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.

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.