Fight Club
Commune life has been intense the last month. Interpersonal dynamics are challenging in the best circumstances, but I can’t help but have the nagging suspicion there’s something about intentional communities that brings out the worst in people. I’d like to be wrong here. I know that my thoughts on this are heavily informed by having spent the last…well…more years than I would like to say working my way towards a PhD, and academia is a very specific instantiation of this tendency to want to create a gated bubble world that is somehow supposed to be “better” than whatever it’s meant to escape. But I think there’s something about trying to force a utopian community from the top down that encourages people to channel their worst selves. Not only does it fundamentally rest on a distaste with the rest of the world, with a lurking, poisonous misanthropy at its heart, but it imagines itself as being somehow above it all. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that monasteries so often encourage broken ways of engaging with the world and others in it. Hotbeds of moralizing, holier-than-thou, self-righteous conviction that — precisely because they are intentional — can simply shut people out largely at will, choosing the easy path of sending away instead of the more difficult one of sorting out disagreements, identifying shared commitments and projects, and forming beneficial alliances.
This is, of course, always relevant, although it’s easy from inside a comfortable or segregated community to imagine problems as less pressing or necessary than they may actually be at any given time. It’s easy to think those people over there are exaggerating things if you’re too far away to feel the immediacy and truth of what they’re describing. And it’s also easy to concoct solutions to problems that are out of touch with what’s needed if you don’t have that hands-on sense and daily practice with them.
I’ll leave it to the reader to draw conclusions about other places where this description might be relevant, but I think it is, which is perhaps why today’s post is a longer one. Understanding the ways this dynamic plays out is important to moving past it, and we do not have the luxury of time for figuring it out these days.
One example came up recently at the commune when the local power company proposed running a huge power grid straight through our property. This is a proposal to run power from a coal plant in West Virginia through a huge swath of Maryland on its way down to data centers for corporate giants down in Virginia. None of the power will go to ordinary citizens, but it’s ordinary citizens whose food-producing farmland, forests, and homes will be taken away in order for … what? A corporate bailout for companies like Amazon to run their power-hungry AI, technology so poorly designed, useless, and inefficient that a single query takes literally ten times the amount of processing power that a single Google search takes. Even as CEOs across the world are writing articles declaring that the AI hype was over-sold and their experiments with it in the last year resulted in devastating financial losses, Maryland is apparently pushing hard to funnel as many resources as possible into what is a profoundly unsustainable and half-baked technology.
Needless to say, absolutely no one here wants this. But the first scramble to figure out how to fight back revealed some of the flawed downstream dynamics that flow out of that subtle misanthropy that seems to plague, not just the tiny commune, but our politics in this country more broadly. Because almost immediately, people split in two directions. The first was people running in to spearhead their own personal effort to fight back and protect their own land. The second was to reach out to close neighbors to stand in solidarity in a way that it was hoped would hold off the giants entirely. What neither of these two paths included was an effort to identify organizers and existing efforts that had already been doing this for a good length of time. Groups that would have already done extensive research, have people positioned in places of power, have lawyers on hand, or have worked on fundraising and putting together resources to go in for the long fight.
Longtime organizers talk about how destructive this dynamic is to building strong political movements all the time. New people with little to no knowledge come into an organization and rapidly derail their efforts by trying to grab the reins of power, imagining that somehow they know better than everyone else already there who’ve been doing the work for ages. “Well if they knew so well, they would have gotten somewhere,” becomes the justification, never recognizing that a better explanation is “If they didn’t have people constantly undermining them from within at every single step, they would have gotten somewhere.” And as soon as anyone with a long history of the group protests in an effort to bring things back around, the new people get their feelings hurt at being corrected and immediately double-down, turning what started out as a flight of fancy that came to them over a cup of coffee into a full-blown power struggle. Everyone ends up dying on a useless, stupid fucking hill that had nothing to do with anything.
I do have some modest hopes about this fight going forward. Most people realized very quickly that being on different pages is not in anyone’s best interest, and I see efforts being made at connecting up with others as part of a broad-based coalition and not simply as tiny, divided communities each inventing the wheel from scratch for themselves. I have hopes that the recent glut of articles and studies coming out showing how unsustainable — not just ecologically, but also economically and politically — AI is will provide some good argumentative backing to the fight. But at the end of the day, the only thing that can take down such massive opponents is getting our shit together as unintentional communities. Communities that are thrown together by chance, proximity, birth, and accident. Communities that maybe sometimes we have to hold our noses to be part of, but which we frankly have no choice but to be in and work together with. If we can’t figure out how to do that, then what are we even trying to do here?
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