Jack, I think you should game simulate your community idea. Write up the community rule set. write up some simple gaming rules to simulate the environment (Turns, time, monopoly money, start and end, roles, etc.). Play it out a few times. Create conflicts along the way and see how players solve them. create “roles” were people play as if they were; camping once a month, live full time, time rich money poor, money rich time poor, horders, meth heads, job loss, land experience, city guy, and so on.

great episode.

Great show, Mr. Spirko. I and my immediate family are trying to live prepared, and your checks and balances b/tw. individual agency and community rules are ideas we will try to implement (w/tweaks) on our plot of land as our family goes forward.

We live on a 1-acre lot outside of San Antonio, and many in our community (like many Americans, unfortunately) are not yet into sustaining themselves because they are, as you say, the “mainstream [non-survivalist] Americans.” Our immediate neighbors seem to be closer to our thinking, however, and they are trying to restore some old wells on their property. We all have decent resources in our land and possesions, but are limited in funds; so we are looking to mutually help each other in a bad scenario. Is there any limit to how small a sustainable community (like the kind you are talking about) can be, i.e. with a few neighbors in a lower/ middle class position? Thank you for any intel.

Jack, how does your own 10% rule come into play here. I don’t mean to sound too dismal, but I think you’re giving humanity a little too much credit. Human nature is just a little too destructive, lazy, and selfish for this to go off with a few problems as it seems like you’re foreseeing. I think issues of moochers, slackers, thieves, and vandals within the community would crop up a lot more than you think, even with a screening process. Anytime something is supposed to be taken care of communally it almost always falls apart. People just don’t care about something as much if it’s not “theirs”. And I know you’ll say it is “theirs” but not really since the communal stuff would belong to everyone who contributed. When push comes to shove, most people, even the most well intentioned people, will take some degree of a “won’t someone else do it?” attitude. And unfortunately there’s a snowball effect. 1 member of your community decides that he’s not going to mow the grass or clean up the tractor because his job takes too much of his time. He wants to, but he doesn’t have time, and after all, there’s so many other owners. Someone else will do it. Well those other people see him not doing it, but the tractor does still get worked on and grass gets mowed, so a few more decide “if I maybe take a week off from communal upkeep here and there, no one will really notice”. Then things start getting worse, and the few people left who did help just say “screw it, if I’m the only one busting my ass for something 50 people can use, I’m done helping”

And of course someone has to administrate all the little things. Who sets the grass mowing schedule? Who manages money brought in by teaching or selling crops? Who handles purchases of equipment and supplies? Pretty soon all those little tasks build up to where you need someone or even a panel of people who need to spend quite a bit of time on it. Now you have a communal government. And who would volunteer to do such tasks? The same kind of shifty power hungry person who wants to be in every government from HOAs to Congress.

Essentially what you seem to be saying is that some form of Communism (root word community) would work fine if you just had the right people to do it. I know, each family would still have their 1 acre that really is theirs and so forth. But all the “community property” that’s “owned equally be everyone” is pretty much textbook-ideal Communism. Just like all the starry eyed nonsense that came out of the USSR about community farms that “The People” owned and all that. None of it worked in reality. Human beings just don’t work very well when they do not get to keep the rewards of their work for themselves. And I don’t think any amount of screening can keep that human nature out of your community. Don’t forget, even the original Plymouth Plantation under William Bradford experimented with community farming and shared burdens. And it almost killed them off. Humans don’t work like that. It may sound nice, but that shared burden philosophy has never worked, ever.