Communes (and my run-away-to-the-forest idea above) will never work without the proper cultural education and social rules to prevent that kind of behavior. To relearn how to build a socially sustainable culture, we should look to cultures that have been around for thousands of years and have done it successfully. It would be a really hard transition because it requires a complete restructuring of how we view other people and how we relate to them. Which, honestly, I think we should be doing anyway, commune or not.
I absolutely agree with you and I’d love to be able to pack up and move to a commune tomorrow. Problem is that some people just seem to thrive on power and drama.
If it wasn’t so incredibly unethical, I’d love to see what’d happen if some children were raised in a commune with minimal interaction from outside adults. I wonder how their culture and language would develop and to see whether or not they form a society similar to our society or if they manage to make a sustainable commune.
We can just look to indigenous cultures for this. They’ve been doing it for tens of thousands of years before being colonized. Like, indigenous Australian cultures sustained themselves for 60k-100k years without ruining their environment while also living in commune-type societies. Native North/South Americans did it too. We can hand off our kids to untouched/minimally touched cultures to learn how to relate to the environment and each other. There will always be human conflict. It’s how we handle that conflict that we need to learn again, and how to appropriately handle conflict needs to be retaught by those who know how to do it.
Very true, though I’m more interested in how a completely new culture would develop. There’s absolutely no way I can think of that would allow the children to be completely unaffected by existing adults since they can’t exactly feed themselves, but I really wonder what would happen.
Communes (and my run-away-to-the-forest idea above) will never work without the proper cultural education and social rules to prevent that kind of behavior. To relearn how to build a socially sustainable culture, we should look to cultures that have been around for thousands of years and have done it successfully. It would be a really hard transition because it requires a complete restructuring of how we view other people and how we relate to them. Which, honestly, I think we should be doing anyway, commune or not.
I absolutely agree with you and I’d love to be able to pack up and move to a commune tomorrow. Problem is that some people just seem to thrive on power and drama.
If it wasn’t so incredibly unethical, I’d love to see what’d happen if some children were raised in a commune with minimal interaction from outside adults. I wonder how their culture and language would develop and to see whether or not they form a society similar to our society or if they manage to make a sustainable commune.
We can just look to indigenous cultures for this. They’ve been doing it for tens of thousands of years before being colonized. Like, indigenous Australian cultures sustained themselves for 60k-100k years without ruining their environment while also living in commune-type societies. Native North/South Americans did it too. We can hand off our kids to untouched/minimally touched cultures to learn how to relate to the environment and each other. There will always be human conflict. It’s how we handle that conflict that we need to learn again, and how to appropriately handle conflict needs to be retaught by those who know how to do it.
Very true, though I’m more interested in how a completely new culture would develop. There’s absolutely no way I can think of that would allow the children to be completely unaffected by existing adults since they can’t exactly feed themselves, but I really wonder what would happen.
It’s an interesting thought experiment!