Malarial infested swamps, false prophecy, sexual politics, tyrannical founders, charismatic con-men, lack of access to safe drinking water, poor soil quality, unskilled labour, restless dreamer syndrome, land not suitable for farming.
I can find no reference to "restless dreamer syndrome" anywhere else on the internet. The author just made it up, and she neither defines it nor explains why it's bad for communities.
To me it sounds like the voice of a culture that has gone astray from human nature, disparaging two aspects of human nature that it no longer has a place for: nomadism and imagination. Even utopian communities can't make a place for those things, because the surrounding society has property laws that prevent communities from being nomadic, and because they set up rules that limit the ongoing contributions of imagination and creativity -- which is basically another form of nomadism, social or spiritual rather than geographical.
So a deeper reason communities fail is because they imitate the settled nature of the dominant culture. The Aeon essay has a similar conclusion:
Perhaps a more useful construct than intentional community is the idea of 'shadow culture', defined by Taylor as a 'vast unorganised array of discrete individuals who live and think different from the mainstream, but who participate in its daily activities'. Shadow cultures have the potential to hold distinct values, but also utilise the infrastructure and opportunities of mass society.
And the next comment in the thread, by MakeTotalDestr0i:
The most resilient intentional communities are gutter punk types because the conditions they live in are extremely variable. They build community and break apart in geography only, not as much socially, but continue existing and reforming over and over in different places with somewhat varying groups of people but usually enough crossover that there is a consistent feeling of continuity.
Two good books on the differences between settled and nomadic culture are Morris Berman's Wandering God and James C Scott's Against The Grain.
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It turns out, humans don't just mindlessly reproduce. When we have access to birth control, when society takes care of old people, and when women are educated, we have the opposite problem: birthrates are too low to replace ourselves.
It's funny, just twenty years ago, this doom scenario wasn't even on my radar: the whole world voluntarily having fewer kids, leading to a collapse of growth-based economies, and a glut of old people without enough young people to take care of them. But that's probably what's going to happen, at the same time as climate change, and whatever crazy stuff happens with AI and biotech.
Into this mess, I want to throw one idea: psycho-geography. Basically, some towns, cities, and neighborhoods, will be more mentally healthy than others, and those places will become magnets for the dwindling population. Meanwhile, the less mentally healthy places will become nasty, and eventually abandoned.
I mean, this is happening already, but now the migrations are more about money, which is sometimes the opposite of mental health. In a post-capitalist economy, developed nations will be preventing famine through social services that you can get almost anywhere. So migrations will be more about culture, or other non-financial measures of quality of life.
Looking farther ahead, the most successful localities could define the next age, maybe in different ways, as nation-states fade.