the lady at the coffee shop or the local newspaper, picking things up from the big box store instead of the local shop where you know the proprietor because you come there every week, and now just getting an amazon delivery. There's a large number of people for whom covid barely changed how many people they saw in a day...
And geographic mobility for work makes all that trickier... I live in a community where I barely knew anyone until my daughter started sports. Nearly everyone else in this community, *their grandparents went to this same high school*. Tapping into that is much different than being raised in it.
And similarly... a lot of us don't want the tradeoffs of community. My cousin moved back to the farm with aunts and uncles as neighbors. It drove her *nuts*. They would just *stop by* at *random times of the day* and *want to talk*! Normal community is a nightmare of people in your business if you're used to modern autonomy, and we really forget that when we talk about missing it.
The Amish are actually illegal. For instance, some sects don't believe in smoke detectors, so none of their buildings are compliant with fire codes. Each community has one smoke detector stashed away somewhere, and when they construct a new building, they stick it in an appropriate place until the inspection is done, then take it down and put it away. (Or, that's the rumor.)
It's the same with sewage rules, egress requirements, etc. Many of which are ridiculous for structures that don't have electricity or running water. But it's still illegal to violate ridiculous laws.
In many places they've succeeded in negotiating carve-outs for their settlements in local building codes. But in others, officials just turn a blind eye, or else it's a source of constant conflict.
Roughly all of the examples of intentional community Scott points to are (technically) illegal in one way or another. Education, child welfare, zoning, public accommodation laws, animal welfare, discrimination, public health, child labor laws, etc.
Mostly, in the US, as long as everyone involved consents, you can get away with breaking these kinds of laws. But if you become A Problem, or if somebody complains about you, your situation can become quite tenuous. The Amish have had to go all the way to the Supreme Court as recently as 2021 (to avoid installing septic tanks for their graywater).
“Serious Christianity” is a much larger category than all of the others put together and itself is more than 10% of the population. I live in Middle Georgia travel a lot in the south. Even the public schools are heavily christianized. The mega churches are packed every weekend.
As someone who has never been to one and has no knowledge on the subject I would say for many people the answer has to be yes. For a lot of serious church goers, it seems like church is a core part of their identity and where they derive a lot of their meaning. Just because the church community is big doesn't mean it's not intense/deep. But this is just why I imagine, I don't actually know and I would love to hear from someone who might have more personal experience. Also, I know you didn't bring it up but just to add: whether or not what they worship is true or not is pretty irrelevant for whether or not the communal belonging they derive is "real/authentic."
Given that people are so not on the same page these days, any imposed social order beyond free for all liberalism would probably lead to widespread alienation, even worse than what we have now. I don't think that the crisis can be fixed from the top-down.
But I also think that, in time, people will get on the same page about a lot of things. People can't just run astray forever. Gradually they will have to take cognizance of the chaos of things and the obvious fact there can be a better order. After all, we live in one world, one universe, one reality.
Strange as it sounds, epistemological chaos seems to me like an aberrant, unnatural situation. There's an old Russian saying, "truth is brighter than the sun." I think it just takes time.
I think in a lot of ways what people are longing for isn't so much community as it is family. We long to be part of an extended kinship group that cares for us, provides purpose, and reproduces itself generation to generation. The Amish are successful in part because their communities have a strong backbone of interlocking kinship networks that tie everyone together.
I'd argue that there is a much deeper force. Evolution has primed us to be a bit afraid of/wary of other people we haven't sufficiently bounded with yet. However, when forced into an environment where we work together to achieve common goals we do form those bonds. The issue is as simple as money brings with it choice and we often take the easier choice of avoiding others.
I want to propose we allow people to contribute to their local communities via labor and engagement as an alternative to paying part of their taxes -- at a sufficiently reduced rate to make it at least somewhat appealing. Sure it's going to be a net cost to have bob the amateur trying to fill a pothole or install the playground but I do think a good liberal government ought to be willing to subsidize desierable activities whether it be socially or economically desierable -- but if you find out that the lady who has taken charge of your local community contribution ring is awful you can still just decide to pay the money instead.
There is reasonably decent evidence that we evolved to cooperate in order to hunt. That is operationalized by having certain reactions to working on common projects with people even if the reason it was favored was because it increased reproduction.
My personal take on why people don't go off to small tight-knit communities with values that reflect their own is mainly not because of money so much as a sense of meaning. Imagine, for example, that 20 years from now AI is so productive that if you wanted to go off in the wilderness and live with whatever values you had in a small community, you could do that and bring some robots with you to provide everything you need. I still don't think people are going to do that, but I still think people will complain about the general culture of the world, maybe for two reasons. For one, we're biased to complain about the current way of the world than to complain about the alternatives because by definition we aren't in any alternatives. Secondly, and admittedly this might just be true for me, I feel like there's a sense in which we care about humanity as a whole. Even though we might not care to donate to people across the globe who could clearly benefit, and we might not concern ourselves with discussions that are essential for humanity but with little impact on our own lives, we still feel a purpose in being part of a bigger team. People get excited when their sports team wins and sad when they lose. Even if they're able to immigrate they care about their country's impact and standing. Even if none of us will be around 200 years from now, many are hopeful that we'll be exploring the solar system with colonies. Of course, you could make the argument that all of these feelings stem from a biological incentive which is inherently selfish and familial, but that doesn't change the fact that we still feel these ways. So my overall take is that even though some people want tight-knit independent communities, and the barrier for some is money, for the vast majority of people even if they complain about the way things are they don't really want to be in some isolated community even if they could be. I for sure don't.
I like the optimistic take on post-AI society, and I even find it moderately plausible. Currently, we're mostly all wage slaves of one kind or another. Maybe once all that busywork is being taken care of by AI, we'll revert to a futuristic version of the apocryphal hunter-gatherer society, where you fill your time by hanging out with your tribe, napping, and having sex. I suppose that's also basically how Iain Banks's Culture series works, when you get down to it.
I also think this will basically address the fertility issue. Once we don't have so much annoying work to do and have more money at our disposal, having lots of kids will be a more popular lifestyle. We'll all become more like the rich are now, with their high fertility rate.
I tend to assume that generational wealth is overrated, given all the wastrels it seems to produce, but now I'm wondering if that's wrong. Maybe those people just have personality disorders, and otherwise a life of leisure is great. Hmm, something to ponder, and/or experience for myself in a few years.
The example of the Mormons is a good one, but in more ways than “get lots of people of the same religion together in one place”. That model was certainly true of the early church, but the real innovation of modern Mormonism is exporting the same community-building model to all four corners of the earth. A common experience for Latter-day Saints traveling abroad is to be struck by how nearly identical the Sunday experience is whether in Africa, America, or Asia. The upshot of the Church’s system of social organization is that it is effortless for a Latter-day Saint person to slot into a new community wherever they go, and it is likewise easy for the community to sustain itself as individuals naturally come and go while they pursue their secular lives and careers. That kind of physical location independence goes a long way towards solving the practical problems highlighted in the post.
This is an argument for abundance -- in this model, the less pressure people are under to earn a living or cope with poverty, the more they'll cluster into communities that provide them with meaning.
Do we see this in our society now? Arguably it applies to college kids to some extent. Arguably retirees are not a counter-example because they've been deformed by a lifetime of work, plus maybe they spend a lot of time at church or other meaning building.
What other groups exist today that aren't under financial pressure, so they can serve as tests of this hypothesis?
I think it's about economic integration *and social integration*. We're bound together by much more than what we want from our communities and our need for grub. There are laws about crime and taxation that regulate our everyday lives, we generally rely on services like school and daycare, there are hospitals and healthcare centers, there are death certificates and wills and burials.
These countless social norms, both formal and informal, are so interconnected by whatever flimsy design and happenstance that it's that once you're socialized into them, it's incredibly difficult to exist without them. I think this is why The Amish are 10/10: they represent generations of people who haven't been socialized within the mainstream social context.
I think forming tightly-knit communities is not a solution to spiritual void after AI takes out everything. Because I believe any person with a shred of laziness will rather take free money and goods than try to make everything by themselves. So the supposed 'freedom' from such void does not exist for them.
This is an argument for abundance -- in this model, the less pressure people are under to earn a living or cope with poverty, the more they'll cluster into communities that provide them with meaning.
Do we see this in our society now? Arguably it applies to college kids to some extent. Arguably retirees are not a counter-example because they've been deformed by a lifetime of work, plus maybe they spend a lot of time at church or other meaning building.
What other groups exist today that aren't under financial pressure, so they can serve as tests of this hypothesis?
I disagree that the main driving force is economics. It's commitment. To join a community, you need to let that be a large part of your identity and make many sacrifices. I consider myself sort of a rationalist (in values and outlook), but I don't live in the Bay Area because I have my family, my wife, my language, many friends (and my current job) in Israel and that's where they want to stay. To join the community fully, I'd have to give up on all those other things. It's not about money, I can get a higher paying job in the Bay. In fact, Israel sounds closer to my community than rationalism, in the sense that I meet mostly people within it, identify as one, marry within it, and my kids will grow up as members.
It's even more extreme than a community - many couples have long distance relationships because they have different careers/schools/constraints that are less important to them than living with their spouse (for a time). And this is just two people! Getting a larger group to give up all those other things takes much more commitment. What prevents communities is individualism and diverse preferences.
"Why don’t YIMBYs live in dense walkable towns sprung up from the forests of Vermont?" I'm intentionally missing the greater point of the article here but Vermont has some of the strictest development laws on the books, including a lengthy state-level review process that kicks in at any housing development with over ten units (among other things) and a public comment period that gives neighboring landowners very large leverage over proposals- leading to a "vetocracy" of sorts. Housing stock is being built at under half the rate of what it needs to in order to combat one of the nation's worst homelessness crises. YIMBYsteaders would be better off picking a different state!
The other 'mysterious force' that I've identified as making this kind of liberalism-substrated patchwork less tractable is that people have friends and family they want to stay in contact with... but their ideologies only overlap in parts.
The medieval peasants 'solved' this by having very cliquey social graphs (because most couldn't practically know distant people) which both homogenises by repeated interaction and also minimises the number of folks with strong ties to different cliques.
You can't get back there from where we are, with the people alive now, without transitioning through a period where many people starkly cut out a majority of their social circles, to focus on a single centre. Most people don't want to do that! Many are happier with the compromise maintaining contact with several enriching subcultures/subcommunities. The diminishing returns on marginal community-deepness means most people don't want to go 'all in' (and the few that do can, often including moving house/state/country).
The Amish memeplex keeps their small subculture somewhat stably resilient to this force by mostly precluding mixing with outsiders. Some other groups do the same - in fact it's one classic characteristic of cults (among many), which are another class of 'success stories' here.
Incidentally, this wouldn't be a problem if we lived in a sufficiently hyperbolic geometry. Then everyone could live next door to *all* their friends, even if the friend graph was (as today) quite messy. Internet, multimedia calls, and VR move in that direction.
Even if I could find people who'd live in Tech Hunter Gatherer Paradise 2.0 and all my friends are onboard (lmao) a lot of _their_ friends need a 2 hour drive to visit. Add in families, children and the need for their schooling, the entire separate social graph of the children themselves... yeah, secession doesn't work that well. I think the most successful model is living a bit on the fringe - but once everyone tries that you just get a suburb, its own special circle of hell.
This is really dumb AF (and I mean F***uyama, not Scott).
Communities, moral orders, and networks of cooperation where people can purely voluntarily opt in or out, are never going to last, because these things impose costs, and those people and groups who pay the cost are going to be outcompeted by those who don't. This is why strong communities, institutions of cooperation etc., need to be backed up and enforced by the state.
Building a community is hard work, which is also hard to gain from (it's a commons, with freeriding etc showing up). Also requires skills not many posses, mainly around communication and navigating interpersonal dynamics. There are many antipatterns and things to navigate around.
Ex: I visited a friend, who was living in a group house. They had 6 ppl in total, 2 of them a couple. The couple lived on the upper floor, with one other person. The other three on the bottom floor. There was two kitchens, one on each floor.
I predicted the group dynamics shaped by this arrangement without hearing about it, just knowing that couples often turn inwards (especially if things go tense - self-reinforcing), and that double kitchens caused two aggregation points (where people meet naturally)
I think learning these things and investing into maintenance is too high a threshold, when people are used to things being convenient.
So Scott Alexander and Fukuyama are saying liberalism does not mean alienated atomic individualism, obviously we want community, but not one enforced community: liberalism provides a platform for many communities.
Let me point out the only country in which liberalism as a platform of communities can work is the US, as it was designed as a platform for 13 communities from day 1, with different religions, culture, sometimes language, and to be fair not much trust in each other. And then developed in this direction, think Utah as a Mormon community-state installed on the Federal platform.
So what America has and had was liberalism on the Federal level - no official language, no federal establishment of religion. Yet a state like Utah could establish Mormon religion (more or less).
Americans rarely notice it, because if Mormon rule is not your thing, you can just choose to not live in Utah. California is a cooler place anyway, right? But if you are Polish, and Catholic rules chafe you, should you not live in Poland, should you abandon your entire culture and language space and patriotism? Now that is much harder...
So that whole idea cannot work for European countries with official languages i.e. officially dominant ethnic groups and more or less officially dominant religions.
So it seems our options in Europe are either one community or no community, Hitler or Bowling Alone, this is why we are chafing and so unsure, as we want neither.
(One community loosely understood, historic communities like South German Catholicism, North German Protestantism ofcoz workable. The issue is this system does not really allow new communities.)
THIS is our huge dilemma in Europe! We want neither Hitler or Bowling Alone, but what is the third option? The platform thing does not seem to work as these countries were not designed as a contract between communities like the US was.
Furthermore, Europe is imitating American liberalism since 1945 **and we did notice Americans only ever meant liberalism on the federal level only!**
Utah is not a liberal platform of communities, it is one Mormon community. But we Europeans do not notice that, simply because Utah does not have a foreign policy, ambassadors, diplomacy (missionaries do not count, they are apolitical), only the FedGov has. Utah probably has a press, but we never read it! We read "federal" press like the NYT. And so on.
Once we in Europe notice this, i.e. that American liberalism does not require Utah to be a platform of communities, and once we also notice Poland or Denmark are more like Utah than they are like America, American federal-liberalism does not apply here, and thus one-community seems inevitable, though hopefully not Hitler-like.
(Or at best, historic communities, but not new ones.)
Generation Identity, though now largely defunct, evolved into a half-Islamophobic, half-Neo-Nazi movement in Europe, but if you read the original manifesto, the original theme was more anti-globalist. Like, you look at a building, and you cannot tell from the architecture in which country, region, city you are. Where is local culture? And that was a good question. In the beginning they were less xeno-hateful, and more about opposing "global slop", and in favour of local identities. Like, you know, Utah is, too.
All this seems to imply to me, that both our options in Europe, one-community or no-community, are both bad, and the right option, the platform of communities is not workable.
And once European people get too fed up with both "global slop" and alienated atomistic individualism, the lack of community, a dreadful enforced one-communitism might come inevitably, and with that intolerance, aggressive nationalist populism, exclusion (hopefully not genocidal-Hitler level) and so on.
A potential counter-argument: Hungary is the most illiberal country in Europe and even the most illiberal people there have no problem with the Krishna Valley (I know, I follow the press): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krishna_valley
So new communities can happen, even in an illiberal space? The thing is the Krishna folks are nearly invisible. They do not hold Krishna Prides through the streets of the capitol like how LGBTQ people do. They do not try to get into the media. They avoid trying to influence the mainstream culture. They are withdrawn from the world. Also, although a very different tradition, their lifestyle is still traditional. As in, "oldschool", monks and married couples, milking cows and suchlike. So like they don't hold orgies, for example, as LGBTQ people sometimes do, which would piss off conservatives. I think conservatives appreciate that culture, because of its oldschoolness and modesty (not trying to influence the mainstream). So the Krishna Valley in Hungary is like the Amish in the US.
So in these countries new communities can work but only within clear constraints.
I think a bigger factor is that most people don’t live out their lives in a way that optimized for everything they care about or even the things they care about most. I know daily exercise and limiting the amount of time I spend on YouTube is guaranteed to bring me closer to my ideal life than not doing those things but I still struggle to make those changes. Having to actively move and form a community with people instead of just floating around where ever you already are and what you’re use to is probably way beyond what people who struggle to clean their room or text back their friend they want to talk can even start to consider let alone know is an option. That’s why I hope the future (singularity or not) has a heavy emphasis on helping sentient beings live in a way more optimized for the terminal values and desires instead of just letting them trend to habits where their life and potential wastes away.
I became a Mormon last year and love it. The way its organized is genius. The people are nice. I think the fact that it requires a lot of time and sacrifice ends up filtering out a lot of people who might drag the group down. My husband says its the religion of the try-hards and he isnt wrong. I really like that.
Its so sad to me that most people dont have something like this. Its amazing how much a community thats tight knit dramatically increases the quality of your life.
I already commented on this post but after I did that I added another layer to my self portrait and realized I should comment again.
A year ago I was an agnostic rationalist that was desperate for a community. After reading the sequences and codex I realized that I believed in God and figured I should find a religious community. I got heavily into judaism because I hate evangelicals and think the Trinity is insane nonsense so I figured I had nowhere else to go.
Leading up to Rosh Hashana I was taking conversion classes for judaism and reading everything I could get my hands on so that I could plunge myself and hopefully my family into a culture. Some Mormon missionaries knocked on my door and I turned them away went back to my chores and then went back outside to give them my number. I figured that out of all the people in my life that showed integrity it was basically just Mormons and Jews so I might as well hear what the Mormons had to say.
Long story short I ended up becoming a Mormon. Im incredibly grateful that I did this because 5 months after my son and I were baptized I began to draw. I was always an art kid but when I went to college I developed a massive art block and literally never picked up a pencil.
Anyways, Im no longer depressed, my 4 kids are thriving and I am pursuing my lifelong passion again all thanks to mormonism. I get that Joesph Smiths story sounds ridiculous but I dont find it anymore ridiculous than any other religious truth claims. Weirdly enough Smith appears to truly have believed he was a prophet and at the very least actually dictated the book of mormon so I figure he was either bipolar or a prophet and I choose to believe he was a prophet.
Did you know that Mormons are transhumanists? Joesph taught that God was once a man who made himself into the being we call God the Father. Mormons dont believe in the Trinity or hand wave away contradictions by claiming some things must remain "mysterious" or "unknowable" because us mere humans dont have the right "framing". Smith and Brigham Young (the father of the mainstream Mormon Church) preached that God would one day become understandable and that everyone could achieve that knowledge as long as they continued to believe and follow Gods commandments.
There is also no real eternal damnation in mormonism thanks to their understanding of the atonement. Yes, there are a select few that are cast off to sheol (cut off from God) but they are expected have numbers that can be counted on two hands. Mormons believe in tiers of heaven and the biggest sinners get to live forever watching whatever depraved porn they want all while doing their favorite drugs. They dont get a body but they get to live in something much lile cyberspace and enjoy everything they wish to enjoy.
Mormons that are faithful and obedient are rewarded with the ability to create new souls (referred to as intelligences in our scripture) and eternally progress after death.
I could talk about the faith from dawn until dusk every day of my life because I am ridiculously happy, my children are happy, my partner is happy and I am flourishing in a way that I thought impossible all thanks to joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
I literally drew every day of my life until I was 21 and never even picked up a pencil until march 7th 2025 and every since then I have barely gone a day without drawing or painting. I am networking with local galleries, learning new mediums, smiling myself to sleep every single day.
Get off you phone. Join a community. If you love God and thing the Trinity is insane join the mormons.
I don’t think it all comes down to economics. Arguably the issue is that our legal system protects liberty among individuals, not groups.
An all white community is illegal. Discrimination on the basis of religion is illegal.
Let’s say a group of Muslims builds a neighborhood for themselves. Then one neighbor converts to Buddhism. There is no legal mechanism to evict the Buddhist and keep the community exclusively Muslim.
And in the age of global inter connectivity, people are far more likely to convert from the ideology they were raised in to something else. The Amish likely have an advantage in preserving their community by reducing exposure to external ideologies.
One other factor is that many of the largest and most successful ideologies (Christianity, Islam, Communism) are evangelical in nature. An inherent feature of these belief systems is expansion and conversion. Their adherents (of which I am one) will not be satisfied by simply associating with likeminded individuals, but will instead seek to change hearts and minds. They will not simply leave other groups to their own devices due to a moral obligation to bring people into their group for their own sake.
Rationalism interests me, especially to the extent that it can create a framework to improve the world through thought. How does one who lives outside the Bay Area partake?
Maybe it's money, maybe it's the Central Paradox of Openness. I have spent decades in various Open movements - Open Science, Open Access, Open Source, etc - and I think you could call Liberalism Open Politics. Communities are defined not by what they include, but by what they exclude. The Amish exclude modernity, the Libertarians exclude laws promoting the common good, Rationalists exclude decouplers. Liberalism doesn't exclude anything (they're only intolerant of intolerance), so there's no bounds that define the community. When an Open whatever is really small, it's a community because what's excluded are people who have heard about it. As it grows, anyone can be a part because the whole point of Open is to be inclusive (note the similarly to the ever expanding acronym used to describe Open Sexuality) and it ceases to be a community. The paradox is in trying to be open to everything, you become nothing (or get hollowed out and worn like a skin by Socialism).
So I think what's missing isn't so much money but courage - the courage to say not only "this is who we are" but "this is who we aren't". May a thousand liberal, but distinct and non-overlapping, communities bloom.
It isn't liberalism that opposes small, tight knit communities. It's individual rights and freedom. Small, semi-sufficient communities are infamous for conformity, and have been for millenia. There's a reason people move to the cities.
But across the span of the 20th century the sense of American community was pretty stable. People expressed their national pride through their church, their school, and their local newspapers. What happened? It wasn't "Liberalism", which hasn't changed much in doctrine since the New Deal and the commodification of the Counter-Culture. Technology was part of it: the Algorithm. But I think a larger part was the economic transformation brought about by economic globalism. Starting in the 1980's, local businesses, and therefore local employers, face competition and challenges that no one had to face before. The results have not been pretty.
In America, small local communities are often anchored by a single large employer--often a factory or a corporate headquarters. Global competitive pressure has forced a lot of these to close or move away, leaving a hollowed out community behind. This has hit rural whites more than any other population (rural people of color face tremendous unique challenges, but that didn't start with globalization, and isn't new). This is where the Opioid epidemic came from.
As a card carrying woke liberal pinko, I would throw deregulation in there too. "Creative Destruction" hasn't destroyed things in equal measure across the US. Some people ended up enjoying the benefits more than others (ie, the highly educated), and others a disproportionate proportion of the costs (everyone else).
The solution isn't more of what caused the problem in the first place.
I’m not sure the fact that only 10% of society joins tight-knit is contra the spirit of fukuyama’s thesis. I think it’s the feature. I think you have two levels: society-wide, and community. Flirting with the old gods is flirting with society wide organizing around those old values. In liberalism, the fact that, given the freedom to join, hardly anyone does, is the Point.
I'm part of the so-called "serious Christianity" type of community. And it's pretty great, but yeah, we don't have the time or resources to fulfil some of our wildest ambitions. We'd love to plant a Christian school and teach classical Christian education. We'd love to get more serious about catechesis of adults too. We have all these big ideas and visions for what we want.
But we all have full time jobs, limited budgets and volunteers. Everything we do is constrained by the current order of things. Give us a post work society with UBI and we can live our dreams and establish exactly the kind of community that we want to have.
Economics is one barrier, but I think this article doesn’t fully appreciate the difficulty of cultural entrepreneurship. Most people in the US don’t want to be Amish or Ultra-Orthodox Jews: yes, there’s strong community, but it’s at the cost of a bunch of rituals and beliefs that most Americans want no part of. For someone to take a look at mainstream culture and come up with an alternative, they need to invent:
* something rich and complex enough to build a community around
* something distinct enough that there are clear outgroup/ingroup differentiators — without some amount of costly signal, it’s too hard to form enough of an external membrane with the rest of society
* something cool, that speaks to a need / desire that peers want — switching community is a life-altering decision so there needs to be some real pull
Then, once invented, it needs to be proselytized, and get past the vulnerable startup stage to achieve critical mass.
I think very very few people are up for this. Rationalism is a great example of a success story, and honestly if it weren’t for HPMOR being a breakout hit, I suspect it wouldn’t have gotten enough traction
If it's just economics, then the costs of not incentivizing community (depression, anxiety, burnout, suicide, and all the unhealthy behaviors like addictions, smoking, drinking, being sedentary and eating bad) should be enough that societies have to act. In Public Health there's a growing consensus on social prescribing, where your GP or other specialists can help you find communities. Yet some kind of recommender service with good coverage is missing, although some are gaining traction
“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
What looks like starting from a blank slate to outsiders often turns out to be a dense web of unwritten rules ---and they're enforced, just not in ways you planned for.
Sounds like they managed to find tight-knit communities!
Have you ever been to a Great Plains town? That’s basically what they already are.
That's different though, those are simply the last people _left_.
(I've spend a fair amount of time in Midwestern farm-belt towns during the past decade-plus due to my work.) The combination of modern mechanized agriculture (no farm workers needed, literally one farmer with modern equipment can do 1,000 acres from planting to harvest now and still have plenty of time for Facebooking), plus so many of the young people splitting for a metro at the first opportunity, has been hollowing out the rural Midwest for a couple of generations now.
You drive around now and there are these half-ghost towns everywhere, that peaked at 5,000 or 10,000 people in 1960 or 1980 or whatever and today they're at one-third that many and still sliding. Every farm-county mayor or county exec or school board president or VFD chief I meet is of retirement age "because there's nobody else left to do it". They all drive to St. Louis or the Twin Cities or Chicago to visit the grandkids.
My wife comes from a Great Plains town that's flipped from ~75% white to majority Latino in 20 years.
Her grandpa (raised in the town's pioneer lore) once sincerely asked me why the Mexicans settled there instead of building their own town. I didn't have a good answer lol.
If I had to hazard a guess: it's easier to reuse existing infrastructure than to build everything from scratch.
So if you are strapped for cash and want to settle somewhere cheap to lead a self-sufficient life, declining regions are probably your best bet to be able to bootstrap your attempt. If similarly minded people start doing that in numbers you are pretty likely to get this exact outcome ...
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
> Do they have to live together? Plenty of strong churches draw people from a broader community.
Really? I have trouble believing that there are strong churches whose parishioners don't live together.
Do they have to live in one contiguous block, with no neighbors who don't attend the same church? No.
Can they be scattered across several different neighborhoods of the same city? No.
The point of the church is that it defines the people you interact with. If the other people attending have no presence in your daily life, there is no point in you attending that church.
I went to a strong church whose parishioners don't live together. About 20 members came consistently, more came irregularly, mainly from the closest two towns but some from 20 miles away. Attending 3x per week + summer camp was plenty enough to form strong bonds.
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.
Furries often live together on the roommate level (though less often on the neighborhood level, that I'm aware of).
Those conventions are generally run by members of local furry communities organizing at a city or region level, and local furry communities often have other smaller events aimed at locals ("furmeets").
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?
There may be an element of that, but I don't think either autism or superstimulus of male characteristics are the whole story. In polls, only about 10% of furries report being autistic- quite a lot higher than the general population, but not close to a majority. Also, only about 20% of furries actually identify as gay- the other 60% who are neither straight or gay are bisexual, pansexual or asexual.
Contrary to the popular image, I don't think the community is primarily organized around a particular fetish. It's definitely very unusually open about kinks, but I think only a slim majority report having an anthropomorphic animal fetish- almost as common in the community are fetishes around transformation, hypnosis, pregnancy, etc. More universal to the community than the anthro fetish, and more central to what they actually spend time doing and making seems to be a shared, deeply-felt fantasy of being an anthropomorphic animal.
If I had to guess, I'd say there's probably some unknown biological thing- maybe a cluster of genes, or some unusual way a brain can develop, or some epigenetic thing- that occurs mostly in males and manifests in a variety of different ways; an increased risk of autism, an increased likelihood of being gay or having a paraphilia unrelated to the more common dominance/submission paraphilias, a deep interest in fictional worlds, and often a deep desire to be something else- a different gender, species, etc.
I think people usually join the furry community not because it caters to any one interest, but because they notice that people in the community share a cluster of unusual personality traits with them- and they're mostly male because that cluster tends to develop in males for inscrutable biological reasons.
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.
Doesn’t this basically mean the only options people have are 1) mainstream liberal society, and 2) communism? Sure I guess you can have Christian communism or white communism or whatever, but if, as I think is true, capitalism is a vastly superior economic system, then wedding profit-seeking by law to mainstream liberal norms effectively dooms nearly sll alternative communities. To really have viable alternatives, it needs to be possible to have profitable businesses within discriminatory communities.
Do you really think economic systems or communities residing inside them just have a single big switch on them somewhere where one setting is "communism" and the other is "capitalism"? There are multiple axes and gradients to any such system.
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.
Coops are pretty common in NYC.
>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.
The way this is accomplished is by a combination of rules that are differentially beneficial for Orthodox Jews, and providing amenities that they care about and will pay for - not active discrimination.
For example, when living near DC, we paid significantly more for an apartment that had a kosher kitchen, while someone not religious will actually pay less for an apartment with lots of space taken up by extra unnecessary items - two dishwashers, two sinks, room to store at least 3 sets of dishes, etc. I also paid more for proximity to a synagogue, a building that does not get locked on Saturdays (but is locked the rest of the week,) and one where my religious Jewish neighbors' kids and mine play together in the hallway while we nap on Saturday afternoons.
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.
I recently came across an example: Christ's Household of Faith in Saint Paul MN, where the members live in church-owned and assigned housing. You'd never know there was a cult there just from looking around the neighborhood.
Frankly quite absurd to run into a mention of this here, but I actually grew up in this specific commune and would love to answer questions about it!
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?
I can list some of favorite speakers in the past couple of years while I’ve been a member. First and foremost is one of the most regular, with half a dozen talks, that being Kim Stanley Robinson, Sci Fi and Climate fiction writer. Sara Imari Walker just gave a brilliant talk on Assembly Theory recently, Speculative Futures by Johanna Hoffman, Seeds of a Good Anthropocene by Elena Bennett, and another similar talk by David Grinspoon stood out in my memory as excellent and inspiring. I’ve missed many I wish I could have attended, but most are available on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/c/longnow
Mormons feels inaccurate here, practically everyone works a secular job, including the massive local lay clergy. Even leaders of a dozen congregations quite often work a full time normal secular job. Yes, even in Utah. Maybe this comparison made sense 50 years ago (20-30 if you're less charitable), but not any more. Unless you meant to write something less strong about "Serious Christians", almost the same words apply (commonalities in friend groups, etc)
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.
Eh, show some creativity. It's easy to work around that.
Eg you could leave some money in escrow with a trusted third party (like a lawyer or notary whatever) and have them hand over the money to the assistant in case you try to pull such shenanigans and the assistant stays firm.
And that's just one mitigation strategy I came up with at the top of my hat. I'm sure, there's much better ways, if you give it a good think.
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.
Exactly. Having a smartphone is a necessity in modern life whether you want one or not.
As another example, my apartment building just moved from coin-operated laundry machines to a mobile-app based payment system.
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?
I think its a mistake to assume that our revealed preference is better for us. Addiction very clearly breaks this model, and I think many (most?) of us are addicted to our phones.
I agree with you, I had a thought and immediately pointed out its flaws. However I still find it interesting to look at it through a Neo-Confucian idea - the union of action and knowledge. Action is derived from knowledge; inaction indicates either perfect knowledge that produces inaction, or imperfect knowledge that impedes action.
Addiction is clearly the latter, but as you point out it is hard to distinguish the former. "Not throwing away my phone" could be a reflection of a robust understanding of its benefits, or a reflection of a poor understanding of its drawbacks.
Not making any claims, but asking a few questions about how people act in response to claims of "something being good for you". We all know we don't always need those claims, even if we believe them.
*heed those claims
You can't use revealed preference to understand things with network effects.
We could all individually want to ditch our phones, but there's no coordinating mechanism (other than legislation, which operates on way too long a time scale to be useful here) to break the vicious cycle of "phones are ubiquitous, so society gets organized around everyone always having a phone, so you have no choice but to have a phone".
There've been surveys of teenagers that show that teens want to use Instagram less (and wish their friends would use Instagram less, so that using Instagram wouldn't be a requirement for participating in social life) but they have no mechanism to get their friends to actually use Instagram less, and so everyone is stuck in a shitty heavy-Instagram-use equilibrium.
No you wouldn't because the phone makes a lot of things convenient, and in many cases is the requirement to participate in many things at all. Believe me, I tried.
Going full Amish doesn't solve your problems unless you literally live among the Amish.
The problem with phones and the Internet is, you wouldn't be overall better without them, not when these things are more and more vital to stuff like banking or taxes or job hunting or any kind of research work. But they are also vehicles for all sorts of terrible habits. The issue is how hard it is to filter one thing from the other.
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.
money would definitely help, because there's a lot of people who kind of feel the draw of community, but they are pretty realistic about their needs and chances, and simply monetary reality pushes them further apart.
for example I recently moved from an apartment into a bigger one (due to the leaseholder giving us notice because of tax reasons he's getting rid of the lease, and even though we wanted to take over the long-term lease the owner said nope, they want to do short-term ones with that unit), so after a brief period of crisis and chaos (how to find an apartment, move, while we had summer plans and plane tickets) we find a nice place through friends. great!
but we initially moved to that smaller place because already 2 units were occupied by our friends!
and we discussed buying land and building a multi-unit house, but ... money!
of course in the end this comes down society/culture. and it's not great that nowadays even in the oh so radical, dense, car-free walkable places the only thing we got is speedbumps and an endless sprawl of ugly small 5-8 story buildings ... (or in China 20-30 story buildings in surrounded by endless highways https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/chinese-towers-and-american-blocks )
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.
if there's some competition/selection going on (for example broader society provides some support to people while they're between communities) then the liberal ones can probably grow a bit bigger, so the median member would just be in those.
scarcity breeds very hard problems, and to solve those you need to make sacrifices, that in turn requires "selflessness" (through some reflective higher-order phenomena, eg. loyalty to your family, tribe, ideology, nation, delayed gratification, investment into something bigger) or selfishness (oppressing others so you can exploit them, etc.)
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.
But the paradox of this is that it goes from "I am normal, therefore I can find other normal people like me very easily" to actually never doing that, or never picking any of them to build truly strong bonds with. Having a single common point to build on (even e.g. being fellow countrymen living as immigrants) is a great seed to precipitate that crystallisation.
Yeah, I suppose the underlying issue here is that the modern concept of "normal" is itself dysfunctional/inadequate. It's pretty much common knowledge nowadays that we're at the height of a "crisis of meaning" of some kind or another, there are no workable life scripts, internet has made everybody crazy, etc. So, while many deviations from this "normal" lead you even further into crazy town, people who are doing better also get there by doing something differently.
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.
>"It's kinda like the prisoner's dilemma."
Possibly more like stag hunt than prisoner's dilemma, which would be good since – unlike in PD – the best outcome in SH is also an equilibrium.
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.
> The biggest impediment to community isn't the liberal world order, it's that video games have gotten really really good.
SMBC made a comic of that.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=4469
I'm more surprised that Scott's got a working rationalist community than that most people don't have one. Community takes sacrifice, and it's...easier not to, even if you want the benefits.
>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.
Good point, reminds a lot about subcultures in general. Obsessive people make a scene that attracts more casual fans. Eventually as the scene grows charismatic sociopaths can come in and attract the casual fans and take over the movement.
A good write up is here: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
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.
German is in that weird position where it has a tradition of building noun terms from simpler terms, in a manner that suggests it could freely do this to represent any idea at all, only to have used that approach to build a term for the idea that it should not be able to.
ETA: It makes some sense that this would be the Sprach from which Gödel would arise.
Well, I've been thinking along the lines that after the horrors of WW2 Germans would be among the last people to openly question the ambiguously strong god of Liberalism.
Whether they question it or not, it's a near-certainty that they would at least devise a word for it!
I mean, about a quarter (I guess these days more like a fifth or a sixth or so) of Germans spent the formative 45 years after WWII in a nonliberal order, and drew very different lessons from WW2. That side is where most of the sympathy for nonliberal social orders comes from today.
Sure, but those critics generally aren't of the intellectual sort, they're rather opportunistic and nihilistic.
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 don't know about LW meetups, but I've seen DSL meetups decline significantly over time.
A lot of the people that I used to see in the New York rationalist meetups years ago have since moved to the Bay Area, but as far as I know there are still meetups in NYC...
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.).
well, they spend a lot of money on funding games, which leads to more games, which then can reach more people and turn them into gamers, yeey :)
yes, of course it's not like the Amish (and there are about 400K of them), but there are millions of gamers, with some serious real world influence (well, let's see where the Stop Killing Games EU citizens' initiative thing goes)
sure, sure, they're a bunch of subcultures in a big group (ranging from anyone who plays too much Candy Crush on their phone to hardcore gamers watching esports or whatever), and somewhere there are the "gamer bros" and/or 4chan/gamergate idiots. (the classic gatekeepers, who frowned upon cosplayers that spent more time on their costume than playing video games, thereby "trying to police" gamer spaces, keeping casuals and normies out.)
while this wouldn't be that interesting in itself, where this comes back to the "strong gods" is that these aggressive gamers trying to keep gaming "pure" led to very anti-inclusive groups, that then had nowhere to go except right into some kind of hyperindividualist purity culture (guns, cars, libertarianism, PewDiePie flirting with every kind of repugnant ideology while having 100M+ subscribers)
... so "you are the main character" individualistic entertainment breeds individualism that then threatens liberalism? or it's the other way around, and gamers are just so weak that the rise of illiberalism took them too, since they are just a bunch of communityless weak-social-skills pussies?
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.
> If anything I wish the government gave the 'trying not to be a burden' people more!
Given that they definitionally won't seek it out themselves, this seems like a clear argument for UBI. If everyone gets an automatic subsistence-level income, negligent jackasses can be slapped with fines when they inevitably misbehave overtly, with no wiggling out of it by insolvency, while "didn't want to be a bother" types, who clean up their own messes when possible, will basically always have enough liquidity to hire competent professionals (plumbers, electricians, doctors, whatever) when necessary.
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!
It's possible that your perspective on this is affected by the false consensus effect.
Survey data does indicate that there is a crisis of community, especially among men. For example, the percentage of men reporting six or more close friends has dropped from 55% to 27%. The percentage of time spent with friends has dropped by two-thirds over the last two decades. Membership in a wide range of civic organizations has dropped. And so on.
That all sounds lovely, but are the members reproducing?
How did you get into it
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."
That post is paywalled, but there's a version by the author on slate for free btw for anyone else who went looking https://slate.com/life/2024/11/parenting-advice-friends-loneliness-village.html
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
Exactly this I live in Pakistan a country where the social fabric is overtly kinship based, in tight knit communities you can forget about individuality and a sense of personal space it's pretty much non existent esp in rural areas and if that wasn't enough jealously and other people being way more invested in your personal life and what you do is thought of as some normal occurance. At times in tight knit communities you are not serving yourself but whatever custom is the norm.
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've also witnessed this in Africa and the West. I find the Western method exhausting - you have to tiptoe around young children even to prevent bad behavior affecting your child, and usually have to do it through their parents, which also forces the parents to be around, increasing the burden of childrearing.
I think the African version requires some amount of shared values, but mostly a more chill attitude towards discipline and childrearing in general, not to panic when someone did something not precisely in your spirit to your child.
I wonder how far this is due to the Western belief in blank-slatism. If you tell people that parenting style is the key determinant of whether a child grows up to be the next Einstein or the next Jack the Ripper, of course a lot of parents are going to become extremely neurotic about how their kids are raised.
I think CHH overshoots her point. If you have a friend group of 5 kids, each kid spends the afternoon/evening at another kid's house 4 days a week, then everyone benefits but nobody is receiving "free" childcare. It's just a more efficient system. It's also not a "village" in the sense that, barring major neglect, any of the 5 families needs to be too judgemental of the others. Same with "I pick you up at the airport and you'll do the same", more efficient than forking 40$ for Uber each time. Help moving is more efficient than everyone renting u-hauls and getting ernia by doing everything themselves etc.
People don't want a village, true, but they don't just want free, unreciprocated favors either. They want a friend group, which obviously makes people happy in and of itself, and also has some obvious material advantages.
The CHH article is paywalled. :(
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.
100%. I do have a tight circle of LGBTQ friends. I'm also part of a tight group of friends from a church I attended a couple decades ago, a rationalist community, a large and very active gaming group, a loose but mutually helpful neighborhood association, plus coworkers with whom I get along well, and other friends and family.
What's the supposed value that a single tight knit community is supposed to provide? My liberal society lets me mix and match smaller communities according to my interests, and it lets me easily maintain connections with people even if I later leave the community. No single tight knit community can match that!
I don't think this is a bait-and-switch, and I stand by my reading of Fukuyama. Elsewhere in his article, he says:
>> "Moral judgments are in fact what create human community. Rather than being infinitely open to other points of view, many people prefer to live in closed societies built around shared beliefs and passions...One can build a community around shared interests—that’s what a for-profit corporation is about—but the strongest communities are built around deeply-held beliefs. "
I think the highlighting of "moral judgments", "not being infinitely open to other points of view", and "built around deeply-held beliefs" are clearly suggesting he means something deeper than just gamers.
But I think this is a matter of degree. LGBT people haven't seceded from mainstream society as thoroughly as the Amish. But they still have spaces where (for example) it's taken as an absolute given that you won't assume people's genders, will respect everyone's chosen pronouns, and various other things that aren't true of regular society. I don't know how many LGBT people would prefer this vs. having some sort of LGBT separatist commune, but I think people at all levels of the secessionism spectrum should be able to find places that cater to their needs.
>I think the highlighting of "moral judgments", "not being infinitely open to other points of view", and "built around deeply-held beliefs" are clearly suggesting he means something deeper than just gamers.
Except that he explicitly says that the need for community can be satisfied without forming a literally separate community, nor by rejecting the broader community:
>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.
>But I think this is a matter of degree. LGBT people haven't seceded from mainstream society as thoroughly as the Amish. But they still have spaces where (for example) it's taken as an absolute given that you won't assume people's genders, will respect everyone's chosen pronouns, and various other things that aren't true of regular society.
No, the difference between the Amish, who form literal communities separate in most ways from the broader society, and LGBTQ people who might or might not sometimes frequent such spaces, is very much a difference of kind, not degree. It is normal to frequent "spaces where (for example) it's taken as an absolute given that you won't [challenge views] that aren't true of regular society." Trekkers do that. Red Sox fans do that. Jews and Muslims in the US do that. Fans of Brutalism probably do that. I go to film meetups where we very much do that. Etc, etc, etc.
I would suggest that, if those people do not secede from mainstream culture, is it is because they don't want to do so, and if they don't want to do so, it is probably because doing so is not necessary to satisfy their need for community. For most people, that is satisfied by hanging out with the gang, whether that gang be fellow sports fans, fellow adherents to religion X, fellow gamers, or fellow LGBTQ folks.
I think his Ukraine example is illustrative, they doubled down on an identity based around democracy, liberalism, tolerance, etc. in response to Russian aggression. Those are deeply held moral beliefs, but it didn't require them becoming a closed society
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.
I think the scarcity of housing and healthcare makes "literally surviving" a very much non-solved problem, even in rich societies.
*Technically* I guess section 8 and medicare are supposed to solve that, but in practice it's very bureaucratic and you might very well fall through the cracks and get homeless or die/remain crippled before either of them intervenes. European public systems are a bit better at making sure you get some care if you need it urgently, but the housing situation is not much better.
Ironically, since housing and healthcare are inflated by Baumol + some regulations only exceedingly rich places would ever humor, this means that the "survivability" of different countries is quickly converging (albeit the middle classes still have wildly different lives depending on where they live)
"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?
Fighting just to fight? Sounds like a boxing or MMA gym...
“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.
The unifying part is accepting that your subjective reality isn't always someone else's objective truth. I guess, put simpler, the "why I'm doing a thing" is different for everyone. Being authentic is believing in something because you actually do and not because someone told you to because their subjective reality says it is right (for them), so it must be universally understood to be that way. A photographer and a mountain climber both interpret the magnificence of, say, Mount Ranier differently, but does that make one of them right and the other wrong? It's still a mountain objectively. Subjective reality is based on our own internal unconscious perspectives, experience, and biases. There is a nuanced grey area between everyone's perspectives.
That is an insightful and most necessary counterpoint. Thank you. You are right to say that the liberal project, in many ways, failed to deliver on its promise of a harmonious, pluralistic society, and instead led to alienation. The crucial question is, why?
I posit that it failed not because its goal was wrong, but because it forgot its own first principles. It became a community defined not by what it stood for (the greater good), but by what it stood against (the old-school conservative view). It spent all of its energy trying to prove the other side's map of the mountain was wrong, instead of doing the harder, more beautiful work of exploring the territory itself.
This is where a Harmonist approach differs in its architecture. It begins with a single, foundational agreement: we must first agree on the shape of the mountain (the Objective Reality), while holding a sacred and non-negotiable respect for each person's unique and valid view of it (their Subjective Experience).
This leads to a different kind of house.
Your comment is right that "a house divided cannot stand." But that assumes the only way to unite a house is to force everyone to paint their room the same color. Harmonism suggests that a house can also be united by a shared, deep respect for the architectural integrity of every room.
The work is not to force conformity. The work is to lead by example, to practice Relentless Inquiry as a core value, and to build a community whose unifying principle is not a shared belief, but a shared and profound curiosity. It is, perhaps, the only foundation strong enough to build a house that is not divided, but beautifully, resiliently, and harmoniously diverse.
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.
As the joke goes, "Amish but for the 90s" is just Germany. It's not too bad, after the 57th fax you need to send you almost stop cursing them. Almost.
But also it doesn't seem that hard, once you have a townful of people who approve? You use your laptop at the office and then *leave it there*. Kids are not tempted by smartphones simply because there are no smartphones, and they realize tiktok is a thing only when their preferences are already pretty set in place.
The hard part, of course, is to get a townful of people to agree!
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
It's exceptional for anything to last 100 years. What's wrong with communities that last a few decades and then fade away? People still found value in their time as a member of the community, which is all we're asking for here.
There’s nothing wrong with a short lived community, but I disagree it’s exceptional to last 100+ years. On a historical time-scale it’s exceedingly ordinary for communities to last many generations. It’s uncommon in the United States of America because economic and cultural forces tend to tear apart any attempt at community-building, which is sort of the point of Scott’s post
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.
That is quite possible yeah. Although for the rural Pennsylvania housing thing I think it's just that they kept buying house in the same community
Which kind of Indian?
I have no idea about the apartment block.
My friend in rural Pennsylvania is South Indian if that matters, but I don't know what kind of Indian the other houses are
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.
Speaking of intermediate groups:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-liberty-of-local-bullies?triedRedirect=true
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.
I don't think it requires too much effort to figure out why Muslims are having a harder time than usual with this. But thanks for the EPIC City link, that's pretty interesting.
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.
I think at least some subset of Amish people have a surprising amount of money. I live in PA and some of the most successful local businesses are Amish-run. Some of them are millionaires, but the way they use their money is, well, very Amish. They buy land and invest in agriculture, and support other Amish businesses, which have a much higher success rate than the national average thanks to all that strong community support from well-heeled family and neighbors. It doesn’t hurt that they’ve been parked on some of the best farmland in America for 300 years. There is absolutely abundance involved in the stability of that model.
> I live in PA and some of the most successful local businesses are Amish-run.
How does that work ? I've seen e.g. Amish cheese being sold at stores and even online, but aren't the Amish prohibited from interacting with the secular world (and in fact electricity in some cases) ? From what I understand, these businesses are fronts, but I'm not sure what the exact relationship between them and actual Amish farmers looks like.
The Amish are absolutely allowed to interact with the secular world when it comes to business (their lifestyle requires it, in fact). The various restrictions they have are to prevent the secular world from interrupting Amish faith, family and community.
Lots of Amish use computers and phones, but only at work, not at home.
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 !
When I was a kid in rural western Canada in the 1970s, a 2-year-old child was killed and eaten by a blackbear in their backyard in my town.
And there have even been a few other cases of them apparently agressively attacking and eating adult humans (ie. not a sow defending cubs).
I agree that blackbears are far less aggressive and dangerous than grizzlies but they are also in much more frequent contact with humans and I have a very very healthy respect for them...
It does happen but as you say it’s rare given the large number of black bears living close to humans. Personally I worry much more about attacks by fellow humans in my medium-sized urban area.
My own most difficult experience with black bears was in Voyageurs NP where a female trashed our camp and dragged our food bag into the brush.
She did make off with the bacon. I have photos of her cubs in a nearby tree watching mama do her grocery run.
Some wrecked gear (and the loss of the bacon) was the worst of it though.
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.
In my part of Canada, where handguns are extremely restricted (basically illegal), if you worked in forestry (as I did), you could apply for permission to carry a side arm. However, the sidearm had to be at least a .357 Magnum or .44 Magnum calibre. All smaller calibres were considered basically useless against bear attacks (we had both grizzlies and blackbears). As the application process for a handgun was complicated and could take up to a year, I ended up just cutting a 12 gauge shotgun down to the minimum allowed length and carrying that with me. At close range a shotgun slug has vastly more energy than even a .44 Magnum, albeit a shotgun (even a sawed off one) is certainly heavier and more cumbersome to carry around in the bush all day...
Obligatory clip from Jackie Brown
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr6eFXNq5Wc&pp=0gcJCfwAo7VqN5tD
The day Joe learned that sometimes a .38 isn't quite enough gun....
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
Thanks for the additional links! I'll need to stew on those for a while and really absorb it, so I don't have anything intelligent to say about them right now other than to express my appreciation. :)
Sorry my comment was ambiguous, by the way, I will try to do better in future.
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.
"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."
while i think this is definitely a cultural pathology of England today, and some other countries, I don't think it's as universal across the North Sea peoples (see e.g. Denmark and their hardline turn against immigration) or across time (were villagers or factory workers in Yorkshire in 1800 really big fans of ethnic self-abolition and outbreeding?) or even universally held in England today, as the passage seems to suggest it would be. Obviously this stuff is contested today, in England and elsewhere, and always has been, even if you think ethnic identity is weaker in England histroically than it ought to be.
In the grand scheme of things the Danish turn against migration is a course correction attempting to prevent the problem that arose due to Danish pathologies spiralling out of control. Whilst it might be radical in comparison to the other WEIRD countries of the 21st century, it isn't at all radical compared to comparable non-WEIRD state initiatives e.g., Chinese pacification of the Uyghurs or Burmese policy against the Rohingya.
You are right though that the point does elide over many layers of complication for rhetorical reasons. "Englishness" is not necessarily the same thing in London high society in 1920, Yorkshire in 1800, or Norwich in 1600. But there is clearly a difference in marriage and kinship patterns that emerges in WEIRD countries (see the book review from two years ago on this blog) from roughly around the 12th century and is fully developed by the 16th/17th centuries, most strongly in the Low Countries and England (especially the Saxon Shore).
I genuinely think that factory workers in Sheffield in 1800 were less insular and tribal compared to the general mass of humanity. London has been a population sink for East Anglia and the East Midlands for a few hundred years at this point, with individual young men and nuclear families migrating from the provinces to the city. Ties were much weaker to the local village or town, people did mix, and they'd have had friends or family who'd got on boats to the New World or been sent to Australia. This is all comparative but can also apply to the Dutch. I hardly doubt they thought about it in the intellectualised terms of "self-abolition", but it seems objectively true that life and expectations were different for a Rajput or Bengali farmer and a Yorkshire labourer, especially in terms of marriage.
The arrow of causality is extremely fuzzy, and that WEIRD review seems to pin it all on the Church, whilst I suspect there is some combination of self-selection for people who'd travel to the furthest outposts of the Eurasian landmass and a sort of Völkerwanderung/Viking memory (whether genetic or cultural) as well. But regardless, the differences are real, and by the 19th century they have become intellectualised, reified, and explicit. Long before Orwell noted that English intellectual elites seemed to despise their own countrymen and country, outside observers like de Tocqueville or Taine noted that the English seemed either embarrassed by, or even happy to criticise, their own institutions.
But sure, I agree there are few if any universals, and that the attitude might not extend to our North Sea neighbours to the same extent, nor is it as explicit up and down the country. But I would note that a large proportion of those arrested in the 2024 anti-migration riots had Irish surnames. Of course, the gulf between the Irish Gaels and the English is (relatively speaking) small, but it's a good example of integration. I've seen similar trends amongst mixed-race or quarter-black English lads going along to the migrant hotel protests in the urban peripheries.
'I hardly doubt they thought about it in the intellectualised terms of "self-abolition", but it seems objectively true that life and expectations were different for a Rajput or Bengali farmer and a Yorkshire labourer, especially in terms of marriage."
I'm sure that's true to an extent (South Asians are really at the other end of the spectrum, unusually insular) but Jared Diamond claims that when he lived in England (1958-1961, says wikipedia) it wasn't uncommon for him to meet older rural people who, IIRC, spent their entire lives between their villge and their market town, with the exception of service in the military. Maybe they were speaking of their parent's generation rather than their own, but still, this suggests that even England- the first country to industrialize and 'modernize'- was historically a more rooted and less, well, 'open' society than people often seem to think, until surprisingly recently.
What I'm not trying to do is make the move "well Angloness self definitionally includes liberalism, therefore open borders and infinity immigration". In fact I'm trying to avoid making any normative claim at all, but it does seem to be the case that some aspects of the open society are deep rooted in Anglo culture, *and* most(?) aspects of the open society are at least derived from Anglo culture in the same way that Atheism can be thought of as a Christian tradition. I suppose you could insert some stuff about Judeo-German 20th Century thought here and reframe it, but I still think that is grounded on certain Anglo strains of thought and permissiveness.
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.
>liberals were less happy than conservatives
>North Koreans and cult members TELL they are more happy?
It may surprise you to discover, but "conservatives" is not synonymous with North Koreans and cult members.
>There is only one metric that makes sense - results, and we all know how those two tribes compare in that, don't we?
Since you bring up North Korea, I'll point out that, on current demographic trends, South Korea will be practically depopulated after a couple of generations, leaving North Korea the victor by default. If your society can't maintain itself into the next generation, it ultimately doesn't matter how brilliant it is in other respects.
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.
The last statistic (25% attending services weekly) sort of puts the lie to the earlier statistics (42% saying religion is very important), doesn't it?
My family attended synagogue weekly when we were young. Even across the few years we were there, there was a pretty wide variety of engagement. At one point I was friends with 3-4 other kids from the synagogue and saw them regularly, and my mother was some kind of leader on some kind of synagogue body. At other points, we just went to a building once a week, sung songs, and went home. So I think even the 25% attending services weekly is an overestimate for how many people get strong communities out of it. Not sure how typical this is though.
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.
Having the neighbours in and out all the time is a lower class.thing though, see Shameless.
Not for food necessarily. And I don’t think shameless is all that correct. Kate fox is more correct in her observation that drinking buddies in England often never visit each other’s houses despite meeting most week.
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...
No, they are assuming it benefits the world via a belief that is abstract and removed from experiencing the society they want to create. They are idolizing farming without growing up with the smell of cow shit.
its similar to people who say religion is a social good due to its effects on people and should be promoted while being atheists who never attend church. Living in it is a more complicated thing, and if they did they might eat those words.
You see this with believers too, some guy makes this big case of how Eastern Orthodoxy or Catholicism is an intellectually elegant faith to convert to. So he converts, and finds out the local church is 75% people who go there because being a good Greek means you are Orthodox, and the priest is more about "pray for the motherland" more than erudite theology.
you maybe can make peace with it but god, you want to smack your younger self some,
i encountered this with the conservative push to both entrepreneurship and trades: turns out a college degree will open your eyes to how risky the former is if you aren't rich, and the classes are filled more with people inheriting a business over starting it. The latter was LOL if you attended technical school, and even more lol if you know older tradesmen.
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.
That's true. And there's no reason why they would be. Those solutions and reactions are either banal (40-hour workweek, no child labor, food and drug inspections/regulations, direct primaries), mistaken (Prohibition, eugenics, segregation), or trying to combat problems that no longer exist. But the fact that we have solved and reacted before should make us hesitate before saying we cannot again today. We can't go back, but my point is that we can go forward. And even if what we need isn't palatable today, who's to say what will be palatable in 5 or 10 years?
One of the reasons that, perhaps, there was a greater sense of nation after the gilded age was the two world wars, the new deal, and (perhaps) immigration restrictions.
That's true, but it doesn't entirely fit the chronology. The movements I listed above (40-hour workweek, etc.) came before WW1 during a time or relative prosperity. WW1 was, in fact, the apotheosis of the Progressive Movement, which lost almost all of its influence at the end of the war. It is difficult to disentangle causation when n roughly equals 1, but the spirit of reform started picking up wins before all the massive mobilizations you mention.
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".
I don’t think what Thatcher was saying was bullshit:
> I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation and it is, I think, one of the tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many of the benefits which were meant to help people who were unfortunate—“It is all right. We joined together and we have these insurance schemes to look after it”. That was the objective, but somehow there are some people who have been manipulating the system and so some of those help and benefits that were meant to say to people: “All right, if you cannot get a job, you shall have a basic standard of living!” but when people come and say: “But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!” You say: “Look! It is not from the dole. It is your neighbour who is supplying it and if you can earn your own living then really you have a duty to do it and you will feel very much better!”
>There is also something else I should say to them: “If that does not give you a basic standard, you know, there are ways in which we top up the standard. You can get your housing benefit.”
>But it went too far. If children have a problem, it is society that is at fault. There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate. And the worst things we have in life, in my view, are where children who are a great privilege and a trust—they are the fundamental great trust, but they do not ask to come into the world, we bring them into the world, they are a miracle, there is nothing like the miracle of life—we have these little innocents and the worst crime in life is when those children, who would naturally have the right to look to their parents for help, for comfort, not only just for the food and shelter but for the time, for the understanding, turn round and not only is that help not forthcoming, but they get either neglect or worse than that, cruelty.
>How do you set about teaching a child religion at school, God is like a father, and she thinks “like someone who has been cruel to them?” It is those children you cannot … you just have to try to say they can only learn from school or we as their neighbour have to try in some way to compensate. This is why my foremost charity has always been the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, because over a century ago when it was started, it was hoped that the need for it would dwindle to nothing and over a hundred years later the need for it is greater, because we now realise that the great problems in life are not those of housing and food and standard of living. When we have got all of those, when we have got reasonable housing when you compare us with other countries, when you have got a reasonable standard of living and you have got no-one who is hungry or need be hungry, when you have got an education system that teaches everyone—not as good as we would wish—you are left with what? You are left with the problems of human nature, and a child who has not had what we and many of your readers would regard as their birthright—a good home—it is those that we have to get out and help, and you know, it is not only a question of money as everyone will tell you; not your background in society. It is a question of human nature and for those children it is difficult to say: “You are responsible for your behaviour!” because they just have not had a chance and so I think that is one of the biggest problems and I think it is the greatest sin.
Society is not an abstract, it is not an impersonal force that can be blamed or relied on. Society is made up of people, and you have to be actually part of that, taking on the responsibilities as well as the benefits.
EDIT: forgot my source. https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689
Of course society is made up of people; in the same way that it is influenced by its myths and leaders. Some myths and some leaders influence or push societies to do things that reduce the effectiveness and willingness of that society to help its members.
Government is a product of society. We can choose to solve problems like childhood poverty with governmental action, or with "National Societies" (NGO's, Charity Organizations, etc.. (called charities from here on out)).
We, as a society can say, everyone has to contribute to eliminating childhood poverty, or we can say people can voluntarily choose which causes to support. The first is government solving the problem, the second is charities solving the problem.
I have no statistics to back this up, but I would be extremely surprised if people donated more to charitable causes than they pay in taxes every year. People also don't regularly donate to every cause that helps society (or themselves), whereas, through (current western democracy, ideally) governmental action, we elect leaders who, through debate, discussion, and consultation with experts, decide how much of our tax dollars go to the issues that concern society.
On some level I think this should go without saying, but not everybody thinks in this way, but every action by a group of people is going to have waste. There will also be people taking advantage of the system. Obviously society should spend some amount of time and energy reducing that waste and reducing the number of people taking advantage of the system, but no system will ever be without waste.
Also, isn't Thatcher saying there: "Children can't be held responsible for living in poverty"? Or is she saying "Its hard to say this, but children should be held responsible for the poverty they are living in"?
If its the first one, then yes, as a society we should help these children. I'm better at other things than making food, building houses, and making clothing, but what I can do generates money that I can pay in taxes to pay other people to do it. I would prefer that its taxes, not charities solve the problem, because I can vote on taxes, not on charities.
If its the second one, well fuck, I don't want to be part of a society where that opinion isn't frowned upon. If that's what people in my society believe, I will do whatever I can to tear down what led people to think like that. Calling bullshit on anything that leads to that line of thinking is crucial to me living in the kind of society that I want to live in.
> Also, isn't Thatcher saying there: "Children can't be held responsible for living in poverty"? Or is she saying "Its hard to say this, but children should be held responsible for the poverty they are living in"?
I think she’s very clearly saying that the poverty those children are growing up in isn’t just material poverty, and we need to engage with a deeper responsibility towards them (and towards the responsible adults we want them to grow up to be) than simply ensuring they have a house, food, and an education.
We do need to engage with a deeper level of responsibility to teach kids, but you can't reliably teach someone who is starving, or who is tired because they don't have a warm bed to sleep in. If we can't do the basics, the rest barely matters.
> We do need to engage with a deeper level of responsibility to teach kids, but you can't reliably teach someone who is starving, or who is tired because they don't have a warm bed to sleep in. If we can't do the basics, the rest barely matters.
This is true, but does not address what she is saying.
>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.
> 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.
Why are you using ChatGPT?
Oh, wow. Do you really read this so negatively?
The message I did take away was basically: "There is LGBTQ Culture, which leads to thighter knitted communal belonging for the ones participating in it, good on them." :)
What makes you read it the way you did?
I get where you’re coming from, but context and tone matter — especially when discussing marginalized groups. This wasn’t a celebration of queer community. It framed LGBT people as having a ‘parallel society’ that’s inherently suspicious — using language like ‘LGBT norms,’ ‘special neighborhoods,’ and ‘they even have their own flag’ as if any of that is proof of separatism or subversion.
The punchline wasn’t ‘good for them.’ It was ‘look how different and concerning they are.’
If someone wrote the same about Jewish people, or immigrants — listing off their dating practices, holidays, community spaces, and then ending with a warning about ‘forming a country-within-a-country’ — would that still read as neutral or positive?
We don’t get to separate intent from impact. Whether the author meant it as hostile or just thoughtless, the result is a reduction of queer lives to stereotypes that feed into old tropes about ‘outsiders’ plotting to take over.
Queer culture is beautiful. But this post wasn’t celebrating it — it was framing it as an existential threat. That’s what I responded to.
Interesting! Thank you for elaborating.
My general reading of Scott has him pegged as a liberal humanitarian who is generally LGBTG friendly, so this could have influenced my judgement, but for me this read clearly tongue in cheek. I also did not get the vibe that he framed LGBT people as having a ‘parallel society’ that’s inherently suspicious.
Perhaps it's also him (and me mostly) being part of bubbles, where marginalisation of queer people is a lot lower than in mainstream culture?
Did you apply the principle of charity? Or is the nefarious vibe so strong you had to point it out?
That’s a thoughtful question, and I appreciate you asking it in good faith. I do try to apply the principle of charity, especially when a writer has a reputation for being thoughtful or progressive. But charity doesn’t mean ignoring the broader context — or the impact something can have when it echoes the language and logic of real-world discrimination.
You mention being in a bubble where queer marginalization is lower — and honestly, that’s part of the disconnect here. I live in the Deep South. My family still casually refers to homosexuality as a sin. A pair of women kissing at a local river spot was seen as ‘inappropriate for children.’ And my own little brother visibly recoiled when bisexuality was mentioned on a Disney show — not because anyone taught him to hate, but because this kind of discomfort is ambient here. It’s in the air. It gets absorbed.
So when I see something that jokes about LGBT people forming their own “parallel society,” following mysterious “LGBT norms,” and gathering in “special neighborhoods” — it doesn’t feel tongue-in-cheek. It feels like the kind of thing I’ve heard in real life from people who genuinely believe queer people are trying to corrupt or isolate themselves from the rest of society. And these real people are not a small or fringe group; they include my entire extended family, their friends, and their neighbors — stretching across miles of private land, holding prominent positions in local universities, raising multiple children, and shaping the values of entire communities. Their beliefs don’t just exist in private — they carry weight, influence policy, and mold the next generation.
Maybe in another context, with another tone, from someone with a different audience, it might land differently. But whether the author meant it seriously or not, this kind of framing still reinforces the idea that queer people existing visibly and in community is somehow suspicious or separatist — and I don’t think that’s harmless. Even ‘friendly’ versions of this rhetoric can feed the exact same narratives people in my life use to justify their discomfort, their judgment, and sometimes their outright rejection.
So yeah — I heard that nefarious undertone loud and clear. Not because I’m cynical, but because I’ve lived in the shadow of it.
Ah, sounds rough. I believe now I get your point. Take my empathy, if you want it. :)
Thank you for taking your time to answer so civilly and thoughtfully, I appreciate it. (And for the reminder that my circles (in urban Europe) are not something I should take for granted, I guess.)
PS: May Scott read your text as a remainder to recalibrate his model.
Wokeness isn't in charge anymore. You misread Scott, that's on you, not on him to change in response to your ChatGPT-written scolding.
I know what you are.
(speaking through chatgpt, that is)
Those em dashes. This is 2025, y'all really need to get an eye for this before responding.
Banned for completely missing the point, being super-aggressive, and looking like they used ChatGPT to write this. I suspect this is a troll.
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.
There are in fact in-person ACX meetups in many cities across the world, as well as the subreddit, a discord, and more:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/meetups-everywhere-spring-2025-times
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/fall-meetups-everywhere-call-for
Subreddit is /r/slatestarcodex
I'm not sure about the discord location, but if you search for astralcodexten or slatestarcodex, you can probably find it.
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.
I agree with the two criticisms, but I'm confused with the first paragraph. In what way do people use liberalism to mean center-left?
In the sense of conflation with the term "liberals", which is in turn contrasted with "conservatives". In America, this rounds off as "Democrats" and (pre-Trump) "Republicans". Democrats are more center-left than liberal, but the historical labeling lingers. So, the dualism of "liberals and conservatives" suggests "center-left and center-right", instead of the French parliamentary dualism of "pro-and anti-gradual change", which can both easily reside within a Western-style democracy, or the even broader definition of liberal, now clarified as "classical liberal".
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.
I'm a bit confused on your framework here. How do you fit the fundamentalist Christian right and the hippies from the 60's into your categorization? I feel like the Christian right, and many other groups, rejects strong government when it interferes with what they want but welcome it when it's on their side. The hippies, from what I've heard, seemed not to want a world state but less war, and yet I still think of them as left-wing liberals. I would categorize right-wing liberals as typically more economically liberal whereas left-wing liberals are typically more social liberals.
Crux in this framework is separation of neighbors (who agree with you regarding right and wrong) and strangers (who need not agree).
Man acts by his sense of right and wrong and this knowledge of right and wrong is provided by his moral authority ie his god (in the sense of Kipling's The Stranger).
Now, a person can say I don't accept any external authority. I am my own authority --he is an anarchist or a right-liberal. Perhaps hippies were like that?
Strong vs weak govt is distinction made within liberalism (with its unprincipled exceptions). In this framework, the logical endpoint of right-liberalism is no-government while of left-liberalism is world government,
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!).
Regarding your first paragraph, my sense of it is that a person of power (and wealth is a kind of power) faces two quite strong isolating. forces:
* When interacting with those of "normal" power (who we might otherwise call "the powerless"), there is this constant nagging feeling that they are just humoring you while secretly aiming to take advantage of your power, or convert some if it to their own purposes.
* Power means in many ways not having to compromise, and if you put several powerful people together, none of whom is used to having to compromise, well, it's not a good formula for them to get together in a group house, you know?
tldr it's lonely at the top.
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
I think that there is a lot to be said for the need for an absolutist position in order to preserve a vision - and therefore, the weakness of those visions is definitive of liberalism. That is, Rationalists see their views as absolutely correct, as do Christians, as do Libertarians. (Less true of LGBT, admittedly!) They are all therefore to some extent proselytizing, which is memetically advantageous under most conditions. (And LGBT is not an exception here - they don't want people to change their orientation, but they want them to adopt the norms and social expectations.)
What has happened in liberal society is that all of the many different absolutist communities are outnumbered and/or weak compared to those opposing them, so people can choose their communities. If any of them ended up winning the war for the hearts and minds of the populace, this would transform increasingly into something like demands rather than liberal views. And this is fundamental - Heinlein presented a straw-man version in Glory Road; "Culturologists state a 'law' of religious freedom which they say is invariant: Religious freedom in a cultural complex is inversely proportional to the strength of the strongest religion. This is supposed to be one case of a general invariant, that all freedoms arise from cultural conflicts because a custom which is not opposed by its negative is mandatory and always regarded as a 'law of nature.'"
This implies that for liberalism to emerge or continue, you need pluralism, which in turn requires that all the individual communities be weak and/or small.
It takes time to develop social technology in response to physical technology.
The Amish developed their ideological separatism in the 16th/17th centuries, and Luddism in the 19th century.
It might just be that it takes decades, or the action of a few great men, or contingent historical developments, or all three for this process to be replicated.
Liberalism can't solve a lack of community spirit. It axiomatically can't.
The whole point of liberalism is to tip the balance in the favour of the individual. The moment you tip the balance in the favour of the group it stops qualifying as liberalism (politically it'd be called socialism if you were trying to do something new or conservatism if you were trying to return to something old).
(Okay, one exception is if you have two or more already strong communities that are forced into one larger group. Increasing liberalism could allow them to separate into distinct legal entities which could then increase community spirit.)
The problem *is* liberalism, the solution can't be more liberalism. Liberalism came to its most recent ascendency in the 1970s to solve stagflation, a problem that had been caused by too much socialism. It worked well for a while but then every problem that could be solved with more liberalism was and only problems that can't be solved with more liberalism remain.
It's time to go back to looking for solutions in socialism, i.e. do things to improve society as a whole even if it reduces individual rights. At least among those of us who want to-make-a-better-world. For those that want to-avoid-a-worse-world then conservatism is always there and ready, indeed it's the only real solution being offered to voters at the moment.
(At some future point technology will change conditions sufficiently that more liberalism will again be the correct choice. None of the three fundamental political ideologies—liberalism, socialism, conservatism—is *always* the correct choice.)
What you call liberalism, I would call "right-liberalism" with its emphasis on the individual and associated denial of moral authority of the collective.
But "left-liberalism" which you call socialism has no such inhibition.
Nah, not really. Stuff like gender rights, anti-racism, and minority rights are all liberalism because they increase the power/rights of the individual at the expense of the greater society. NIMBYism is also liberalism (and therefore YIMBYs are at least directionally socialist).
Because elections drive people into two main coalitions: left and right, but there are three main ideologies, you get a mixture of different parts of two ideologies in left and right. It's easy to confuse coalitional purity with ideological purity, but they aren't the same thing.
An example. When a left-liberal advocates for trans women to compete against cis women in sports that's good for individuals (liberalism) but bad for the average of society overall (socialism). Perhaps some future technology will solve this, but that's not the case right now.
Stuff like gender rights, anti-racism, and minority rights explicitly attack the power and freedom of individuals. Define them precisely and you can see how.
I don't see it. If the counterpoint harms of a policy affect a much smaller group acutely but a larger group diffusely then that is a pro-individualist, and thus liberal, policy.
If *any* policy that harms an individual can be called anti-liberal then *every* policy must be, but then the term loses all usefulness. Only by examining the balance of trade-offs can one say that a given policy is pro-social or pro-liberal.
Gender rights, anti-racism, and minority rights derive from liberalism's blank-slatist tendencies. If we're all born the same and only develop differently due to our environment, then if Group A does worse than Group B along some metric, then that can only be because members of Group A are experiencing a different environment somehow -- either due to poverty, bigotry, or some other thing artificially keeping them back. And since these kinds of constraint hinder individuals' ability to flourish and self-actualise, liberalism requires us to remove them.
(Of course, not everybody believes that we're all individually born the same -- a lot of people are happy to admit that two people might be born with different skill levels etc. But suggesting that this variation leads to statistical differences at the group level is generally verboten, so we still get anti-racism and anti-sexism policies.)
So I want to add small towns in rural america to your list. Small towns being something with a population of ~1000. I'm not sure how to rate this, but maybe a 3/10 or 4/10. It's still a high trust community, farm stands sell produce or eggs by the side of the road. I don't lock my doors and leave my keys in the car. I know my neighbors and we're various degrees of friendly. Lots of people go to the fireman's parade and then the (volunteer) fireman's picnic afterwards. (Where there's a beer tent, food and games all to support the firemen.) My kids play in the community band (run by the band director from the nearby high school.) There are bowling leagues in the winter at one local tavern, and weekly euchre nights at another. In general a nice place to live.
Missing the actual major non-mainstream communities, Black America (we still have huge segregation, many Black Americans live in an all-Black environment that is completely unrepresenatative of the country as a whole) and Hispanic America (if you're saying speaking alternate languages is nearly immune to the mainstream, look no further).
1) People already do this to a degree. There's a reason liberals all move to cities and conservatives all move (or stay) in the country.
2) Social organization is *hard*. I have friends I'd like to live next to. We even half discussed building an apartment for them on our lot. But we have many overlapping wants and it's just *easier* to not compromise.
3) Social organization is *hard* and no one's working on it. Do you know who does all the social organizing in traditional church communities? Stay at home moms and grandmas. If all those ladies are working a career, building community can't be more than a hobby or a secondary concern.
It's so much easier to continue organizations or relationships than to start them from scratch. It's easier to respond to an invitation to a potluck than to host one.
We're all so much more disconnected from our geographic locality than we used to be -- getting news from twitter instead of the lady at the coffee shop or the local newspaper, picking things up from the big box store instead of the local shop where you know the proprietor because you come there every week, and now just getting an amazon delivery. There's a large number of people for whom covid barely changed how many people they saw in a day...
And geographic mobility for work makes all that trickier... I live in a community where I barely knew anyone until my daughter started sports. Nearly everyone else in this community, *their grandparents went to this same high school*. Tapping into that is much different than being raised in it.
And similarly... a lot of us don't want the tradeoffs of community. My cousin moved back to the farm with aunts and uncles as neighbors. It drove her *nuts*. They would just *stop by* at *random times of the day* and *want to talk*! Normal community is a nightmare of people in your business if you're used to modern autonomy, and we really forget that when we talk about missing it.
The Amish are actually illegal. For instance, some sects don't believe in smoke detectors, so none of their buildings are compliant with fire codes. Each community has one smoke detector stashed away somewhere, and when they construct a new building, they stick it in an appropriate place until the inspection is done, then take it down and put it away. (Or, that's the rumor.)
It's the same with sewage rules, egress requirements, etc. Many of which are ridiculous for structures that don't have electricity or running water. But it's still illegal to violate ridiculous laws.
In many places they've succeeded in negotiating carve-outs for their settlements in local building codes. But in others, officials just turn a blind eye, or else it's a source of constant conflict.
Roughly all of the examples of intentional community Scott points to are (technically) illegal in one way or another. Education, child welfare, zoning, public accommodation laws, animal welfare, discrimination, public health, child labor laws, etc.
Mostly, in the US, as long as everyone involved consents, you can get away with breaking these kinds of laws. But if you become A Problem, or if somebody complains about you, your situation can become quite tenuous. The Amish have had to go all the way to the Supreme Court as recently as 2021 (to avoid installing septic tanks for their graywater).
“Serious Christianity” is a much larger category than all of the others put together and itself is more than 10% of the population. I live in Middle Georgia travel a lot in the south. Even the public schools are heavily christianized. The mega churches are packed every weekend.
Do mega churches really offer "real/authentic" communal belonging and meaning?
(Honestly interested, not asking sarcastically.)
As someone who has never been to one and has no knowledge on the subject I would say for many people the answer has to be yes. For a lot of serious church goers, it seems like church is a core part of their identity and where they derive a lot of their meaning. Just because the church community is big doesn't mean it's not intense/deep. But this is just why I imagine, I don't actually know and I would love to hear from someone who might have more personal experience. Also, I know you didn't bring it up but just to add: whether or not what they worship is true or not is pretty irrelevant for whether or not the communal belonging they derive is "real/authentic."
Given that people are so not on the same page these days, any imposed social order beyond free for all liberalism would probably lead to widespread alienation, even worse than what we have now. I don't think that the crisis can be fixed from the top-down.
But I also think that, in time, people will get on the same page about a lot of things. People can't just run astray forever. Gradually they will have to take cognizance of the chaos of things and the obvious fact there can be a better order. After all, we live in one world, one universe, one reality.
Strange as it sounds, epistemological chaos seems to me like an aberrant, unnatural situation. There's an old Russian saying, "truth is brighter than the sun." I think it just takes time.
I think in a lot of ways what people are longing for isn't so much community as it is family. We long to be part of an extended kinship group that cares for us, provides purpose, and reproduces itself generation to generation. The Amish are successful in part because their communities have a strong backbone of interlocking kinship networks that tie everyone together.
>"Or some sort of pseudo-Amish who live in an eternal 1990s?"
So, Portland(ia)? /s
I'd argue that there is a much deeper force. Evolution has primed us to be a bit afraid of/wary of other people we haven't sufficiently bounded with yet. However, when forced into an environment where we work together to achieve common goals we do form those bonds. The issue is as simple as money brings with it choice and we often take the easier choice of avoiding others.
I want to propose we allow people to contribute to their local communities via labor and engagement as an alternative to paying part of their taxes -- at a sufficiently reduced rate to make it at least somewhat appealing. Sure it's going to be a net cost to have bob the amateur trying to fill a pothole or install the playground but I do think a good liberal government ought to be willing to subsidize desierable activities whether it be socially or economically desierable -- but if you find out that the lady who has taken charge of your local community contribution ring is awful you can still just decide to pay the money instead.
"Common goals" in evolution can not be anything else than "spreading one's genes" and for this bonding with strangers is unlikely.
There is reasonably decent evidence that we evolved to cooperate in order to hunt. That is operationalized by having certain reactions to working on common projects with people even if the reason it was favored was because it increased reproduction.
My personal take on why people don't go off to small tight-knit communities with values that reflect their own is mainly not because of money so much as a sense of meaning. Imagine, for example, that 20 years from now AI is so productive that if you wanted to go off in the wilderness and live with whatever values you had in a small community, you could do that and bring some robots with you to provide everything you need. I still don't think people are going to do that, but I still think people will complain about the general culture of the world, maybe for two reasons. For one, we're biased to complain about the current way of the world than to complain about the alternatives because by definition we aren't in any alternatives. Secondly, and admittedly this might just be true for me, I feel like there's a sense in which we care about humanity as a whole. Even though we might not care to donate to people across the globe who could clearly benefit, and we might not concern ourselves with discussions that are essential for humanity but with little impact on our own lives, we still feel a purpose in being part of a bigger team. People get excited when their sports team wins and sad when they lose. Even if they're able to immigrate they care about their country's impact and standing. Even if none of us will be around 200 years from now, many are hopeful that we'll be exploring the solar system with colonies. Of course, you could make the argument that all of these feelings stem from a biological incentive which is inherently selfish and familial, but that doesn't change the fact that we still feel these ways. So my overall take is that even though some people want tight-knit independent communities, and the barrier for some is money, for the vast majority of people even if they complain about the way things are they don't really want to be in some isolated community even if they could be. I for sure don't.
I like the optimistic take on post-AI society, and I even find it moderately plausible. Currently, we're mostly all wage slaves of one kind or another. Maybe once all that busywork is being taken care of by AI, we'll revert to a futuristic version of the apocryphal hunter-gatherer society, where you fill your time by hanging out with your tribe, napping, and having sex. I suppose that's also basically how Iain Banks's Culture series works, when you get down to it.
I also think this will basically address the fertility issue. Once we don't have so much annoying work to do and have more money at our disposal, having lots of kids will be a more popular lifestyle. We'll all become more like the rich are now, with their high fertility rate.
I tend to assume that generational wealth is overrated, given all the wastrels it seems to produce, but now I'm wondering if that's wrong. Maybe those people just have personality disorders, and otherwise a life of leisure is great. Hmm, something to ponder, and/or experience for myself in a few years.
The example of the Mormons is a good one, but in more ways than “get lots of people of the same religion together in one place”. That model was certainly true of the early church, but the real innovation of modern Mormonism is exporting the same community-building model to all four corners of the earth. A common experience for Latter-day Saints traveling abroad is to be struck by how nearly identical the Sunday experience is whether in Africa, America, or Asia. The upshot of the Church’s system of social organization is that it is effortless for a Latter-day Saint person to slot into a new community wherever they go, and it is likewise easy for the community to sustain itself as individuals naturally come and go while they pursue their secular lives and careers. That kind of physical location independence goes a long way towards solving the practical problems highlighted in the post.
This is an argument for abundance -- in this model, the less pressure people are under to earn a living or cope with poverty, the more they'll cluster into communities that provide them with meaning.
Do we see this in our society now? Arguably it applies to college kids to some extent. Arguably retirees are not a counter-example because they've been deformed by a lifetime of work, plus maybe they spend a lot of time at church or other meaning building.
What other groups exist today that aren't under financial pressure, so they can serve as tests of this hypothesis?
I think it's about economic integration *and social integration*. We're bound together by much more than what we want from our communities and our need for grub. There are laws about crime and taxation that regulate our everyday lives, we generally rely on services like school and daycare, there are hospitals and healthcare centers, there are death certificates and wills and burials.
These countless social norms, both formal and informal, are so interconnected by whatever flimsy design and happenstance that it's that once you're socialized into them, it's incredibly difficult to exist without them. I think this is why The Amish are 10/10: they represent generations of people who haven't been socialized within the mainstream social context.
I think forming tightly-knit communities is not a solution to spiritual void after AI takes out everything. Because I believe any person with a shred of laziness will rather take free money and goods than try to make everything by themselves. So the supposed 'freedom' from such void does not exist for them.
This is an argument for abundance -- in this model, the less pressure people are under to earn a living or cope with poverty, the more they'll cluster into communities that provide them with meaning.
Do we see this in our society now? Arguably it applies to college kids to some extent. Arguably retirees are not a counter-example because they've been deformed by a lifetime of work, plus maybe they spend a lot of time at church or other meaning building.
What other groups exist today that aren't under financial pressure, so they can serve as tests of this hypothesis?
I disagree that the main driving force is economics. It's commitment. To join a community, you need to let that be a large part of your identity and make many sacrifices. I consider myself sort of a rationalist (in values and outlook), but I don't live in the Bay Area because I have my family, my wife, my language, many friends (and my current job) in Israel and that's where they want to stay. To join the community fully, I'd have to give up on all those other things. It's not about money, I can get a higher paying job in the Bay. In fact, Israel sounds closer to my community than rationalism, in the sense that I meet mostly people within it, identify as one, marry within it, and my kids will grow up as members.
It's even more extreme than a community - many couples have long distance relationships because they have different careers/schools/constraints that are less important to them than living with their spouse (for a time). And this is just two people! Getting a larger group to give up all those other things takes much more commitment. What prevents communities is individualism and diverse preferences.
The Society for Creative Anachronism solves all these problems.
"Why don’t YIMBYs live in dense walkable towns sprung up from the forests of Vermont?" I'm intentionally missing the greater point of the article here but Vermont has some of the strictest development laws on the books, including a lengthy state-level review process that kicks in at any housing development with over ten units (among other things) and a public comment period that gives neighboring landowners very large leverage over proposals- leading to a "vetocracy" of sorts. Housing stock is being built at under half the rate of what it needs to in order to combat one of the nation's worst homelessness crises. YIMBYsteaders would be better off picking a different state!
As a Mormon I will say the Serious Christianity description is far more apt these days than the highly-concentrated allegation, yes, even in Utah
The other 'mysterious force' that I've identified as making this kind of liberalism-substrated patchwork less tractable is that people have friends and family they want to stay in contact with... but their ideologies only overlap in parts.
The medieval peasants 'solved' this by having very cliquey social graphs (because most couldn't practically know distant people) which both homogenises by repeated interaction and also minimises the number of folks with strong ties to different cliques.
You can't get back there from where we are, with the people alive now, without transitioning through a period where many people starkly cut out a majority of their social circles, to focus on a single centre. Most people don't want to do that! Many are happier with the compromise maintaining contact with several enriching subcultures/subcommunities. The diminishing returns on marginal community-deepness means most people don't want to go 'all in' (and the few that do can, often including moving house/state/country).
The Amish memeplex keeps their small subculture somewhat stably resilient to this force by mostly precluding mixing with outsiders. Some other groups do the same - in fact it's one classic characteristic of cults (among many), which are another class of 'success stories' here.
Incidentally, this wouldn't be a problem if we lived in a sufficiently hyperbolic geometry. Then everyone could live next door to *all* their friends, even if the friend graph was (as today) quite messy. Internet, multimedia calls, and VR move in that direction.
I think social graphs don't separate so neatly.
Even if I could find people who'd live in Tech Hunter Gatherer Paradise 2.0 and all my friends are onboard (lmao) a lot of _their_ friends need a 2 hour drive to visit. Add in families, children and the need for their schooling, the entire separate social graph of the children themselves... yeah, secession doesn't work that well. I think the most successful model is living a bit on the fringe - but once everyone tries that you just get a suburb, its own special circle of hell.
This is really dumb AF (and I mean F***uyama, not Scott).
Communities, moral orders, and networks of cooperation where people can purely voluntarily opt in or out, are never going to last, because these things impose costs, and those people and groups who pay the cost are going to be outcompeted by those who don't. This is why strong communities, institutions of cooperation etc., need to be backed up and enforced by the state.
Building a community is hard work, which is also hard to gain from (it's a commons, with freeriding etc showing up). Also requires skills not many posses, mainly around communication and navigating interpersonal dynamics. There are many antipatterns and things to navigate around.
Ex: I visited a friend, who was living in a group house. They had 6 ppl in total, 2 of them a couple. The couple lived on the upper floor, with one other person. The other three on the bottom floor. There was two kitchens, one on each floor.
I predicted the group dynamics shaped by this arrangement without hearing about it, just knowing that couples often turn inwards (especially if things go tense - self-reinforcing), and that double kitchens caused two aggregation points (where people meet naturally)
I think learning these things and investing into maintenance is too high a threshold, when people are used to things being convenient.
So Scott Alexander and Fukuyama are saying liberalism does not mean alienated atomic individualism, obviously we want community, but not one enforced community: liberalism provides a platform for many communities.
Let me point out the only country in which liberalism as a platform of communities can work is the US, as it was designed as a platform for 13 communities from day 1, with different religions, culture, sometimes language, and to be fair not much trust in each other. And then developed in this direction, think Utah as a Mormon community-state installed on the Federal platform.
So what America has and had was liberalism on the Federal level - no official language, no federal establishment of religion. Yet a state like Utah could establish Mormon religion (more or less).
Americans rarely notice it, because if Mormon rule is not your thing, you can just choose to not live in Utah. California is a cooler place anyway, right? But if you are Polish, and Catholic rules chafe you, should you not live in Poland, should you abandon your entire culture and language space and patriotism? Now that is much harder...
So that whole idea cannot work for European countries with official languages i.e. officially dominant ethnic groups and more or less officially dominant religions.
So it seems our options in Europe are either one community or no community, Hitler or Bowling Alone, this is why we are chafing and so unsure, as we want neither.
(One community loosely understood, historic communities like South German Catholicism, North German Protestantism ofcoz workable. The issue is this system does not really allow new communities.)
THIS is our huge dilemma in Europe! We want neither Hitler or Bowling Alone, but what is the third option? The platform thing does not seem to work as these countries were not designed as a contract between communities like the US was.
Furthermore, Europe is imitating American liberalism since 1945 **and we did notice Americans only ever meant liberalism on the federal level only!**
Utah is not a liberal platform of communities, it is one Mormon community. But we Europeans do not notice that, simply because Utah does not have a foreign policy, ambassadors, diplomacy (missionaries do not count, they are apolitical), only the FedGov has. Utah probably has a press, but we never read it! We read "federal" press like the NYT. And so on.
Once we in Europe notice this, i.e. that American liberalism does not require Utah to be a platform of communities, and once we also notice Poland or Denmark are more like Utah than they are like America, American federal-liberalism does not apply here, and thus one-community seems inevitable, though hopefully not Hitler-like.
(Or at best, historic communities, but not new ones.)
Generation Identity, though now largely defunct, evolved into a half-Islamophobic, half-Neo-Nazi movement in Europe, but if you read the original manifesto, the original theme was more anti-globalist. Like, you look at a building, and you cannot tell from the architecture in which country, region, city you are. Where is local culture? And that was a good question. In the beginning they were less xeno-hateful, and more about opposing "global slop", and in favour of local identities. Like, you know, Utah is, too.
All this seems to imply to me, that both our options in Europe, one-community or no-community, are both bad, and the right option, the platform of communities is not workable.
And once European people get too fed up with both "global slop" and alienated atomistic individualism, the lack of community, a dreadful enforced one-communitism might come inevitably, and with that intolerance, aggressive nationalist populism, exclusion (hopefully not genocidal-Hitler level) and so on.
A potential counter-argument: Hungary is the most illiberal country in Europe and even the most illiberal people there have no problem with the Krishna Valley (I know, I follow the press): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krishna_valley
So new communities can happen, even in an illiberal space? The thing is the Krishna folks are nearly invisible. They do not hold Krishna Prides through the streets of the capitol like how LGBTQ people do. They do not try to get into the media. They avoid trying to influence the mainstream culture. They are withdrawn from the world. Also, although a very different tradition, their lifestyle is still traditional. As in, "oldschool", monks and married couples, milking cows and suchlike. So like they don't hold orgies, for example, as LGBTQ people sometimes do, which would piss off conservatives. I think conservatives appreciate that culture, because of its oldschoolness and modesty (not trying to influence the mainstream). So the Krishna Valley in Hungary is like the Amish in the US.
So in these countries new communities can work but only within clear constraints.
I think a bigger factor is that most people don’t live out their lives in a way that optimized for everything they care about or even the things they care about most. I know daily exercise and limiting the amount of time I spend on YouTube is guaranteed to bring me closer to my ideal life than not doing those things but I still struggle to make those changes. Having to actively move and form a community with people instead of just floating around where ever you already are and what you’re use to is probably way beyond what people who struggle to clean their room or text back their friend they want to talk can even start to consider let alone know is an option. That’s why I hope the future (singularity or not) has a heavy emphasis on helping sentient beings live in a way more optimized for the terminal values and desires instead of just letting them trend to habits where their life and potential wastes away.
I became a Mormon last year and love it. The way its organized is genius. The people are nice. I think the fact that it requires a lot of time and sacrifice ends up filtering out a lot of people who might drag the group down. My husband says its the religion of the try-hards and he isnt wrong. I really like that.
Its so sad to me that most people dont have something like this. Its amazing how much a community thats tight knit dramatically increases the quality of your life.
I already commented on this post but after I did that I added another layer to my self portrait and realized I should comment again.
A year ago I was an agnostic rationalist that was desperate for a community. After reading the sequences and codex I realized that I believed in God and figured I should find a religious community. I got heavily into judaism because I hate evangelicals and think the Trinity is insane nonsense so I figured I had nowhere else to go.
Leading up to Rosh Hashana I was taking conversion classes for judaism and reading everything I could get my hands on so that I could plunge myself and hopefully my family into a culture. Some Mormon missionaries knocked on my door and I turned them away went back to my chores and then went back outside to give them my number. I figured that out of all the people in my life that showed integrity it was basically just Mormons and Jews so I might as well hear what the Mormons had to say.
Long story short I ended up becoming a Mormon. Im incredibly grateful that I did this because 5 months after my son and I were baptized I began to draw. I was always an art kid but when I went to college I developed a massive art block and literally never picked up a pencil.
Anyways, Im no longer depressed, my 4 kids are thriving and I am pursuing my lifelong passion again all thanks to mormonism. I get that Joesph Smiths story sounds ridiculous but I dont find it anymore ridiculous than any other religious truth claims. Weirdly enough Smith appears to truly have believed he was a prophet and at the very least actually dictated the book of mormon so I figure he was either bipolar or a prophet and I choose to believe he was a prophet.
Did you know that Mormons are transhumanists? Joesph taught that God was once a man who made himself into the being we call God the Father. Mormons dont believe in the Trinity or hand wave away contradictions by claiming some things must remain "mysterious" or "unknowable" because us mere humans dont have the right "framing". Smith and Brigham Young (the father of the mainstream Mormon Church) preached that God would one day become understandable and that everyone could achieve that knowledge as long as they continued to believe and follow Gods commandments.
There is also no real eternal damnation in mormonism thanks to their understanding of the atonement. Yes, there are a select few that are cast off to sheol (cut off from God) but they are expected have numbers that can be counted on two hands. Mormons believe in tiers of heaven and the biggest sinners get to live forever watching whatever depraved porn they want all while doing their favorite drugs. They dont get a body but they get to live in something much lile cyberspace and enjoy everything they wish to enjoy.
Mormons that are faithful and obedient are rewarded with the ability to create new souls (referred to as intelligences in our scripture) and eternally progress after death.
I could talk about the faith from dawn until dusk every day of my life because I am ridiculously happy, my children are happy, my partner is happy and I am flourishing in a way that I thought impossible all thanks to joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
I literally drew every day of my life until I was 21 and never even picked up a pencil until march 7th 2025 and every since then I have barely gone a day without drawing or painting. I am networking with local galleries, learning new mediums, smiling myself to sleep every single day.
Get off you phone. Join a community. If you love God and thing the Trinity is insane join the mormons.
Thanks and God bless you all
I don’t think it all comes down to economics. Arguably the issue is that our legal system protects liberty among individuals, not groups.
An all white community is illegal. Discrimination on the basis of religion is illegal.
Let’s say a group of Muslims builds a neighborhood for themselves. Then one neighbor converts to Buddhism. There is no legal mechanism to evict the Buddhist and keep the community exclusively Muslim.
And in the age of global inter connectivity, people are far more likely to convert from the ideology they were raised in to something else. The Amish likely have an advantage in preserving their community by reducing exposure to external ideologies.
One other factor is that many of the largest and most successful ideologies (Christianity, Islam, Communism) are evangelical in nature. An inherent feature of these belief systems is expansion and conversion. Their adherents (of which I am one) will not be satisfied by simply associating with likeminded individuals, but will instead seek to change hearts and minds. They will not simply leave other groups to their own devices due to a moral obligation to bring people into their group for their own sake.
Rationalism interests me, especially to the extent that it can create a framework to improve the world through thought. How does one who lives outside the Bay Area partake?
Maybe it's money, maybe it's the Central Paradox of Openness. I have spent decades in various Open movements - Open Science, Open Access, Open Source, etc - and I think you could call Liberalism Open Politics. Communities are defined not by what they include, but by what they exclude. The Amish exclude modernity, the Libertarians exclude laws promoting the common good, Rationalists exclude decouplers. Liberalism doesn't exclude anything (they're only intolerant of intolerance), so there's no bounds that define the community. When an Open whatever is really small, it's a community because what's excluded are people who have heard about it. As it grows, anyone can be a part because the whole point of Open is to be inclusive (note the similarly to the ever expanding acronym used to describe Open Sexuality) and it ceases to be a community. The paradox is in trying to be open to everything, you become nothing (or get hollowed out and worn like a skin by Socialism).
So I think what's missing isn't so much money but courage - the courage to say not only "this is who we are" but "this is who we aren't". May a thousand liberal, but distinct and non-overlapping, communities bloom.
It isn't liberalism that opposes small, tight knit communities. It's individual rights and freedom. Small, semi-sufficient communities are infamous for conformity, and have been for millenia. There's a reason people move to the cities.
But across the span of the 20th century the sense of American community was pretty stable. People expressed their national pride through their church, their school, and their local newspapers. What happened? It wasn't "Liberalism", which hasn't changed much in doctrine since the New Deal and the commodification of the Counter-Culture. Technology was part of it: the Algorithm. But I think a larger part was the economic transformation brought about by economic globalism. Starting in the 1980's, local businesses, and therefore local employers, face competition and challenges that no one had to face before. The results have not been pretty.
In America, small local communities are often anchored by a single large employer--often a factory or a corporate headquarters. Global competitive pressure has forced a lot of these to close or move away, leaving a hollowed out community behind. This has hit rural whites more than any other population (rural people of color face tremendous unique challenges, but that didn't start with globalization, and isn't new). This is where the Opioid epidemic came from.
As a card carrying woke liberal pinko, I would throw deregulation in there too. "Creative Destruction" hasn't destroyed things in equal measure across the US. Some people ended up enjoying the benefits more than others (ie, the highly educated), and others a disproportionate proportion of the costs (everyone else).
The solution isn't more of what caused the problem in the first place.
I’m not sure the fact that only 10% of society joins tight-knit is contra the spirit of fukuyama’s thesis. I think it’s the feature. I think you have two levels: society-wide, and community. Flirting with the old gods is flirting with society wide organizing around those old values. In liberalism, the fact that, given the freedom to join, hardly anyone does, is the Point.
I'm part of the so-called "serious Christianity" type of community. And it's pretty great, but yeah, we don't have the time or resources to fulfil some of our wildest ambitions. We'd love to plant a Christian school and teach classical Christian education. We'd love to get more serious about catechesis of adults too. We have all these big ideas and visions for what we want.
But we all have full time jobs, limited budgets and volunteers. Everything we do is constrained by the current order of things. Give us a post work society with UBI and we can live our dreams and establish exactly the kind of community that we want to have.
Economics is one barrier, but I think this article doesn’t fully appreciate the difficulty of cultural entrepreneurship. Most people in the US don’t want to be Amish or Ultra-Orthodox Jews: yes, there’s strong community, but it’s at the cost of a bunch of rituals and beliefs that most Americans want no part of. For someone to take a look at mainstream culture and come up with an alternative, they need to invent:
* something rich and complex enough to build a community around
* something distinct enough that there are clear outgroup/ingroup differentiators — without some amount of costly signal, it’s too hard to form enough of an external membrane with the rest of society
* something cool, that speaks to a need / desire that peers want — switching community is a life-altering decision so there needs to be some real pull
Then, once invented, it needs to be proselytized, and get past the vulnerable startup stage to achieve critical mass.
I think very very few people are up for this. Rationalism is a great example of a success story, and honestly if it weren’t for HPMOR being a breakout hit, I suspect it wouldn’t have gotten enough traction
If it's just economics, then the costs of not incentivizing community (depression, anxiety, burnout, suicide, and all the unhealthy behaviors like addictions, smoking, drinking, being sedentary and eating bad) should be enough that societies have to act. In Public Health there's a growing consensus on social prescribing, where your GP or other specialists can help you find communities. Yet some kind of recommender service with good coverage is missing, although some are gaining traction