Damanhur’s mock battles prevent the kind of burn-out you find when the most empathetic people in a community get tasked with dealing with the emotional needs of others, putting a lot a strain on the shoulders of a few.

The bottom line is that many intentional communities exist because of wealthy patrons and benefactors, and courting philanthropy and start-up capital is part of the job of charismatic founders.

she writes about her time cutting and baling hay, making butter, driving a tractor, cutting firewood, baking bread, and taking care of children, animals and the wellbeing of her peers.

When the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen established New Harmony in 1825, on 20,000 acres in Indiana, he attracted an enthusiastic following, gaining more than 800 members in just a little over six weeks.

the more relevant drivers that cause many communities to unravel sound more like the challenges afflicting any organisation today: capital constraints, burn-out, conflict over private property and resource management, poor systems of conflict mediation, factionalism, founder problems, reputation management, skills shortage, and failure to attract new talent or entice subsequent generations.

the irony is that many of the administrative and managerial forces that individuals are running away from within mainstream society are exactly the organisational tools that would make intentional communities more resilient:

attrition rates for intentional communities are not all that different from many other types of human endeavour.

Generally, intentional communities fail at a rate slightly higher than that of most start-ups. Only a handful of communities founded in the US during the 19th century’s ‘golden age of communities’ lasted beyond a century; most folded in a matter of months. This golden age birthed more than 100 experimental communities, with more than 100,000 members in total who, according to the historian Mark Holloway in Heavens on Earth (1951)

“If everyone did it the world would be a better place.”

these kinds of issues are systemic and intrinsic and maybe even foundational to intentional communities.

478 intentional communities since the 1820s have now shrunk to 112 worldwide in the last 30 years)

how do you how do you think about what that community looks like and how you communicate that because in many senses you could say obviously you're hoping to build utopia 00:09:30 not dystopia right but but utopia and dystopia are different things with different people right and you could start out on this journey with uh with everyone saying we're going 00:09:42 to go to here point point a and then actually they decide their life changes they have a family or whatever they want to go over here and they put a lot of time into this or and equally point a could actually end up not looking like what they want to to be 00:09:55 part of how are you managing that journey for the people as part of the path

I   grew up at Esalen and all these crazy new age-ey  sort of places, and I can tell you that I have   00:54:38 seen every flavor of self-help and personal  development that you could shake a stick at.   And none of them work. They all breed assholes.  I mean, I'm sorry, but if you're an asshole,   there's no way around it. Nothing's going to fix  you. And if you're not an asshole, then everything   is going to make you less of an asshole. So the reason that's important is that there's   00:55:02 a lot of pressure on how people should live, how  they should think, how they should be, how they   should feel. And this top-down instructional of  telling people how to live, think and feel is,   I think, a completely un-ecological process that  is interrupting the possibilities

I can tell you that   my experience is that intentional communities  are not only not fun, but a disaster.   00:51:53 And one of the reasons they're both not fun and  a disaster is that they have a mission statement.   They already know where they're going and there's  some abstracted map-like idea that everyone thinks   that they're cohering to. But then it turns  out that everyone actually interpreted that   differently and the way they interpreted it  yesterday changed. And so that thing becomes   00:52:16 the territory on which you are in polarity with  each other and not the thing that you agree about.   The thing you fight about most is the mission  statement.

They work, they go to the pub and while they share cooking duties they’re not against ordering a takeaway on a Friday night. ‘I would argue that quite often intentional communities reflect the period in which they were formed,’ explains Kirsten Stevens-Wood, a senior lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University and lead for the Intentional Communities Research Group.

According to a study published last year by researchers at the University of California San Diego, more than three-quarters of American adults now experience moderate to high levels of loneliness — rates that have more than doubled over the last 50 years. Despite rising housing costs across the country, more Americans are living alone today than ever before. As Boone Wheeler, a 33-year-old member of East Wind, told me, “There are literal health consequences to loneliness: Your quality of life goes down due to lack of community — you will die sooner.”

IN 2017 BJORN GRINDE and Ranghild Bang Nes, researchers with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, co-authored a paper on the quality of life among North Americans living in intentional communities. Along with David Sloan Wilson, director of the evolutionary studies program at Binghamton University, and Ian MacDonald, a graduate assistant, they contacted more than 1,000 people living in 174 communities across the U.S. and Canada and asked them to rate their happiness level on the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), a globally recognized measurement tool. They compared these results to a widely cited 2008 study by the psychologists William Pavot and Ed Diener, which surveyed past studies that used the scale to analyze 31 disparate populations — including Dutch adults, French-Canadian university students and the Inuit of northern Greenland — and discovered that members of intentional communities scored higher than 30 of the 31 groups. Living in an intentional community, the authors concluded, “appears to offer a life less in discord with the nature of being human compared to mainstream society.” They then hypothesized why that might be: “One, social connections; two, sense of meaning; and three, closeness to nature.”