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.