paradise communities

I posted an excerpt here, and then looked at the next part I had noted to note, and decided to post it here. It's topical. :) From Richard Heinberg, Memories and Visions of Paradise (1989), p. 157:

The effort of creating and maintaining an intentional community, even for a few years, brings with it a kind of experience that is unattainable in the ordinary urban environment. In the best instance, communal life offers the chance to associate closely with a few friends who share a commitment to living consistently according to their highest vision.

What makes some communities thrive and others dissolve? There are a few essential issues that inevitably arise in every communal group-questions of leadership and decision making, of the division of labor, and of the distribution of material goods-whose resolution requires an ongoing compromise on the part of the egos of all concerned. The communities that survive the longest are those in which members are somehow motivated to transcend their own wants and fears for the good of the whole. In the great majority of cases, that motivation arises from a shared paradisal vision and a shared sense of the sacred. Every sociological study of cooperative communities has come to essentially the same conclusion: when the vision dies, the community dies.