So it is this strange recurring paradox of modern
life, really. You could be standing on a packed
subway car during rush hour. Oh, yeah. We all
know that feeling. Right, like you are literally
shoulder to shoulder with 50 other human beings
breathing the exact same recycled air and somehow
you still feel completely utterly isolated. Yeah,
and be in isolation. It's a real thing. Exactly.
I mean, the modern city is a marvel of engineering,
sure. But for a lot of people, that isolation
carries a heavy physical weight. And if you are
listening to this right now and you have ever
felt that weight, you have probably entertained
the daydream. The big daydream. Everyone has
it at some point. You know the one. selling everything,
buying a massive plot of land somewhere, and
just living in a closed loop with a group of
close like -minded people. Right, because it's
a fundamentally human daydream, honestly. I mean,
we are hard -wired to crave deep connection and
a shared, tangible purpose. But for the vast
majority of us, that thought experiment just
terminates the exact moment the train doors open,
right? You have to swipe your badge at the office.
We kind of just accept the isolation as the cost
of doing business in the modern world. We do.
But for today's Deep Dive, we're looking at the
people who didn't stop at the daydream. So welcome
to the Deep Dive. Today, we are immersing ourselves
entirely in the concept, the mechanics, and really
the psychology of intentional communities. It
is such a fascinating topic. It really is. And
our mission here is to look way past the pop
culture stereotypes you might have in your head.
We want to understand how you actually go about
radically redesigning human coexistence. you
know, from the ground up. Because when you dig
into the data and the historical frameworks we're
analyzing today, you quickly realize this is
not it's not some fringe hobby or a fleeting
generational phase. Right. It's not just a phase.
Exactly. It's a persistent structural phenomenon.
Basically, throughout history, whenever a society
reaches a certain threshold of complexity or
fragmentation, a subset of people will actively
try to build an alternative operating system
for human society. I love that framing. I actually
think of it like this. If the way most of us
live right now, you know, fragmented housing,
separate bank accounts, nuclear families walled
off from each other, if that is the default factory
setting on your smartphone, an intentional community
is a custom built app. Oh, that's a great analogy.
Right, right. It is software engineered for very
specific human needs that the default setting
just ignores. But to understand that app, we
really have to strip away the baggage of the
word commune. Yes, definitely. Because most people
hear that and immediately picture like a 1960s
tie -dye dropout culture. Yeah. But... The sociological
reality we're looking at is vastly broader and
much, much older. Oh, far older. I mean, the
academic definition of an intentional community
is just a voluntary residential community designed
to foster a high degree of social cohesion. And
if we look at the historical timeline, the 1960s
are just a blip. For example, ashrams, functioning
as these highly structured spiritual and social
communities in India, they were established around
1500 BCE. Wait. 1500 BCE. Yeah. And Buddhist
monasteries utilized really similar cohesive
models around 500 BCE. So this is ancient. That
is wild. And actually, my personal favorite historical
curveball from the source text, Pythagoras. Oh,
yes, the math guy. Right. The guy who tortured
us all in high school geometry. He actually founded
a strict intellectual vegetarian commune in southern
Italy around 525 BCE. It's so funny to think
about. I know. He wasn't just doing math. He
was literally engineering a micro society based
on shared philosophical assets and rigid dietary
laws. Which really demonstrates that the impulse
isn't just about, you know, escaping to farm
the land. In fact, modern demographic data from
the Fellowship for Intentional Community shows
something really surprising. What's that? Well,
while 54 % of these communities are rural, a
massive 28 % are strictly urban, with another
10 % operating as a mix of both. Wow. Almost
30 % in cities. Yeah. They are tackling poverty,
consumerism, or just the logistical nightmare
of modern living right in the middle of our urban
centers. But I mean, if these groups are just
trying to build a better, more efficient social
unit, why is there so much hostility toward them
from the outside? Like the label utopian community
is often thrown at them as an insult, right?
And many of these groups fiercely reject that
term. They do because, you know, Utopia implies
a flawless, friction -free society. When mainstream
culture calls a project utopian, it is usually
just a polite way of dismissing it as hopelessly
naive. Ah, I see. Like, oh, look at those naive
utopians. Exactly. But the reality of building
these communities is the exact opposite of friction
-free. The mechanics of sharing a life, an economy,
and a living space with dozens of other people
requires a grueling amount of daily governance.
Grewing is probably the right word. Right. They
aren't escaping the friction of human relationships.
They are actively choosing a much more intense,
concentrated type of friction. Well, let's get
into the mechanics of that friction then. Because
this is where the theory kind of hits the brick
wall of human nature. Oh, absolutely. If you
put 50 people in a shared space, how do they
actually govern themselves without it just devolving
into a localized civil war? The data in our sources
shows 64 % use democratic forms of governance,
which usually means consensus decision -making.
Yes, consensus is huge! And only about 9 % are
strictly hierarchical. But... Honestly, consensus
sounds incredibly paralyzing. Does that mean
50 people have to unanimously agree on who cleans
the gutters or what brand of flour to buy? In
many cases, yes. And that is exactly why the
friction is so intense, because consensus isn't
just a simple majority vote where 51 % wins and
the rest just have to deal with it. True consensus
requires working through an issue until every
single person can at least tolerate the decision.
It requires endless meetings, immense emotional
labor, and just this willingness to constantly
process group dynamics. That sounds exhausting.
It is. You remove the formal bureaucracy of a
boss or a landlord, but you replace it with the
heavy, inescapable weight of social pressure
and peer accountability. And the financial mechanics
have to make that pressure even heavier. Like,
the source text notes that if a group wants to
be officially recognized as a commune by the
Fellowship for Intentional Community, they have
to implement 100 % income sharing. The common
purse. Yes. That is the ultimate crucible. Everyone's
outside income, every single paycheck, goes into
a single collective pot. I am trying to picture
the reality of that. You work a 40 -hour week,
you hand over your entire paycheck to a communal
committee, and then if your boots wear out, you
have to formally request funds from the group
to buy a new pair. Exactly. That level of financial
vulnerability requires absolute unshakable trust.
And it ties perfectly into the criteria laid
out in the German text we look at, das Kommunibuch.
Right, which has very specific definitions. Yeah,
it defines communes not just by shared property,
but by the communalization of housework, childcare,
and low ecological footprints. You are literally
sharing everything. Which inevitably leads to
power struggles, even in a system designed to
have no leaders. Sociologist Benjamin Zablocki
actually studied this extensively in 1960s and
70s hippie communes. Oh, what did he find? He
identified a very specific structural flaw. It
was this intense tension between the original
family, meaning the founders, and the new arrivals.
Oh, that makes total psychological sense. Yeah.
Going back to the custom analogy, you have the
coders. who built the app from scratch pouring
their blood and sweat into it. And then you have
the users who just downloaded it yesterday and
are already complaining about the user interface.
Even if you claim everyone is equal and there
are no titles, the founders are going to hold
immense informal power simply because they wrote
the unwritten rules. Exactly. Zablocki noted
that because these groups were consciously anti
-bureaucratic, they lacked formal mechanisms
to resolve disputes. So no HR department. Right.
When you have no HR and no legal contracts, simple
disagreements turn into deeply personal existential
crises. Throw in media attention, the pressure
of keeping a farm running, or the incredibly
messy reality of shared sexual or romantic relationships.
Oh yeah, that'll do it. Yeah. That social software
often crashes. Hard. So if consensus is that
emotionally exhausting and fragile, What happens
when someone tries to build a community with
absolute, rigid, top -down control? Let's look
at the real -world experiments, because the historical
record is full of wild triumphs and spectacular,
catastrophic failures. Yes, and 1831 Ireland
is the perfect example of a failure. The Raleighina
State. It perfectly illustrates how vulnerable
these isolated systems are to external forces.
So you had an Irish landlord named John Vandelaar
who teamed up with an English socialist named
Edward Thomas Craig. Quite the duo. Right. And
they decided to engineer a perfectly controlled
agricultural commune. And the mechanics of this
place are fascinating. They completely eliminated
traditional money to ensure people couldn't hoard
wealth or buy alcohol. A completely closed system.
Yeah. They created a closed loop economy using
only localized credit notes that could be spent
at the commune shop. They banned tobacco, banned
gambling, and enforced grueling 12 -hour work
days. Which sounds punishing. It does. But surprisingly,
it worked. For two years, they actually prospered,
lived peacefully, and even absorbed 29 new members.
It was a highly functional machine, but then
in 1833, the entire community collapsed overnight.
just completely fell apart. And it wasn't because
the credit note system failed or because the
workers rebelled against the 12 hour days. It
collapsed because the founder, John Vandeler,
had a secret gambling addiction. Wow. Yeah, he
lost his entire estate, the actual land the commune
was built on in a card game in Dublin. It is
the ultimate cautionary tale. The very vice he
strictly outlawed inside the commune was the
exact thing that destroyed it from the outside.
It is so similar to a modern Silicon Valley startup.
You can have a brilliant disruptive product,
but if the founder has a fatal personal flaw,
the entire company goes up in smoke. Talk about
the failures because there are communities that
figure out how to patch their social software
and actually scale. Definitely. Moora in Australia
is a phenomenal example of longevity. They are
a cooperative community that has been operating
entirely off the public electricity grid since
1974. Since 1974. That's incredible. They built
their own localized infrastructure and have maintained
the governance required to sustain it for half
a century. And if you want to see what happens
when that infrastructure scales up, look at the
Findhorn Ecovillage in Scotland. Oh, Findhorn
is a great example. We are talking about over
400 people living together. They aren't just
surviving off the grid. They engineered their
own wind turbine system that generates so much
power. They are a net exporter of electricity
back to the mainstream grid. That is seriously
impressive. It is. Then you have places in the
US like Twin Oaks. surviving through 100 % income
sharing since 1967, and the Bruderhof communities
operating since 1954. And what's also crucial
to note is how these models adapt over time.
Take the kibbutzim in Israel, for example. Right.
Historically, we picture them as strictly agricultural
rural settlements, but the demographic data shows
a major structural shift toward urban kibbutzim.
Urban kibbutzim. Yes. These are smaller, highly
cohesive, sometimes anarchists leaning communes
operating inside dense city centers. Instead
of farming crops together, their shared labor
is focused on urban education, community organizing,
and social change. They literally adapted the
intentional model to the modern urban landscape.
That's fascinating. Now I want to pause here
for a second and be incredibly clear with you,
the listener, as we transition to this next section.
Yes, this is important context. We are about
to examine some extreme historical and modern
edge cases of intentional communities. The historical
record we are analyzing contains highly politically
charged material. We are simply reporting the
structural facts as they are documented in the
sociological data to demonstrate the absolute
furthest extremes of human ideology. Exactly.
We are not endorsing any of these viewpoints,
whether left -wing or right -wing. Our goal is
strictly to look at how the mechanics of communal
living are utilized across the spectrum. Right.
Because what the sociology reveals is that An
intentional community, meaning a physically isolated,
socially cohesive group with a shared reality,
is fundamentally a neutral vessel. A neutral
vessel. Yeah. The structure itself has no inherent
morality. It can be filled with literally any
ideology imaginable, from radical egalitarianism
to strict ethno -nationalism. Well, let's start
with the historical extremes in Imperial Russia.
Following the 1917 revolutions, a network of
communities known as the Tolstoyans rapidly proliferated.
Based on Leo Tolstoy, right? Yes. They built
their settlements based on his philosophical
and pacifist teachings. They were heavily agricultural,
vegetarian, and deeply committed to nonviolence
and self -reliance. But their structural independence
made them a massive target. When the Soviet Union
began its aggressive campaigns of state collectivization
and ideological purges in the late 1920s, the
independent Tolstoyan communities were viewed
as a threat to state control. Because they wouldn't
assimilate. Right. The historical record shows
they were systematically crushed. Leaders were
subjected to show trials, many were liquidated
or sent to the Gulag prison camps, and the lucky
ones managed to flee to Siberia or emigrate to
Canada. So tragic. The state simply could not
tolerate a closed -loop society operating outside
its parameters. So you have a pacifist community
utterly eradicated by the mainstream state. If
we look at the modern spectrum, the data points
to a highly controversial town in South Africa
called Orania, which was founded in 1991. Yes.
And Orania utilizes the exact same mechanisms
of intentional isolation, but for a radically
different ideological purpose. It was founded
exclusively for white Afrikaners. OK. Their explicit
stated goal is to create a secure cultural stronghold
for the Afrikaner minority, preserving their
language and heritage completely separate from
the rest of South Africa. Africa. And the mechanics
of how they enforce that isolation are rigorous.
It is built on strict self -sufficiency. They
employ only Africaners, doing all their own manual
labor, which is a significant departure from
historical norms in the region. Right. They handle
everything internally. They even establish their
own cooperative bank and print their own local
currency, the aura, to keep capital circulating
strictly within the community. And according
to the recent demographic data, the model is
scaling. By 2022, their population had reached
2 ,500 people, which was a 55 % increase from
just four years prior. It is a striking example
of structural isolation. And you see similar
mechanisms of isolation used for physical survival
in the United States, too. Well, like the freedom
colonies. Exactly. Following the abolition of
slavery, freed slaves established freedom colonies.
isolated, intentionally closed enclaves where
they could build their own economies, govern
themselves, and most importantly, live safe from
the pervasive threat of racist violence in the
broader society. Looking at all these examples
side by side, you know, the Tolstoyans fleeing
state purges, Irania isolating to preserve a
specific ethnic culture, freedom colonies forming
a fortress against physical violence, it raises
a really profound question. It really does. Are
intentional communities fundamentally a tool
for solving the problems of mainstream society
by modeling a better way to live? Or are they
ultimately just a mechanism for escaping and
isolating from a world these groups simply refuse
to deal with? That is the defining paradox of
this entire field of study, because it is both.
Both, yeah. Some communities are undeniably outward
-facing, like the urban kibitzim we mentioned
or the Simon community in London, which tackles
homelessness by having volunteers and homeless
individuals live and run businesses together.
They are deeply engaged in solving broader societal
decay. They want to fix the world. But the others.
But others are absolutely escapist. They draw
a hard, impenetrable line in the sand and declare
the outside world unfixable. But it's really
important to recognize that the very act of escaping
requires resources. That's a good point. Sociologist
Damon R. Bach noted that during the 1960s, minority
and low -income individuals largely avoided hippie
communes because they simply couldn't afford
to embrace voluntary poverty. Right. You have
to have something to drop out of. Exactly. already
marginalized, dropping out of society isn't some
romantic adventure, it's an active threat to
your survival. So the ability to build that wall
and escape is historically a significant privilege.
The privilege of choosing to drop out. That adds
a massive layer of complexity to the daydream.
It really does. Well let's pull all these threads
together. We have covered an immense amount of
ground today. From the 1500 BCE ashrams and Pythagoras's
intellectual geometry cult, to the grueling reality
of 100 % income sharing, off -grid wind farms,
and ideologically driven enclaves minting their
own currency. It's a vast spectrum. But if there
is a central unifying takeaway from all of this
sociological data, it is that humans possess
a relentless, enduring urge to redraw the boundaries
of what constitutes family. society. We really
do. When the default systems of the mainstream
culture fail to provide safety, meaning, or economic
stability, we will inevitably try to engineer
our own environments. You will always try to
hack the operating system. And that is exactly
what I want you, the listener, to reflect on
right now. Yeah. Take a hard look at your own
living situation, the neighborhood you reside
in. the way you interact or actively avoid interacting
with your neighbors. Yeah, consider your own
boundaries. Think about how you share or hoard
your resources. How much of your daily life is
a truly intentional choice? And how much are
you simply running on the default factory setting
of modern isolation? Because it fundamentally
comes down to how consciously we are participating
in the social structures that dictate our lives.
Absolutely. But before we wrap up this deep dive,
there is one final incredibly provocative concept
buried deep in the historical data that we have
in touched on yet. Oh this is a good one. And
it completely flips this entire conversation
on its head. It really forces you to redefine
the word intentional because the historical records
highlight that the planned corporate developments
in the United States during the early 1900s,
the classic company towns, technically meet the
structural criteria of intentional communities.
Think about the mechanics of that. A corporation
buys a massive plot of land, builds comfortable
housing, sets up the grocery stores, builds the
schools, and dictates the social rules. Everything
is planned. Right. The stated aspiration was
to provide a perfect, harmonious living environment.
But the underlying structural goal was to ensure
a highly managed, sober, captive, and perfectly
stable workforce. The structure is literally
identical to a commune. The only difference is
who holds the power at the top of the hierarchy.
Exactly. We usually romanticize intentional communities
as an act of rebellion, a way to stick it to
the system and live freely on your own terms.
But what if the ultimate intentional community
of the future isn't a hippie commune in the woods
or a sustainable wind -powered eco -village?
It's a chilling thought. What if the most successful
Friction -free, perfectly structured, intentional
community of tomorrow is a closed loop company
town designed from the ground up by your employer.
So the next time you were standing on that crowded,
isolating subway car, dreaming of escaping to
a place where everything is planned, everyone
shares a single purpose, and the friction of
modern life is engineered away. Just be careful
what you wish for. Exactly. Just make sure you
know exactly who is writing the code for that
app.