#the whole idea of the empty natural trackless wilderness in which it is possible to build an autarkic community

[tanadrin]

What are your thoughts on people who just want to be left alone, and not just solitarily - they want to leave modern society and go live in the woods.

They should be permitted to. Modern liberal democracies are mostly OK with making deals with secessionist subcultures: enclaves of Mennonites, the Amish, ultra-orthodox Jews, and so forth are permitted form and mostly self-govern, and are occasionally even granted opt-outs from various forms of government interference, like certain taxes or insurance requirements, on the basis that they make much less use of government services. It's harder to carve out such exceptions for individuals, but we do have things like the concept of the conscientious objector that accommodate deviations from the usually expected set of rights and obligations for people with a commitment to alternate sets of values.

But these things exist on a spectrum; opting in or out of society isn't a binary choice. Also, except in the libertarian fantasy land, it's very hard even in North America these days to find trackless wilderness where you can live totally unconnected to the rest of humanity--and most of it is in Alaska and northern Canada, so bring a nice thick coat. Where I think this consideration, the concept of "atomic communitarianism" to borrow a phrase, is most interesting is in its more complicated real-world instantiations.

Anabaptist religious communities in the US, for instance, aren't really autarkic villages; they're socially segregated, but economically connected with the surrounding area. Ultra-orthodox Jewish groups, while endogamous, have historically always existed within larger urban communities, and could not function without them; many seem happy to rely on social support from the government, which given the emphasis they place on a particular kind of pious lifestyle makes sense.

Where indulging atomicity in society encounters tension, I think one of three things are at play. First, the atomic community is in conflict with the wider community over material interests. The fight over the distribution of public school funding in Ramapo, New York is a great example of this. I don't think these kinds of conflicts ever have easy solutions, especially when the atomic community in question doesn't or can't form a distinct separate unit of local self-government.

Second, an organization wants conditional status as an atomic community. Anabaptists generally refrain from participating in secular government as a fundamental tenet of their religion; contrast the Catholic church, which now that religiosity is declining in many of its former strongholds, often presents itself as merely wanting to govern its own affairs free from governmental interference; but as soon as they are in a position to influence policy and make political noise, they do so, and they have no doctrinal objection to being made the sole official church of a secular state. In other words, Catholics are not naturally an atomic community, and so shouldn't be treated as one. They shouldn't get special consideration in a pluralist society, and Catholic institutions should be subject to normal rule of law. The Catholic church hates this, and it's this loathing of being constrained by the same rules everyone else is, rather than a real ideological motive, that causes them to cover up child abuse and play the victim when their mass graves get dug up in Canada and Ireland.

Thirdly, an atomic community may be genuine in its aspiration to atomicity, and it may be tolerated implicitly or officially by the collective authorities; but there are obligations that the collective authorities have to individual members it is pledged to protect that supersede any deal made with the community as a whole. The most visible example of this in the present day is child abuse by religious authorities. Whether it's the FLDS, ultra-orthodox Jewish communities, or, yes, the Catholics, one of the few things our society absolutely refuses to condone in an atomic community or an aspiring one is the sexual abuse of children, and the obligation of the collective authorities to prevent that is considered so far-reaching that no exceptions for any self-governing community can be permitted. Sometimes these communities can stave off interference temporarily by capturing local authority in elections and flying under the radar of more remote authorities, but this seems to only work in rural areas and only for a limited amount of time. The only imperative to exercise state authority over atomic communities that I can think of that comes even close to this one regards, like, tax evasion, because states also have a strong incentive to make sure people know that independent parallel authorities aren't permitted to compete with the state, and tax collection is one of the very basic functions of government.

Now, all of the above examples are religious communities. That's not entirely a coincidence: religion is a powerful community-building force, and rising standards of living in the developed world have reduced the relevance of purely political or economic utopian projects. In countries like the US, where there is a strong tradition of religious freedom, federalism, and soft libertarianism, society can easily accommodate a large number of atomic communities, even highly insular religious ones. That is strong to America's credit; in almost every case, if people want to go off and do their own thing, they should be permitted to. Even fucked-up cults like the FLDS folks should get a strong benefit of the doubt, because pluralism is important, and state power is a crude bludgeon, and when that bludgeon goes awry you get shit like the Waco massacre. We can quibble on where exactly the line for outside interference should be drawn, but regardless of the criteria we use, sexual abuse of children seems like a reasonable criterion for interference.

Should lone individuals or tiny groups get carte blanche to fuck off into the woods and never contact human society again? Sure; but they effectively already have that, if they can find an empty patch of woods. And simply in terms of sheer numbers, the quantity of hermits and members of eremitical microcommunities will always be dwarfed by larger, more persistent atomic communities like those organized on religious lines. Religion is just a much stronger motivating factor for that kind of secessionism.

If a self-organized community of individualists did form in the wilderness, or on some vast expanse of privately owned land, and wanted to govern themselves free from interference--well, that's called "incorporating a municipality" and you can go through existing legal channels. Your new town won't be free of state or federal authority, depending on where it is; but if you're large enough to need a bona fide local government, I think there's a strong presumption that your community has a big enough impact on the surrounding areas and is populous enough that the collective authority takes a legitimate interest in how your community is run. But local governments are really important, and get a lot of shit done! Don't underrate their power.

If you really want more autonomy, you can always petition your state or national government for status as a separate state/territory/province/autonomous community/department (it worked for the Mormons!). You'd probably have to be fairly big; but I think your community would have to be very large in the first place to really get any benefit from that kind of larger local government. And, of course, there's always the Free State Project. In fact, I want to strongly encourage right-libertarians and anarcho-capitalists of every stripe, no matter where in the world they live, to move to New Hampshire and leave the rest of us alone. I think that's a really terrific idea (and more viable than seasteading).

One thing I didn't discuss is uncontacted peoples or native communities that preexist the communitarian authority. Especially with regard to the former, I don't trust state power to interfere in these communities in a non-destructive way; whatever the conditions the North Sentinelese are living in, the entire population being wiped out by measles carried over from the mainland would not be an improvement. And the excuse of legitimate state interest in protecting individuals has often been used to fuck with communities of racial undesirables--it is after all the reason the residential schools in Canada were built, and the Catholic church empowered to imprison children in them. This is part of the reason why even if you can prove an atomic community is a fucked up cult that treats its members horribly, I don't think it should be forcibly disbanded--the criteria for interference have to be extreme, because they have been so flagrantly abused in the past. Basically, the framework I'm using in the rest of this post doesn't apply here, because these native communities aren't secessionist for any meaningful use of the term. They function differently, they preexisted the authorities imposed on them, and that original imposition was a war of conquest.

[tanadrin]

I want to expand briefly on something in the tags in that last ask, because I think this point informs how I think about the whole question in a way that be different from anon.

The whole idea of an empty, natural, trackless wilderness suitable for building an autarkic community is a fiction. By the time humans finished spreading out into the Americas, most of the surface of the Earth was inhabited to some extent by human beings who developed a suite of technologies appropriate to the climate, and further innovation took place within that framework. In short, the whole world was peopled in 1492, except for some remote islands and Antarctica. The density of that population varied a lot, and the kinds of social organization, and the cultural institutions around law and territory and property, but there was really very little wilderness that was also suitable to human habitation. And much land not at all suitable to human habitation that humans stubbornly decided to live in anyway.

Part of the self-mythologizing of North American (and later Australian) settlers, because of the lower population density of many of the areas they settled (though at least in the Eastern Woodlands in the US, this may have been a very recent change caused by smallpox), and because conflict with expanding settler states drove the natives out so that their own farmers could move in. Since “we tamed a virgin wilderness” is more appealing as a national mythology than “we drove out and exterminated the savages” (although there was plenty of romanticizing of that part, too, back in the 19th century!), that view of American history is the culturally preferred version. It’s the sort of thing I would point out as settler-colonial ideology, if the phrase settler-colonial hadn’t been driven into the ground by overuse. The natives are treated as a footnote, which is easy because they’ve been demographically swamped by higher settler population densities and by centuries of immigration. I’m sure apartheid South Africa would have tried to take the same tack with regard to its own history, if the native population hadn’t stubbornly insisted on being much more numerous and sticking around.

This national mythology was developing while at the same time new theories of government were being articulated; the American revolution (anger at the British crown was motivated in part by settlers being forbidden from crossing the Appalachians, remember!) not only occasioned but may have been necessary to the great push west, and so a lot of thinking and writing on liberty, on the origins and purpose of government, and the ideal nature of government was being done in a period of time when, it just so happened, a lot of people found themselves in a position to set up big family farms in frontier “wilderness,” and had occasion to justify and celebrate as ideal a form of economic organization that is actually historically very anomalous. Patterns of land use and property distribution in the colonial Americas looked nothing like patterns of land use and property distribution in Europe, and though they used approximately the same principles of land tenure, the actual situation on the ground was a lot different. Small family land holdings for a European peasant would have been distributed among other small family land holdings of neighbors within the same community. Tenant farming by small farmers working the land of a local bigshot were still common. This system worked given the conditions on the frontier at the time, but it was never going to be stable long-term. It’s not very efficient, and it’s not always environmentally sustainable either.

But the fallout of all this is that a really unusual episode of history has provided an abstract template for thinking about economics and politics for generations! When we imagine building a utopian community ex nihilo, we imagine doing it in some nonexistent but fecund wilderness that really hasn’t existed anywhere on Earth since humans made it to Tierra del Fuego. I think this hampers our understanding a lot of the time. It blinds us to how dependent current institutions are on the shape of past institutions (we can build institutions from nothing!), it emphasizes an unrealistically individualist and autonomous approach to society (we can live far enough away from our neighbors we never have to interact!), and it handwaves away a central problem of land and wealth distribution, which is how often acquiring those things necessarily comes at someone else’s expense. It seems to me that a lot of people of anarcho-capitalist inclinations live in a world where that frontier-possibility exists as a self-evident, perennial feature of the world. Whereas to me, it feels like a mirage: something that has never existed in recorded history, and which has no actual relevance (at least until we colonize other planets, I guess).