John McMahon
1 min readJun 4, 2021

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The USA has had many collectivist societies across it’s history, although they were usually religion based, had a cult leader, and weird rules about sex because that is a good way to control people. The most notable was Jim Jones’ People’s Temple. During the the 1970s hundreds of hippy communes sprung up and they didn’t have weird rules about sex, and that caused a lot of problems because not everyone wanted to share their body equally. That will always be a problem because guys fight over that shit. Also subsistence farming sucks, especially when everyone is not inclined to do the same amount of work, and that is another intractable problem with human nature. More work, more benefit doesn’t fly in the type of community you’re thinking of I believe, but it would have to fly in any community that I live in.

You mentioned kibbutz, and they have been around for well over a hundred years and have been very successful, but there isn’t a single model and in fact there have been many disagreements as to what constitutes a proper kibbutz. Only 15% of kibbutz are now involved in agriculture, and most of them have become more like corporations than communes, and are quite profitable particularly in the defense industry. Isn’t it funny how that happens? It’s almost like capitalism is a natural thing that can’t be averted.

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