[ajkjk]

I generally love this idea but, historically, the risk with people building private communities that they're in charge of is that they may or may not turn out to be abusive tyrants and you can't do much about it and probably the abusive tyranny will come out thirty years later with a lot of "I told you so"s.

c.f. cults, "dude ranches", "wilderness therapy", foster homes, asylums, etc; the list goes on quite a ways. All in principle good ideas and in practice... probably... sometimes good and sometimes really awful.

It is hard to differentiate "a nice compassionate living situation" from "a mechanism for abusers to build tiny empires" without a lot of regulation and transparency.

[jackcosgrove]

Maybe I am just being unimaginative but it seems that civil society with its institutions evolved precisely to handle conflicts and allocate resources between individuals who lack a strong emotional bond. Those bonds do exist in families and it seems over the long run that families are probably the exception to the need for intermediating institutions.

I bet successful private communities, intentional communities, etc. basically speedrun the recreation of the broader civil society they exist within.

[ajkjk]

More likely they speedrun the mistakes that civil society at least in principle has fixes for.