The one-vote veto apparently didn’t work well for Poland.Liberum veto

The principle of the liberum veto preserved the feudal features of Poland’s political system, weakened the role of the monarchy, led to anarchy in political life, and contributed to the economic and political decline of the Polish state. Such a situation made the country vulnerable to foreign invasions and ultimately led to its collapse.[

It might work for a commune, but not for a nation of millions.

The community needs strong common morals, and the members have to agree to abide by the commune rules. This works until kids are born, and their parents have trouble raising them “fairly” / optimally, and the kids don’t always agree to abide by the commune rules.

Other communes that accept all strangers rapidly go down, but many instead require the strange new members to accept the rules. Those that do then contribute. But it’s always a lot of work to get most middle class comfort.

I was looking briefly for stuff I might have read before, didn’t find it. Did find these Top 10 communes (#3 Israeli Kibbutzim):
https://www.toptenz.net/top-10-experimental-towns-and-communes.php

9. Auroville in India has a really cool top down photo.

This 1 pager on what makes a commune work was good:
https://www.quora.com/What-makes-a-successful-commune?share=1

It includes the “one no vote” idea that anybody can vote no on a potential policy, and it only takes a single “no” for the policy to fail.

A few other links had others say the same thing.

Many of the communes were of the Free Love variety. I remembered reading of some before, and it was cool to read about some again.
http://themovementsite.weebly.com/sex-sense.html

But I was too Libertarian and too horny to go for any such community. Libbers were mostly men, thus no actual Libber commune would likely satisfy my love life; and the Free Love folk’s politics was not at all attractive.

I did have a very short, but intense, affair with a Jewish coed who had already agreed to go to kibbutz, which also piqued my interest about them.

Tom Grey: What does your reading of commune history cover? All you’ve mentioned is the kibbutz version. It’s a big subject. There have been a lot of communes with varying degrees of collectivism.

I was a big fan of “The Modern Utopian” magazine which covered American communes during their 70s heyday. One photograph was quite clever — it showed a commune bathroom with a dozen labeled toothbrushes! As in “We don’t share everything.”

Back in the 2000s I was interested in back issues of the magazine, so I contacted its editor. He was happy to hear from me, but then he went straight to Bush Derangement Syndrome. I kept trying to steer the conversation back to the magazine. However, he kept trying to argue me down and I had to break things off.

I actually sort of had in mind a ranking of groups who supported communal living, and socialism. Zionists were basically all socialists, even if only a few were so extreme as to support communes for kids.

The socialist Jewish Zionists are at the top of my list of “modern” (post Enlightenment/ gunpowder*) groups working on making socialism work. They could do it and survive, but couldn’t do it and prosper/ advance as fast as the more individualist capitalists.

Your note on Hebrew individualism is important, good, and unfortunately not taught in most gov’t schools.

*God created Man.
Colt made him equal.

I really believe this is true in an important way – democracy requires that the elites respect normals. Those with guns always get respect.

“Who gets the fun?
It’s always the man with a gun …”

They sell it rosy-eyed and rosy-cheeked and rainbows and moonbeams, not as a system with flaws and (at least some) redeeming values (trust me, I don’t mean enough to make it vaguely workable or sufficiently redeemed for 150m deaths, and 3 billion people left destitute and despondent, in 100 years), enough data for them to think carefully about it and come to their own conclusions as to its workability.

There is the real problem. People taken in by silence of not hearing the whole story.

It is my primary reason for engagement of people whom I have no hope of saving from their stupidity.

I don’t do it to change them. I do it so that said idiots are not allowed to speak unchallenged and undisputed, so that they can take in others with their clueless ignorance.

There are far more lurkers in a conversation than there are debaters. If you are clear and reasonable and use a set of consistent, rational points that make sense, you have a chance of saving those who don’t know better and might be taken in.

Individuals and individual rights were important to the ancient Israelites. See, for example, this:

The Individual and Moral Autonomy

–New Hebrew conception of God made possible awareness of the individual:
–Hebrews developed notion of “self” or “I,” moral autonomy and personal worth
–Hebrews insisted God did not create people to be slaves
–Men and women thought to bear responsibility for choice of good or evil
–Hebrews rejected worshiping idols or other gods, broke with Near Eastern religion
–Ultimate loyalty could be granted only to God, not to a human ruler or institution
–Freedom means voluntary obedience to divine commands
–Human dilemma is that freedom to choose includes freedom to disobey God and suffer the consequences (e.g., Adam and Eve in Genesis)
–Hebrew assertion of human dignity and autonomy is at core of Western tradition

I believe it’s at least somewhat misleading for two reasons.

The first is that you wrote “the Jewish Zionists, who so far remain the only group to try to raise kids communally, in a kibbutz.” But it wasn’t “Jewish Zionists” in general, it was a small percentage of the Jewish Zionists who lived in Israel (which is already a small percentage of “Jewish Zionists”). In my opinion, 4% is indeed “tiny tiny” in a country as small as Israel. But at any rate, “Jewish Zionists” as a whole did not raise their children communally at any point; it was always a very small percentage of them.

I believe that although the practice became extinct even on kibbutzim in the 1980s, it began to end long before that. I recall that even in the 1960s it was starting to be abandoned by some kibbutzim. I can’t get any figures on that, though, so I’m not sure.

My second objection is the word “remain.” You wrote that the Zionists “so far remain the only group to try to raise kids communally, in a kibbutz.” It sounds like you mean that they still do it. Perhaps that’s not what you meant, but if you didn’t mean they still do it, what was it you were saying? That “Jewish Zionists” are the only group to have ever tried to raise kids communally? I don’t think that’s true. Quite a few communes did it, as far as I know, and the Shakers did it (although strictly speaking, since the Shakers were celibate, their children had no biological parents available). And Spartan children were considered the property of the state from birth. Weak infants were put to death by the state, and at 6 or 7 the boys were put in rigorous schools together and raised to be – well, Spartans.

Come to think of it, that’s a bit like the British “public school” (that is, private boarding school) system, isn’t it?

So that’s what I was referring to. And there may have been some other tribes or cultures, of which I’m not aware, that had some sort of communal child-rearing as well. I agree, though, that during the heyday of the kibbutz, that kibbutzim were seemingly unique in having communal sleeping quarters for infants. Mothers and parents in general did have a lot of access to their children, however.

I have recently finished the book Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism [2014; 2017] by Larry Siedentop [Oxford professor]. He suggests that hunter gather and later societies, including the Greek and Roman, were very patriarchal, with the husband/father basically having life and death control over his wife and children, with minimal if any push back from the rest of society. Only the man had any human rights and was considered a free citizen. All others (slaves, etc.) did not. The focus was on supporting the city state or tribal equivalent, rather than the individual. I don’t recall that he specifically discussed the situation within Jewish society, but I got the impression a similar view was held there as well since Siedentop did not suggest an alternative “modern” view. He claims it was only with the advent of Pauline ideas of Christianity that the concept of individual human rights (outside of concern for the family/clan/tribe/ city) came into being.

He then discusses how that concept was carried forward thru the “Dark Ages”, Middle Ages legal developments, Church and King contests, and later periods up to Locke, with the concomitant influence on our Founders/Framers. I recommend it to the Neo group for consideration.

I originally learned about this book via an equally interesting item at NRO: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/the-american-misunderstanding-of-natural-rights. If interested, you might start there.

I’d say my very short kibbutz note was merely incomplete about facts rather than misleading. When? How many?

You add that it is only a tiny tiny percentage.
To me, two “tinys” means less than 1%.
But to some it could be anything less than 10%.
In Israel, the electoral threshold is now – 3.25%

I think 4% (1960 as linked) is small, but not quite tiny tiny.
https://zionism-israel.com/dic/Kibbutz.htm – in 2005, it’s 2%.

Perhaps more interesting is the 1910-1980 timeframe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz_communal_child_rearing_and_collective_education

Communal child rearing was the method of education that prevailed in the collective communities in Israel (kibbutz; plural: kibbutzim), until about the end of the 1980s.

Collective education started on the day of birth and went on until adulthood. At the time it was considered a natural outcome of the principle of equality, which was part and parcel of the kibbutz life.

It took a LONG time, decades, for the kibbutzim to change the excessive equality emphasis. Even longer than Heidegger to renounce Nazism.
I’m pretty sure the leaders most often said
“we’re not doing our theory correctly”.
Until they died.

Intellectuals in love with their own theories, despite real word evidence to the contrary.

Madness.
…

One Step Beyond
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOJSM46nWwo&list=RDcYQTL-ws6p4&index=27