Communities that Abide—Part I

Married to the Sea
“Everyone”

In thinking through where we are and what awaits us, there is a very basic, simple, obvious question we can ask: Does our society work for us or against us? The US, regarded as a single community, that is; does it still function as such? Does it provide safety, security, a sense of belonging, freedom from necessity and want, meaningful opportunities to care for others, and to be cared for in return? Or has it become a cold, savage, alienating place watched over by the ubiquitous surveillance state and held together by “law and order” and the implicit threat of violence?
Has it become a place where meaningful, satisfying work has become a rarity, and where a lifetime of servitude and workaday drudgery is coerced using the threat of marginalization and exclusion? Does it share our values, or does it willfully ignore them, squandering the taxes we pay on war toys that kill innocents, on enabling and subsidizing environmental destruction, on perpetuating an overbearing and intrusive police state in the name of security, and so on and so forth? And if that turns out to be the case, the next basic, simple, obvious question to ask is, What might we do about it? Lobby the government? Well, it's not a particularly popular government: a 2011 Gallup poll determined that the US Congress is less popular than King George was in the colonial days. That same year Washington Post wrote that it is less popular than either communism or Nixon during the Watergate scandal. Public Policy Polling went even further; according to them, Congress is less popular than cockroaches, lice, root canals, colonoscopies, traffic jams, used car salesmen or Genghis Khan!

Taken as a whole, as a single community, the US is doing rather poorly. Yes, it still leads the world in propaganda, which tends to mask a lot of its problems, but beyond that the picture is not pretty. Among the world's developed nations, the US leads in many categories in which one would rather not lead, such as obesity, divorce rate, child abuse death, teen-age pregnancy, incarceration rate, homicide rate, percentage of children brought up fatherless and rate of sexually transmitted disease infection. It leads the world in fear, stress, anger and the use of antidepressants and antipsychotic medications. Suicide is the number one cause of injury death, having surpassed the also plentiful car accidents and fatal gunshot wounds. More US soldiers kill themselves than die in combat. A third of all employees suffer from chronic debilitating stress; half experience stress that causes insomnia, anxiety and depression; more and more people find the workplace so unpleasant that they are choosing to opt out of the workforce altogether, finding a much lower standard of living to be an acceptable tradeoff.

The myriad social problems are so severe and so entrenched that, at this rate, any attempts to “solve” them would border on quixotic. Yes, you could switch from voting for a louse to voting for a cockroach, but is that really going to help? You could even “throw away your vote” on a third-party maggot. But you would still be voting for an American politician, even though you know what they are all like. A different and increasingly popular response is to flee to a happier land, but emigration is traumatic and painful and often causes damage to both self and community. Many of the social problems in the US stem from the fact that it is “a land of immigrants,” which is to say, a land of uprooted, lost souls. But there is another response: escape internally but remain in place by forming insular, separatist communities, with different rationales, sets of standards and codes of behavior from the surrounding society, in order to achieve better outcomes for their members. This approach is the one that is being embraced by more and more people.

Voluntary subcultures are often formed because of dissatisfaction with society at large, and the reasons for dissatisfaction are many. Just one example: over half of the recent college and university graduates are now either working in jobs that do not require a degree, or are unemployed or underemployed. An entire generation (or two) of young people is finding that their society has led them down a garden path to debt slavery, with no fulfilling, satisfying, productive role for them to play. Given the chance, why would they not want to opt out of it? As times goes on and nothing changes for the better, their dissatisfaction grows, and we should expect their desire to opt out to only increase.

Already the level of dissatisfaction in the US is such that some are describing it as a “pre-revolutionary sentiment.” For the time being it is being masked by various government hand-outs which are keeping the populace placated: over 50 million are now on food stamps and record numbers are on disability, supplemental security income and other government aid. The populace is kept placated with cheap or free food and public spectacles designed to reassure them: Rome's “bread and circuses” has been replaced with food stamps, television and the Internet. But it must be understood that this system is now being perpetuated by nothing more than money-printing and endless piling on of government debt: the federal government spends a third more than it collects in taxes. This is not a scheme that can continue in perpetuity, and although nobody can predict with any accuracy when it will stop working, we need to prepare for the day when it does.

As we prepare, we must understand two things. The first is that little can be achieved by acting alone or as nuclear families; what is needed is a band, a clan, a tribe. The second is that we must think small: within the limits of Dunbar's number, which is somewhere between 100 and 230 individuals, and is commonly taken to be around 150. This number is based on the cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable personal relationships. Indeed, throughout much of human history, people lived in groups that rarely exceeded Dunbar's number. Larger groups are possible, but only at great expense, either in the form of exorbitant amounts of time expended on “social grooming” (a.k.a. politics) or through the imposition of authoritarian, hierarchical structures which tend to be very inefficient. Thus, larger groups are, by their very nature, less efficient, squandering resources on organizational maintenance, which smaller groups avoid. The number 150 is ubiquitous. It is the typical size of a farming village, the splitting point for a Hutterite colony, the ideal size for a military unit, and (in my experience) the point at which a tech start-up company ceases to be a start-up, becoming burdened with layers of middle management, human resources specialists, marketing and other corporate bloat. Even at Dunbar's number, cohesion requires that 42% or so of the time be devoted to “social grooming.”

It is important to note that even at such small numbers a well-designed community can provide everything its members need: housing, nutrition, education, medicine, entertainment, companionship, social security and, perhaps most important of all, a sense of belonging. To people who live with the feeling that they belong to a cohesive community, where each member puts the interests of the whole ahead of their own individual interest, this is an incredible source of power. Social security, not in the sense of receiving a promised check from an anonymous institution, but in the sense of being tied in with the people around you through an informal web of obligations of mutual self-help, is equally important. These services may seem subpar from the point of view of first-world standards, but at a time when the promise of such standards rings increasingly hollow for much of the population, this point seems increasingly moot.

A small community of this sort inevitably sets limits on most things, including one's individuality, but this too has a positive side. People have a strong psychological need to have well-defined limits within which to express their individuality. Lack of limits produces anomie, or loss of self. A strong, healthy sense of self requires that one's individuality be constrained by the needs of others. Without such constraints, expressions of individuality are reduced to meaningless gestures, self-indulgent peculiarities, expressions of personal idiosyncrasy or consumer preference. What's worse, the lack of meaningful social constraints often makes one feel so socially insecure that it paradoxically gives rise to a compulsive, extreme conformism. Thus we have people who have few close friends or family and who react to this rootlessness by compulsively cultivating a nondescript persona, expressing preferences for popular products and sports teams, dressing to blend in and doing everything they can to avoid awkward holes in their résumé, thus becoming virtual slaves to a fictional self that “fits in” and “belongs” and can make “fast friends,” making it possible for them to function within, and remain dependent upon, a transient social environment.

But such dependence is becoming a serious liability. The impersonal systems on which this transient social environment depends are coming unglued. Social security is a broken promise: the Social Security trust fund has been emptied out, and the unfunded liabilities are in the trillions—well in excess of all household wealth. Other parts of the system have turned predatory: from the student loan crisis, to medical bankruptcies, to the scam that is real estate, which has resulted in record homelessness alongside a record number of empty houses—all of these developments undermine both the system and the individual who depends on it. Of course, most of the individuals have been undermined already—by a system that is designed to insert commerce, finance and government between every two people, making them into pseudo-“rugged individuals” who are, in fact, abjectly dependent on commercial and government services for their very survival.

How do we respond in order to avoid falling prey to an increasingly desperate and predatory system? As individuals, we are almost completely powerless. We can attempt to respond as families, but most families are small and weak, built on airy notions of romantic and erotic love rather than the solid foundations of sacred duty, family honor and tribal responsibility. Strong and cohesive extended families have become something of a rarity, to be found among recent immigrant groups and in various small ethnic and religious enclaves. We can attempt to respond as informal, voluntary, casual groups, centered around community gardens and other such initiatives, but these are unlikely to ever evolve into the sorts of cohesive communities that can provide everything their members need (housing, nutrition, education, medicine, entertainment, companionship, social security and a strong sense of belonging). What is needed is more of a total system based on an alternative living arrangement. When facing adversity, such a system can form spontaneously around a church, a club, a campground and other sorts of venues. How exactly that happens is something of a mystery, but it seems that the impetus for its formation tends to be some sort of ordeal. Those who go through the ordeal together and survive are transformed by the experience, bonding with each other so strongly that everyone else—sometimes even their own families, and sometimes even their own previous identities—recede into the background or disappear altogether. This is no easy trick, but apparently it does happen.

It may surprise some of you to learn that such communities do exist, right now, right here in the US. Some of them are relatively well-known, others disguise who they are and hide in plain sight. They are as varied as the accidents that brought them into being, but they also possess a set of commonalities that are nothing short of stunning. I have looked at a number of them, and though they are as different as groups of humans can be, from a certain level of abstraction they all look the same. To exclude all the failed experiments, the ones I looked at are the ones that have been around for a while—a century at least, preferably a few centuries, and this means that they are all pre-modern (and, being highly resistant to altering their ways, are very likely to remain so). Their attitudes toward gender equality, rights of sexual minorities, right to education, ethnic diversity or freedom of religion may, to our modern way of thinking, seem oppressive or decidedly outdated.

What this means is that it would be impolitic to propose that any of these communities can directly serve as models. But this does not render their example any less useful, because the commonalities that unite them have nothing to do with their attitudes toward gender or religion. There are some limitations that are due to their small size; for instance, a community of a hundred or so people, with much of their attention devoted to their children and to the breeding couples which sustain their numbers, is unlikely to have a particularly active gay scene. On the other hand, it is unclear what practical constraint, if any, determines the extent of gender specialization, beyond the obvious fact that women tend to be more involved with the care of young children. Arrangements that have stood the test of time should not be dismissed out of hand simply because they seem old-fashioned; nor should they be adhered to slavishly for the sake of blindly perpetuating customs or traditions, especially if these customs and traditions seem alien and strange. But it must be kept in mind that there is an entire bookshelf of books about utopian communities that were based on various progressive principles, and the vast majority of them did not outlast the generation of their founders. Communities that abide tend to be socially conservative, and while this is hardly a candidate for a general principle, nor is it a tendency that we should allow ourselves to blithely overlook.

Moreover, it is important to keep in mind is that the rules by which these separatist, insular communities choose to operate are set by them, not by us, making our opinions of them about as highly irrelevant as opinions can ever be. They are not the ones with a problem and we are not the ones with a solution; thus, they have no reason to be interested in us, but we have a reason to be interested in them. While there is is no reason for any of us to accept and be bound by any of their rules, the ones that they all tend to have in common are interesting because they probably have a lot to do with why these groups succeed, and we'd be foolish to ignore them. It is these commonalities that we will focus on next.