8 ms·

I'm curious on HN's thoughts about why it is that Amish(and similar groups)have succeeded where hippie type communes failed? They've been going strong for centu

• waboremo 4y ago
  Why do you consider them failed? Many are still around, and new ones start all the time.
• paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Indoctrination to a rigid set of beliefs (often from birth), backed by threats of shaming or shunning, are more difficult to leave behind.
  • subpixel 4y ago
    Also sex abuse and the normalization of controlling behavior are more common in these self-isolating communities, and even more impactful on a person who has little to no contact with the outside world.
    • theonething 4y ago
      So you're saying sexual abuse is more prevalent in the Amish community than in the greater society? What are you basing that claim on?
      • subpixel 4y ago
        Even if it’s not more common, young people in isolationist authoritarian communities are literally more trapped than victims in the greater society. I’m not sure how this observation offends.
        • theonething 4y ago
          I'm not sure where you saw any offense. I'm asking you to backup your claim and you interpret that as offense? > young people in isolationist authoritarian communities are literally more trapped than victims in the greater society. I'd say victims of sexual abuse find themselves trapped and isolated in general. As to whether Amish victims are more trapped than non-Amish victims, I haven't seen any evidence to point one way or the other, so I won't make a conclusion about that. You are leveling non-trivial claims against some folks so you need to offer commensurate evidence to substantiate those claims.
      • TylerE 4y ago
        https://www.npr.org/2020/01/19/797804404/investigation-into-child-sex-abuse-in-amish-communities https://www.npr.org/2020/01/19/797804404/investigation-into-... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10861949/amp/Amish-11-year-old-girls-given-pamphlets-normalizing-incest.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10861949/amp/Amis... https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2020/01/14/amish-sexual-abuse-assault/ https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2020/01/14/... https://lancasteronline.com/news/hidden-in-plain-sight-domestic-and-sexual-abuse-in-amish-mennonite-communities/article_c70ece28-1cff-5dce-9a78-806cf7a36ba3.html https://lancasteronline.com/news/hidden-in-plain-sight-domes...
        • theonething 4y ago
          Those show that sexual abuse happens in the Amish community. That is not in question. You can make that claim about almost any community after a certain size and be correct. They don't show it happens more often compared to the rest of society. And with the exception of NPR (somewhat), I find your sources questionable.
          • TylerE 4y ago
            Given the size of the Amish community (less than most mid sized cities), and the cases being spread geographically , and with associated coverups (this is really the differentiator - does the community ostracize the perpetrator or shame the victim into covering it up.
            • theonething 4y ago
              Nothing you've said thus far proves that it happens more frequently in this community.
• xwolfi 4y ago
  They didnt make the girls do everything while the guys just smoked their lives away. The amish men actually do back breaking work, which instill a sense of sharing. They also organize in locked couples, smaller structures more efficient to avoid drama, and focus on reproduction: the hippies cant reproduce, they cant even focus on one child, let alone agree on who will have to be responsible for parenting. The idea the hippies had was that all structure was stupid. The idea the Amish have is that there s only one old structure worth living by. Ofc the Amish will survive and the hippies dillute in chaos: the first preserve entropy to a minimum, the second pushes it to a maximum. There's an even simpler way to describe it: the goal of the hippies didnt seem to be self preservation of their structure, while the Amish have an absurd obsession with it.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• BurningFrog 4y ago
  I think most "culture startups" fail. Only after it has worked for a few generations can you know one is sustainable.
• stcroixx 4y ago
  Hard work. The Amish are willing to do it.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• hindsightbias 4y ago
  Sheep vs cat herding. Not in any disparaging sense. One is historically collectivist, the other thinks they can or want to be - but usually end up like a Kundera novel.
• A_D_E_P_T 4y ago
  You said it yourself: Religion. People absolutely require a system of metaphysics. It is one of the most basic and natural needs of mankind; it is how all men come to account for the world and their existence in the world. People in general have little time for philosophy, so a folk metaphysics must be simple and easy to understand, and must be connected to a straightforward system of moral principles. Communal hippie living is a lifestyle that one typically grows out of. The Amish -- like the Hasidic Jews, and like various other religious movements -- are an essentially metaphysical community. The metaphysical principle comes first, and the rest follows. The way they live life is wholly on account of how they interpret their religion's moral principles and strictures. It's easy to leave one lifestyle for another. Not so easy to leave a religion that you were raised in, and which you have built your entire world-view around. There's a certain IQ threshold for that, as it requires the de novo construction of a new metaphysics.
  • whatshisface 4y ago
    >There's a certain IQ threshold for that, as it requires the de novo construction of a new metaphysics. I am sure that a lot of atheists are flattered hearing this, but come on, they heard about it online, or even from the community's conniptions about outsiders. For that matter "what if what I see with my eyes is what is real" does not take a big I.Q. to think of.
    • xupybd 4y ago
      Maybe but our perception should not be assumed to be correct. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. I'd be surprised if our eyes give us a truthful perception of reality. They give us a functional understanding that allows us to thrive here but nothing more.
      • astrange 4y ago
        Similarly, being high intelligence is not evolutionarily fit for any given problem because it costs more energy than just being good at that problem. (And saying "IQ" when you meant "intelligence" is a sign of a midwit.)
• nyokodo 4y ago
  > why it is that Amish(and similar groups)have succeeded where hippie type communes failed? They manifest characteristics that enable stable communities. Sex within marriage, no divorce, marriage and sex for procreation, reliance on extended family and local community, no industrialization/urbanization, social isolation, religion as unifying principle. Hippy communities on the other hand tended to be built around sexual promiscuity or at least lack boundaries around sex and marriage, and subsequently suffer commensurate relationship/family breakdown. Not to mention that hippy communes are converts to agrarian life and when the going gets tough there’s no millennia of continuity to rely on but there is the memory of the city and the supermarket.
  • Covzire 4y ago
    The Christian living aspect is definitely the major part of it. There are also over 100 Hutterite colonies, many that have survived for over a hundred years with new ones getting planted all the time all over SD, ND, some in MN and many in Alberta and nearby provinces each with roughly 100 people or so. Hutterites are essentially Amish who embrace technology for farming, manufacturing, etc. Their origin story is a bit different but they are both Anabaptist Christian sects with Germanic-language roots.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      ... and for those who don't know and are too lazy or busy to look it up, "anabaptist" means "adult baptism" - the idea that you did not need to be baptised as a child in order to enter the kingdom of heaven.
    • Timon3 4y ago
      How many communes with this kind of "Christian living" have failed, and how many have succeeded? Since you know it's "definitely the major part of it" you'll surely have data beyond anecdotes, right?
  • lotsofpulp 4y ago
    > Sex within marriage, no divorce, marriage and sex for procreation, reliance on extended family and local community, no industrialization/urbanization, social isolation, religion as unifying principle. Do Amish women have the ability to attain financial independence? If not, I would add that to the list.
• cmh89 4y ago
  The Amish have rigid hierarchies. People who are drawn to communes frequently don't want to live with rigid hierarchies. Amish culture is not all that different than general American culture structurally. Communes are. The Amish aren't getting a lot of recruits, so the folks that are there were born, raised, and indoctrinated, which also helps with sticking.
• ROTMetro 4y ago
  We were in a hippie commune when I was a kid. My parents got tired of choosing to be poor. Getting down to eating canned zucchini and frozen catfish by the end of winter was not great.
  • tejohnso 4y ago
    Damnit. Is it not possible to farm enough and preserve enough to eat happily through a north american (46ish latitude) winter? Maybe with a greenhouse to extend the season somewhat? You're killing my self sufficient, off-grid homestead dreams.
    • waldothedog 4y ago
      Do a bit of earnest gardening and evaluate your yields. Consider these in proportion to what you buy at the grocery store each week, and the land/resources required. Math it out. Probably not impossible, but certainly not trivial.
    • nukeman 4y ago
      It can be done. But it requires a lot of work. When you aren’t in the fields planting/fertilizing/harvesting (which takes up a lot of time on its own), you’re gonna be slaughtering animals, preserving foods (through canning, salting, etc), doing repairs to the farmstead. You’ll be up frequently from before sunrise to after sunset. You’ll have some leisure time, but not a lot. You probably won’t be traveling as much (a trip to your state’s capital or largest city will be a big deal). Modern gear like tractors definitely helps, but it introduces its own complications (namely fuel and maintenance, how will you be paying for that?). Pesticides can cut down on crop losses, but they can also literally kill you (seriously, pesticide poisoning is one of the most common forms of suicide, and some insecticides are basically nerve agents). And all this effort can be for naught if there’s a late freeze (you did can your extra food, right?). That’s not to say there isn’t value in a lifestyle like this. But it requires a lot of effort that many people either don’t want to or cannot put in.
• boomboomsubban 4y ago
  This is a religious based commune that fell apart in about a decade, something that has happened again and again. The difference is that religious communes started earlier, so we've forgotten most of the numerous failed attempts. Comparatively we can meet people who lived in failed hippy communes, but the successful ones aren't likely to interact with you.
  • jrumbut 4y ago
    Yeah, I would strongly challenge the premise of the question. Is a temporary commune even a failure? Is a long lived one necessarily a success? Are there 50 year old hippie communes we haven't heard of?
    • boomboomsubban 4y ago
      >Are there 50 year old hippie communes we haven't heard of? Yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farm_(Tennessee) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farm_(Tennessee) There are probably others too.
      • danielvf 4y ago
        The Farm only lasted 12 years as a commune, before switching over to people earning their own income and paying rent. Still perhaps comparable to the amish though.
        • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
          It still calls itself a commune.
      • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        Twin Oaks (VA) is probably the other prime example. And then of course, the kibbutzim in Israel, though almost all of them have radically transformed themselves since they were founded.
    • emodendroket 4y ago
• wnevets 4y ago
  They treat other humans as property rather than humans [1] [1] https://medium.com/the-collector/10-rules-you-had-no-clue-amish-women-had-to-follow-4e0be7f2ccb2 https://medium.com/the-collector/10-rules-you-had-no-clue-am...
  • CatWChainsaw 4y ago
    Well, companies have "human resources" departments...
• jxramos 4y ago
  I guess what they say about knowing the tree by its fruits rings true. There’s something about the surviving of tradition and ways of living that if they did not work and were not fruitful would have faded away into obscurity. We can’t specify anything formulaic to them but the longevity of their way of life speaks something to its truth somehow. Having generations survive and multiply and retain unity and order is not some default random outcome but something intentional and directed. I’m starting to appreciate more and more the conditional improbability of order which speaks of something greater than any one individual can account for. Fascinating people I’d like to learn more about.
• micro_cam 4y ago
  There are tons of successful long term non religious cooperative living arrangements of various sorts but yeah most not fully isolated substance farming because that is hard. Amish communities also aren't self sufficient though. They'll happily sell and buy goods with outsiders and even sell amish furniture via websites (not sure if they use an intermediate). A ton shop at the Costco near me.
• akiselev 4y ago
  I think that really depends on how you define religious and commune. There are lots of informal communes (hippy or otherwise) in the 5-20 person range all over the United States that have nothing to do with religion. More than enough people for a small homestead that shops mostly at a supermarket, but not nearly enough to have a few dozen men to spare to put up a barn which is kind of the bare minimum for sustenance communes like the Amish. There's also a century of history of large kibbutzim in Israel that are somewhat religious but fundamentally organized around agriculture or industry.
  • Convolutional 4y ago
    Twin Oaks in Virginia has been going for over half a century, and other such places exist all over the US. Israel has religious and secular kibbutzim as well. Some hippy communes failed, or just decided to break up, but religious communes fail as well.
• anon291 4y ago
  The Amish don't have communes. Community is not equivalent to communes. The amish believe in private property, yet have a strong community life.
• saghm 4y ago
  If there's a correlation between the religiousness of a commune and the longevity of it, I'd guess that it's due to the fact that it's harder to maintain cohesion with openly expressed dissent and doubt, and religious-based groups have an additional tool to combat that compared to secular ones (i.e. invoking divine fiat).