In Praise of Intentional Community
By thomas p. hunterson
History has been one long, tragic procession of humanity accidentally living near one another. For millennia, people have stumbled into villages through such embarrassingly primitive mechanisms as geography, employment, family ties, rivers, fertile soil, or simply because they happened to stop walking.
These unintentional communities are clearly a catastrophic design flaw. How can one expect social harmony when neighbors have not first completed a values alignment questionnaire and attended a consensus circle on permaculture? This is intentional progressivism.
Thankfully, Intentional Community™ has arrived to rescue civilization. Why tolerate the horrifying uncertainty of discovering that your next-door neighbor enjoys different music when you could instead spend time in meetings determining the precise emotional protocol for borrowing a ukulele?
Critics point out that intentional communities often devote astonishing amounts of time to governance. Governance is the community. Growing vegetables is merely a side quest undertaken between emergency discussions about whether the community deer are respecting sufficient consent before eating the lavender.
Meanwhile, ordinary neighborhoods remain hopelessly inefficient. Residents recklessly exchange brief pleasantries, tend to their chores without forming Facilitation Working Groups, and occasionally help each other shovel snow without first establishing a Conflict Transformation Framework. Barbaric!
A truly intentional community courageously schedules facilitated dialogues, forms Exploratory Committees, and emerges weeks later with a deeply transformative agreement to revisit the issue after everyone has processed their feelings. An intentional community is diverse and inclusive, except for the diversity of ideas.
The beauty of intentional community lies in its breathtaking confidence that all human complexity can be conquered with enough flip charts. Disagreement? Circle. Awkwardness? Circle. Someone broke from approved protocols? Emergency circle. Meteor strike? First, a circle.
Contrast this with the depressing spontaneity of unintentional communities, where friendships emerge unpredictably through shared experience rather than carefully curated compatibility matrices. What kind of reckless system allows people to become friends simply because their children attend the same school?
Intentional Community knows better. Authentic connection can only occur after trust exercises, a retreat, and a mandatory workshop entitled Reimagining Presence Through Radical Listening, while building consensus on the meaning of “authentic.”
Some cynics claim that intentional communities occasionally fracture into two separate intentional communities over irreconcilable philosophical differences regarding shared maintenance responsibilities. This is malicious misinformation. Sometimes it’s about fonts.
In the end, the superiority of intentional community is undeniable. Why settle for the random miracle of ordinary human coexistence when you can deliberately engineer a social ecosystem so exquisitely optimized that re-scheduling Tuesday’s potluck requires a constitutional amendment?
Civilization has wandered blindly for thousands of years. At last, humanity has discovered its highest calling; living with people who voluntarily attended the same orientation weekend and unanimously agree that the minutes from the previous meeting failed to capture the deeper spirit of the discussion.
Surely this is what evolution intended. Or, at the very least, what the Facilitation Committee intends.
