I (and Yana Ludwig and Paxus, at least) often discourage people from trying to start communities. It’s a lot of work and usually doesn’t work out the way you expected. Often it just doesn’t work out.
But every community that’s up and running was started by someone (and usually a few folks) that was (or were) crazy enough to try.
I’m currently living in a very small community in western MA that is on its third attempt to get up and running. I’ve been talking with folks starting an ecovillage in Vermont (where they are at least discussing income-sharing) as well as someone in a collective in central MA where everyone else is moving out and they are needing to start all over. Plus, I’m thrilled that Serenity Solidarity has moved up to New York state and they are starting up on land near Albany. I’m very excited about people starting or trying to revive communities. I just want folks to realize what a hard task they are taking on.
Or maybe I shouldn’t emphasize this. Maybe some of the communities that exist wouldn’t have happened if the founders had realized what they were in for.
Creating an income-sharing community that lasts is extra hard. Right now the basic ones I know of are the three Kat Kinkade communities (ie, Kat was one of the founders of each of them): Twin Oaks (57 years), East Wind (50), and Acorn (31). (Also, Alpha Farm, which chose not to be part of the FEC.)
I posted a question about why they lasted when others haven’t and I got well over thirty comments and over eight hundred views. (Usually I think we are doing well if we get over a hundred views and phenomenal if we get over three hundred.) Raines Cohen, a cohousing maven, pointed out in a comment that there were many cohousing communities that are now over thirty years old. I do think it’s easier to create lasting cohousing places and co-op houses than to attempt to start an income-sharing community that makes it.
But we need to have people who are willing to do the work to start some. I often quote the made up (but I suspect fairly accurate) statistic that 90% of new communities fail. My take is that we need to start a hundred new communities–that way, we will probably end up with ten new ones that succeed.
However, I think that many new communities don’t last because the people starting them don’t know what they need to do in order to succeed. That’s the reason I write so much about starting communities on this blog–and the reason folks like Yana Ludwig and Diana Leafe Christian write so much and the Foundation for Intentional Community offers so many courses and resources. (If you’re starting a community, I can’t imagine a better resource to start out with than ic.org –also, if you are looking for folks, you might want to also check out icmatch.org )
In spite of trying to discourage folks from trying to start communities, if you are determined to do it, we all want you to succeed. It’s a foolish endeavor, but I think it’s the best kind of foolishness.
One of the central defining characteristics of an intentional community is that the people who live at the place select the new members. This is not done by a real estate agent or some faceless credit check bureau. This intentionality comes at a cost, you have to know what you want and you have to know how to interview prospective members so your membership process works well. I recommend three pieces to this approach:
Deal breakers – if they are a good conversationalist, charming and do their chores are you willing to take someone who has a radically different faith than you do? What about someone who smokes pot? Or does harder drugs? Or is recovering from drugs? What about some intolerance?
What types of behavior are okay with your community?
2. Be sure to ask the “magic wand question“. After the prospective new member has visited the community and you are in your interview, ask them what the thing they most would like to change about the community is. If answered honestly, you will have a strong insight into how this person will deal with the transition to community and longevity in staying. If it is deceptive answer, you can almost always tell right away, And if they say the place is perfect, you are encouraged to stand on your soup box and remind them at length why it is not so.
3. “Know when to hold them, know when to fold them.” Almost every community i have visited has some type of expulsion policy. These communities come in two types. Communities that saw this was going to be a need and put policy in place early (often to protect the rights of the person being expelled) or those which did not craft policy, and then had a person who need to be expelled and then had a nightmarish time with members who are friends trying to stop the process or deny the need. Because it can be tricky, i recommend newly formed communities prioritize expulsion as the first policy.
My brother once told me a story that he said he heard on a Christian radio station. I may have parts of the story wrong because by this point it’s third hand. Here’s what my recollection of it is.
In the early days of telegraph, a magnate in the business was boasting to his pastor that in the future he would be able to broadcast his sermons coast to coast using the telegraph.
The pastor got very excited about the idea of being able to send his words across the country, but the businessman had to slow him down.
“We’re not there yet,” he said. “It would be way too expensive to broadcast one of your sermons nationwide at this point.”
Then he saw how disappointed the minister was and he relented. Sort of. He told him that if he could boil one of his sermons down to one word he would telegraph it across the country. But his sermon had to be just one word.
The pastor thought and thought and finally came up with a one word sermon.
The word was “Others.”
Why am I writing this on Commune Life? Because I think that if you are trying to start a community, the one word that you should have in mind is “Others.”
Very few communities start by thinking that they’re not going to last very long. Unfortunately, most communities don’t last very long.
I certainly hope that if you’re starting a community, it’s going to last for a long time but chances are it won’t, and when things are falling apart is probably not the best time to figure out a good and fair way to end things.
In terms of Policies and Agreements, this isn’t where you want to start, but if you’ve worked your way through most if not all of the other agreements, you should definitely work on this one. Planning for the community’s demise isn’t much fun but it will be a lot less fun if things are going down and you don’t have anything in place.
I’ve been part of two communes that we deliberately ended. In both cases the ending, while sad, wasn’t that hard. We realized that it didn’t make sense to continue the community but we also knew we cared about each other and that was going to continue, so we tried to split up in such a way that everyone was taken care of. I also know from hearing stories that this kind of ending doesn’t always happen. Often communities fall apart with acrimonious struggles and all sorts of accusations. Again, I hope this doesn’t happen but it’s good to be prepared.
If you have a document that covers how you would like to dissolve the community if you need to and that everyone agrees to, it can be referred to if and when the time comes so you don’t have to figure it all out when things aren’t going well.
Think about what everyone might need with the community ending (similar to how you may have created exit agreements except it’s for everyone this time) and how you might want to divide whatever assets the community has at the time you decide to end it.
Interestingly enough, you don’t have to follow what you write when you actually dissolve the community. With Common Threads, one of the first communes I helped create, we had a plan for dissolution. But when we ended the community, my memory is that we did something different because it made more sense at the time and we were all in agreement. So this policy, like any of the other policies, is not written in stone. If something seems better and everyone can agree on it, then do that. Agreements are fallbacks, defaults. They are there for when you can’t agree or don’t have the space to figure something out in the midst of difficulties.
That’s it, I think. These are all the agreements and policies that I can think of. Of course, as you go along and the community gets going, you might think of something else that you need to agree on. I’m not saying this is necessarily all the agreements and policies you will ever need, but I think that if you’ve got all these policies and agreements in place, you’re probably going to be in pretty good shape.
Good luck with it all. My hope is that if you decide to create a community, your community will thrive, but if not, I hope that it will be a good experience for most if not all of the folks that were in it.
Today I’m offering a kaleidoscope of memories from my first five years at Sandhill Farm, on the occasion of its Golden Anniversary.
Exactly 50 years ago today, Ann Shrader and I arrived at the 63-acre property two miles west of Rutledge MO (that we had just purchased two weeks prior for the grand price of $13,500) that would be the start of Sandhill Farm. We rendezvoused there with fellow pioneers, Ed Pultz and Wendy Soderlund, who had driven up from their home in Memphis TN to live near Memphis MO (our county seat).
Both red and white spirea were in full bloom, framing the outside of the modest white clapboard, one-bedroom house that the two couples took turns occupying (while the other lived in a tent) until we completed a 16’x30′ renovation on the south side that added two bedrooms and expanded the bathroom. Probably its most distinctive feature was the checkerboard pink & black linoleum tiles on the kitchen floor. (Hard to believe that could ever have been in fashion—excepting, perhaps, at a Good & Plenty factory.)
We were full of enthusiasm for our experiment in community living—which was a good thing, given the bottomless pit of our naiveté. As we had arrived just after the frost free date for northern MO, one of our first acts was getting the garden planted. I still recall Ann’s and my excitement at seeing the first shoot emerge from our carefully planted rows of vegetable seeds, only to discover later that it was milkweed, not sweet corn. Talk about a rookie error.
While the house stood on the highest point of the property (in the southwest corner), there was a house located directly to our south that was higher still—the home of Edna & Earnest Childers. They were in their 80s and the only remaining residents of Sandhill after Charlie Gilmer died in 1972. Charlie was the last person to have have lived in our house, which we negotiated the purchase of from his surviving son and daughter-in-law, Bob & Lilian.
It’s noteworthy that Earnest, our neighbor, was born in that house and had lived there his entire life. Amazingly, he was already two years old when the Santa Fe Railroad laid tracks nearby, in the late 1880s. The town of Rutledge sprang up at that point, as a service stop along the route from Chicago to Kansas City. Though Edna & Earnest both passed away a few years after we arrived, Sandhill has been continuously occupied since the 1850s. (Before that, we understand it was a seasonal camping spot for indigenous Native Americans.) In the years prior to the Show Me State being fully platted and the current county lines defined, Sandhill was something of a regional center, and the location from where a frontier circuit judge would periodically dispense justice in our corner of the state.
While Ann focused on gardening (something she still does today), Ed took charge of overseeing the house extension, working closely with Wendy’s father, an experienced builder/architect. I bought a copy of H. P. Richter’s Wiring Simplified (for $0.87) from the local Ace Hardware store and became the community’s electrician—while we were doing the house extension, we rewired everything (switching from fuses to circuit breakers) and reroofed the entire house. Laying concrete blocks for the extension’s foundation was my first foray into cementitious work, which also became a community niche for me. (Over the years I learned to do concrete work, as well as lay block, brick, tile, and tuck pointing—all flowing from that first summer.)
In the early years we tried all manner of homestead things, substituting labor for dollars. Example: raking leaves in the fall from the Childers’ massive white oaks (that were sprouts before the arrival of white settlers) and then packing them into circular bins we fashioned from scrap woven wire fencing. After a couple years of rain and snow we had our own leaf mold, for use as a garden soil amendment.
Our first dog was Rochester, a medium-sized stray that showed up unannounced one day and never left. He was with us for nine years and was the only dog in my life that was closer to me than any other human. Our first cat was another stray, Seymour, an orange tabby. I took it as a good omen (for a cooperative community) that the two of them got along famously. Both were outdoor pets and they would huddle together for warmth on an old blanket inside a plywood kennel on the front porch during the winter months.
Early on we acquired a Jersey milk cow, Rebecca. While we didn’t get gobs of milk, it was high in butterfat and we were self-sufficient in butter in those days. (Cream is most readily churned to butter at 62 degrees, and I did it often enough that I could tell by feel when the gallon we had taken out of the fridge had warmed to the right temp.)
Milking time was one of the highlights of the day for both Seymour and Rochester. Seymour would follow the milker down to the barn, where he could depend on getting some squirts of fresh milk for his trouble. While the distance from house to barn was only about 50 yards, as soon as Seymour headed down there, Rochester would make a game of overtaking the cat and putting his entire head in his mouth. Seymour would patiently wait until Rochester released him and then would travel several more yards until Rochester did it again. By the time Seymour made it to the barn, his head would be covered in dog slobber.
While the cost of living in our area was low (hence the bargain land prices), so were the opportunities for employment, and we scrambled to figure out a way to make ends meet. At one time or another, in the early years all of us took jobs off the farm. Some taught, some worked for the extension service, some did work for neighbors. As I recall, that first summer Ed drove a tractor for a neighbor, earning the not-so-handsome wage of $60 for a 40-hour week. After that we never worked for less than $2/hour (hard bargainers that we were).
For most of its existence, Sandhill’s signature product was organic sorghum, a traditional sweetener in the Midwest and South. The seed for that was planted when Ann & I stopped by the homestead of Joe Pearl & Eva Grover (a mile or two south of Memphis) to buy some sorghum during the fall of 1975. We stayed long enough to watch it being made and were fascinated by the process. They were in their 70s and it was obvious the work was tiring for them. We offered to help, and before we knew it we were back every day, lending a hand. They would only make about 7 gallons a day, yet it impressed us that every drop was sold about as fast as it was made.
Thinking that this might be a specialty product for Sandhill, we planted some cane the next year and traded our labor in 1976 for the use of the Grover’s equipment to process it. That went well enough that we took it another step in 1977 and had stainless steel cooking pans made for us at a metal fabrication shop in Quincy IL. We bought a sorghum mill to do our own pressing, and had labels made announcing the availability of Sandhill Sorghum. While we were somewhat concerned about being in competition with the Grovers (we didn’t want to bite that hand), it happened that Joe Pearl had a stroke in 1977 and they never made sorghum again, and thus we became the sole sorghum producers in Scotland County. For a period of more than 40 years, sorghum was the flagship product of the community’s agricultural portfolio.
Community was a tenuous concept the first five years, as Ann & I struggled to get beyond being one couple living with others who tried it out for a year or two and then moved on. Following Ed & Wendy, there was Pamela Johnston & Michael Almon. Then we had Jesse Evans, Lin McGee, and Linda Joseph (all from Texas, for some reason). It was something of a revolving door in the early years. After five years, it was down to just three of us: Ann, Tim Jost, and me.
Our breakthrough in stability came circa 1979, when Stan Hildebrand, Grady Holley, and Thea Page arrived. Over the ensuing five years the only change in personnel was Clarissa Gyorgy (who came to us from Twin Oaks in Virginia) while Thea moved to Twin Oaks, along with her 2-year old daughter, Shining. After that we were never fewer than 5, and it felt like we’d crossed the line into being a stable intentional community. Whew.
While losing members was always hard, those early years are largely happy memories, and I look back with amazement at what we were able to accomplish with sufficient pluck and luck.
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Commune Life editor’s note: Sandhill Farm is no longer an income-sharing community but they were one for well over forty years. The Sandhill folks write: “Sandhill Farm has historically been an income-sharing commune for the last 45 years. We are restructuring to provide private dwellings for family units and greater personal autonomy while also still collectively stewarding the land and infrastructure, held by a nonprofit.”
The commune movement in the US during the 1960s was not an isolated phenomena. There have been waves of communal movements, many dating back to long before Europeans discovered North America. One very fertile period for communities in the US (often called ‘utopian experiments’ at this time) was in the nineteenth century.
I was reading a very important book called Collective Courage by Jessica Gordon Nembhard (subtitled, “A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice”.) It’s a great book giving a detailed look at Black cooperative organizations and Black mutual aid from early in US history. An early section in the book was entitled ‘Black Communities or Communes and Utopian Ideals’. Of course I read this section with great interest.
The book talked about three early communal attempts. I knew about two of them. The Nashoba Commune was, of course, mentioned–a well meaning attempt by suffragist Fanny Wright to create a community for ex-slaves. A second one was the Combahee River Colony, a group of “several hundred African American women who occupied abandoned farmland where they ‘grew crops and cared for each other’” during the Civil War. I’d heard of it but didn’t know much about it. But I had never heard of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry.
I’m currently living in a small commune in western Massachusetts and we visit Northampton occasionally. I’ve visited Northampton since I was a student at UMass/Amherst in the 1970s. I had never heard of this place. It wasn’t really a Black community, but an abolitionist community that practiced racial and gender equity in the 1840s. Sojourner Truth was a member there and this was where she became an abolitionist. Frederick Douglas was a frequent visitor and said of the place: “The place and the people struck me as the most democratic I had ever met. It was a place to extinguish all aristocratic pretensions. There was no high, no low, no masters, no servants, no white, and no black. I, however, felt myself in very high society.” I had to know more about this place.
I looked for more information about the Northampton Association and found a book called The Communitarian Moment by Christopher Clark (subtitle, “The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association”). It was in the local library system, so I ordered it and read it.
The Northampton Association of Education and Industry was not a Black community. It was a predominantly white community with only a few black people there. But it was a community devoted to equality. Not only were black people and white people treated equally, but also women and men, at a time when that wasn’t usually true, even in the abolitionist movement. It started off as an attempt to create an abolitionist community focused on silk manufacturing and although it started as being connected with a company with ‘wages’, “In what the historian Arthur Bestor once referred to as a ‘coup’, a majority of members took steps during 1843 to move the community in noncapitalist direction… at the annual meeting… members ensured that the wage system would be scrapped. In a succession of votes they overturned the founders assumption that the association would operate like a company.
“The meeting… moved the association firmly toward a more communal organization.”
The author situates the Association in the nineteenth century communal movement, particularly in the 1840s, the period he calls ‘the communitarian moment’. While he refers to many other communities occurring during this period, he focuses on the Northampton Association and compares it to three other communities, also in Massachusetts during this period: Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Fruitlands in the town of Harvard, and “Adin Ballou’s ‘Practical Christian’ community at Hopedale.” He also says, “Recent scholars of utopian movements have pointed out that communities were being founded throughout the nineteenth century and were not less common at other times than they were in the 1840s. Otohiko Okugawa found 119 communal societies established in the United States between 1800 and 1859, and Robert S. Fogarty lists 141 more that were set up between 1860 and 1914… Nevertheless, there is merit in the view that the 1840s were an especially significant period for communitarianism. At least fifty-nine new communities were founded between 1840 and 1849, more than in any other decade.”
The Northampton Association lasted four and a half years (1842-1846), which was longer than forty-three of those fifty-nine communities (the average lifespan was two years or less). There was always a tension between the aims of the community and the economic needs of running a business. It was a nonsectarian Christian community, started by abolitionists, with interests in “nonresistance” (ie, nonviolence), moral reform, temperance, diet, and health. All of the original founders were white men, active in the abolition movement, but included businessmen, including two with silk manufacturing experience. The founders brought their families and soon it was almost thirty people. By 1844 there were a hundred and twenty.
“Early in 1843 they declared that ‘association’ together provided the best means of enacting ‘the principle of equal brotherhood, the all-embracing law of love so emphatically taught by true Christianity.’ They rejected the ‘distinction of rights or rewards’ made in ordinary life ‘between the strong and the weak, the skilful and unskillful, the man and the woman, the rich and the poor’ and sought a social equality that would ask ‘only of all honest effort according to ability.’” While I’m not sure the Northampton Association would qualify as an income-sharing community, it was certainly headed in that direction and they were working hard toward egalitarianism.
Unfortunately, they never did well with silk production, lost a lot of money, and had several ideological rifts. This all culminated in moving from being a community to functioning as a business. “Northampton’s change after 1846 from community into factory village was another strand in the shift from social critique to acceptance of industrial capitalism.” The author saw it as part of a bigger movement at the time, “a retreat of sorts, one that left abolitionists less likely to perceive the need for communitarian ventures, less likely to criticize social conventions, and more likely to accept… the growing consensus that the ‘free labor’ system was the only logical alternative to slavery. The collapse of the communitarian moment, in other words, helped cement the alliance between abolitionism and capitalism that some radical reformers sought to avert at the beginning of the 1840s.”
The silk factory and boarding house at the Northampton Association
As far as I can see, the problem with the Northampton Association, the problem with most of the nineteenth century communities, and the problem with many of the twentieth and twenty-first century communities, is that changing an established way of life like capitalism and creating a brand new culture in addition to starting a new community, often on the fly, is just not going to be easy. A more egalitarian and communal way of living seems logical to many people and this book is just one example of creating communities to meet those desires, but we are going to have to be smarter and more persistent if we actually want it to work within a society that’s heading in the opposite direction. The ‘communitarian moment’ may have passed in the 1840s and the 1960s but I believe that we can bring it back around and make it a communitarian way of life if we’re willing to work hard enough.
“Serenity Solidarity is a collective of mostly Black, Brown, and Indigenous people rooted in land based collective living, activism, and community service. We are an income-sharing community that also shares collective ownership of community resources, such as land, buildings, and vehicles. We work together with our mutual aid network to support vulnerable people and to support BIPOC-led community service efforts. Our first community is currently starting up near so-called Albany, NY on Mohican land.”
We’re still running about a month behind here on our Facebook posts (and probably will continue to be). This was a slow news week for the communes. Acorn posted about their collards and showed off their new baby and Twin Oaks Hammocks posted a picture of their devastated warehouse and said that they suspected their business was gone. With little else to post, after posting an old blog post about the communes and the pandemic, I posted a pop quiz on communal living, with answers the next day. (Thank you so much, Joshua, for this idea!)
Mary, an Acorn member, just had a baby and Acorn wanted to show off their newest collard variety, so why not have both in the pictures?
This did pretty good on Facebook, with three likes, three loves, and a hundred and eighty-five views.
The destructive fire at Twin Oaks demolished the warehouse/production facility for their hammocks business. This is a post from Twin Oaks Hammocks showing what’s left of the building.
Since the link above the pictures is a picture, here’s a link for anyone who wants to contribute to Twin Oaks recovery. (The QR code picture should work.)
Unfortunately, disaster plays well on Facebook and this post did very, very well, with seventeen sads, seven cares, one like, five comments, and four hundred and thirteen views.
And now to the quiz. Here’s the questions:
Before you go any further, can you answer the questions?
This did pretty well on Facebook, with six likes, three loves, and a hundred and forty-eight views.
Okay, get ready. Here’s the answers.
How did you do?
This post did very well on Facebook–much better than the questions. It got nine likes, seven comments (including someone wishing they saw the question post first, and another person bragging that they got six out of six right), one share, and a very nice three hundred and thirty views.
Okay. Here’s yet another thing few new communities want to think about. How and when do you tell someone to leave? Who gets to decide? What does your community agree are grounds for expulsion?
Again, as hard as confronting these questions as you are starting a community is, it would be a lot harder to figure this all out after someone does something that makes at least someone so uncomfortable that they want the person out of the community.
Two of the main things that you need to decide are, first, what are expellable offenses, and second, what is the process for expulsion.
In terms of offenses, violence? Is it violence if everyone involved consents (ie, BDSM)? Non-consensual sexual approaches (rape, assault, inappropriate touching)? Something involving children? Theft? Harassment? Illegal activities? Are there things that would get a warning the first time but potential expulsion if repeated?
In terms of who gets to decide that someone should be expelled, does it take one person? A majority? Consensus minus the offender? Consensus minus the offender and anyone that they are involved with?
There are certain situations where someone has been hurt that you want the offender out of there immediately. Do you call the police? Are there situations where you would give the offender twenty-four hours (or whatever) to get their things together before they have to leave? There may even be situations where things are so unclear that you ask the victim to leave, temporarily, while a decision is being made.
It’s good to not make a policy hard and fast. Sometimes there are extenuating circumstances. But, like a lot of these policies, you want something that you can fall back on in situations where emotions are running high and you can’t get agreement.
As difficult as all this is to think about and talk about, having a policy around all this should make everyone feel safer.
Finally, a policy that may be even harder, the final one that I want to look at, is when do you decide to dissolve the community? How do you do it if you need to?
Very few communities start thinking that they’re not going to last very long. Unfortunately, most communities don’t last very long.
In my last post I wrote a little about individualism and how it’s rampant in American culture. It’s a hard habit to break out of–but I suspect that many people fear the opposite happens in communal living, that all individual freedom will be gone.
I have sometimes thought about community as existing in the “dynamic tension” between the individual and the group. And by “dynamic tension” I mean an ever changing midpoint or community point. Too far in the direction of the individual and you are back to individualism and the community falls apart. Too far in the direction of the group and you’re talking about a cult and group think, and believe it or not, the communes are very, very far from this.
In her book,Is It Utopia Yet?, Kat Kinkade wrote this about ideological and lifestyle diversity at Twin Oaks: “All it really expects is conformity to decent behavioral standards. We don’t (officially) demand ideological adherence to much of anything, not even the Community’s basic principles…” She talks about the New Age tendencies at Twin Oaks: “…we eat a lot of beans, rice, and tofu… We subscribe to ten or fifteen radical leftist magazines. We wear used clothing made of natural fibers, and we don’t throw it out when it becomes stained… We have built geodesic domes, enjoy a rustic cabin and a tipi, and one of these days will probably get around to making a yurt… We go in for underwater births, mud pits, nude swimming, sweat huts, and pagan rituals. We think seriously about animal rights. Some people won’t even kill flies.” But then she adds: “More than half of us do several of the following: eat meat, drink coffee, read Newsweek, go to regular AMA physicians, wear clean neat clothing, ignore the tipi, take rituals with a grain of salt, and kill flies with a clear conscience.”
Having spent time around Twin Oaks, I know that there are pagans and Christians and Jewish folk and atheists and agnostics and probably a lot of other ways of believing; that there are lots of queer folk, and a lot of gender fluid folks and several trans folks and many poly people, but there are also quite a few monogamous, heterosexual, cis-gendered folk there too; and while I’m pretty sure that there aren’t a lot of right-wingers at Twin Oaks, the political spectrum runs from vaguely conservative/libertarian, through classic liberals and pretty progressive, to rather radical. It’s the old adage of having sixty folks and probably seventy-five opinions.
And it may be even more diverse at anarchist leaning Acorn and individualist/libertarian leaning East Wind. If you’ve spent any time at the communes, you will soon realize that they are far from a conforming group-think cult. In fact, I would say that there is probably a lot more individual freedom in the communes than in American society at large. Many, many communards delight in being weird in many different ways–but there is probably more acceptance of “normal” behavior in the communes than there is of weird individuality outside of them.
It’s interesting but I think that places devoted to communal living probably have more real individual freedom of expression than in “individualistic” mainstream America. (And then there’s the economic freedom of not having to worry about a job and where your food and next paycheck will come from. But that’s for another post.)
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