It seems like one of the major issues with these communities was the heavy emphasis on self-reliance. What I think this ends up doing is not allowing people to rely on systems that already exist and are much more efficient. One of the core beliefs behind a lot of the utopian communities was “The system as it currently exists doesn’t work”, which at the extreme, led to the rejection of things that do work (like having access to food, water, electricity, etc.). In other words, a community begins by a group of people noticing that a lot of the current systems which exist in society have inefficiencies or are clearly not ideal in some way, but only later does it become obvious that, actually, what we have took centuries to get to the state it is currently in, is way better than what we had before, and tearing it all down and starting from scratch is probably a horrible thing to do.
A better approach might be to do a systematic study of societies that have existed across time, the structures that existed within them, and try to incorporate the details that seemed to work and avoid the things that didn’t, while also trying to avoid re-inventing the wheel whenever possible.
It seems like one of the major issues with these communities was the heavy emphasis on self-reliance. What I think this ends up doing is not allowing people to rely on systems that already exist and are much more efficient. One of the core beliefs behind a lot of the utopian communities was “The system as it currently exists doesn’t work”, which at the extreme, led to the rejection of things that do work (like having access to food, water, electricity, etc.). In other words, a community begins by a group of people noticing that a lot of the current systems which exist in society have inefficiencies or are clearly not ideal in some way, but only later does it become obvious that, actually, what we have took centuries to get to the state it is currently in, is way better than what we had before, and tearing it all down and starting from scratch is probably a horrible thing to do.
A better approach might be to do a systematic study of societies that have existed across time, the structures that existed within them, and try to incorporate the details that seemed to work and avoid the things that didn’t, while also trying to avoid re-inventing the wheel whenever possible.