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Cults create deep commitment and social cohesion, but they also rely on coercion, ideological rigidity, and hierarchical control. The Communitarium Project seeks to harness the strengths of cult-like communities—meaningful engagement, shared purpose, and counter-hegemonic vision—while avoiding their pitfalls. building solidarity without becoming insular, authoritarian, or dogmatic.

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Navigating the Tensions Between Commitment and Coercion in Communitaria

The Communitarium Project is an effort to foster deep, engaged, and meaning-generating communities without replicating the manipulative and authoritarian structures that often define cultic formations. To build something that truly resists social fragmentation, we need a strong sense of collective purpose—but we also need to ensure that commitment does not slide into coercion, and that shared meaning does not ossify into dogma.

This challenge is particularly pronounced in the digital sphere, where online communities struggle to strike a balance between meaningful engagement and ideological rigidity. Given that communitaria will initially exist as digital spaces, before evolving into real-world infrastructures, we must carefully consider how online dynamics shape commitment, identity, and power.

The Appeal of Cult-Like Structures

Cults are remarkably effective at fostering deep social cohesion and intense collective purpose—qualities that communitaria also aim to cultivate, but in a way that remains open-ended and non-coercive. Some of the elements that cults get right include:

• A strong sense of belonging – Cults make individuals feel uniquely valued, embedded in something larger than themselves. Communitaria must achieve this without requiring submission to authority or ideological purity.
• Symbolic and ritual engagement – While cults often use ritual as a mechanism of control, symbolic practices—storytelling, shared commitments, participatory deliberation—can reinforce communal bonds without dogma.
• A counter-narrative to the dominant culture – Cults thrive by positioning themselves as revolutionary alternatives to a corrupt system. Communitaria, too, must challenge hegemonic individualism, but in a way that remains self-critical rather than sliding into insularity.

These factors explain why cult-like energy can be compelling, particularly in fragmented, alienating societies where people are desperate for real connection and collective power. But if communitaria are to endure as ethical and participatory communities, they must avoid the authoritarian tendencies that often arise when groups seek to preserve their internal coherence at all costs.

Where Cults Go Wrong—and How to Avoid It

The dangers of cultic structures are well-known: hierarchical control, coercive belonging, epistemic closure, and the demonization of outsiders. These tendencies can manifest in online communities just as easily as in physical ones. Some specific risks to be aware of:

1. Leaderships and Power Accumulation – Most cults revolve around an unquestioned leader or hierarchical elite who centralizes interpretive power. In contrast, communitaria must be radically decentralized, ensuring that leadership roles are temporary, accountable, and distributed. Digital spaces must avoid the gravitational pull of personality cults—even charismatic figures should be subject to community critique.
2. Epistemic Closure and Ideological Rigidity – Cults maintain control by sealing off members from dissenting viewpoints and punishing those who question the narrative. Online communities often fall into a similar trap, where engagement is filtered through algorithmic reinforcement loops that create ideological purity spirals. Communitaria must resist these enclosures by institutionalizing debate, dissent, and interpretive flexibility.
   • Instead of having sacred texts or dogmas, meaning must remain an open, living process.
   • Disagreement should be a feature, not a failure—structured into communal deliberation rather than seen as a threat to coherence.

3. Us vs. Them Thinking – Cultic formations rely on demonizing the outside world to keep members bound together. While communitaria must necessarily critique the dominant order, they must not become self-isolated enclaves that see all outsiders as adversaries. This is especially important online, where polarization is actively encouraged by platform dynamics. Communitaria must:

   • Build bridges with other communities rather than fortifying ideological barriers.
   • Engage outwardly rather than defensively, recognizing that cosmopolitanism strengthens rather than weakens solidarity.

4. Psychological Manipulation & Dependency – Cults manufacture dependency, making members feel that they cannot exist outside of the group. Online communities often replicate this dynamic by making platform participation central to members’ identities. Communitaria must provide real agency, not manufactured dependency:

   • Membership must be active but voluntary—engagement should be meaningful, not performative or compulsory.
   • Members should feel free to step away, shift their level of participation, and engage without fear of exclusion or retaliation.
   • Privacy must be respected, ensuring that participation does not turn into surveillance or social control.

Starting Online: Unique Challenges & Safeguards

The fact that communitaria will initially exist in digital spaces brings specific risks:

• Hyper-visible online personas can lead to performative rather than genuine participation.
• Echo-chamber effects can make internal discourse brittle and resistant to critique.
• The rapid spread of information can turn minor disputes into public crises.

To counter these risks, communitaria must establish early safeguards:

1. Radical Transparency – No hidden power structures, no secretive decision-making.
2. Deliberative Ethics – A culture of slow thinking and collective inquiry rather than knee-jerk reactions.
3. Soft Boundaries – Membership should be fluid, not rigidly enclosed—a network rather than a sect.

Final Thought: Cult Energy Without Cult Control

The Communitarium Project aims to build strong, participatory, and deeply engaged communities without replicating the rigid, coercive, and dogmatic structures of cultic formations.

A guiding question: Are we creating a space where people feel empowered and free, or one where they feel controlled and obligated?

If the answer ever tilts toward the latter, we must have the courage to dismantle and rethink our structures—always prioritizing openness, flexibility, and the continuous negotiation of meaning.

a reflection toward the ethos of communitaria

Winning should not be the purpose of organizing. It should be a by-product.

But this is not a call for quietism, nor a dismissal of what many now face as existential threats. In the present moment—when hard-won rights are being rolled back, when institutions are captured by oligarchy, when the ruling order criminalizes dissent and encroaches on every form of collective life—winning is often a necessity. Sometimes survival depends on it.

There are times when winning means stopping a pipeline, freeing someone from prison, securing a ceasefire, defending a clinic, preventing a ban, resisting a coup. In such moments, organizing must win—or people suffer irreparably.

But that is precisely why we must be careful.

When organizing is consumed by winning, its soul begins to shrink. It adopts the tempo of campaigns rather than lifeways. It treats people as assets or voters rather than as participants in the shaping of shared meaning. It focuses on resisting power, not building power. And worst of all, it may forget to ask what kind of world we want to live in beyond the struggle.

So yes, we fight to win. But we must also refuse to let “winning” become the only thing we know how to do.

Capitalism encourages us to think in terms of winning—as market share, as domination, as victory over others. Even the most well-meaning left movements often internalize this competitive frame, speaking of “winning power” as though the goal were to inherit the throne rather than dismantle the castle. We fall into cycles of mobilization driven by urgency, moral crisis, and the desire to defeat an enemy—but without building durable alternatives in how we live, work, care, and relate. We become crisis-chasers. The campaign never ends. The election never ends. The fundraising never ends.

The Communitarium Project begins elsewhere. It starts from the intuition that we cannot outcompete capitalism on its own terrain. We must change the terrain. Not with slogans, not with purity tests, not with aesthetic defiance—but by building environments of shared life that allow for collective agency, mutual care, and meaningful deliberation to flourish. These are the conditions under which real freedom grows—not as individual autonomy floating in space, but as the lived experience of shaping the world together.

This means organizing not toward a win, but toward a way of life. A socialist lifestyle, if we must use that word, is not primarily about consumption choices or moral consistency—it’s about how we make meaning together. It’s about restoring the infrastructures of reciprocity and repair that capitalism has eroded. It’s about cultivating an “us” robust enough to withstand fragmentation, capture, and despair. And that “us” cannot be built by tactical maneuvers alone.

In this sense, the fixation on “winning” is not just a strategic error. It is a symptom of idiotism—in the classical sense, where the idiot is one who retreats into the private sphere and disengages from collective life. Modern idiotism doesn’t always look like retreat; it often takes the form of constant activity, performative outrage, or solitary moral heroism. But it remains private in effect. It does not bind us together in common purpose. It does not help us stay with each other when things get hard.

The Communitarium Project resists this idiotism by reclaiming the local, the dialogic, the schmooze-level reality of human life. It proposes that we need not just movements, but places—communitaria—where people live, argue, experiment, and grow together. Where political action is not separated from the daily processes of storytelling, caregiving, and collective sense-making. Where success is measured not by how decisively we win the next battle, but by how deeply we embed shared agency into the structure of our days.

This is also a challenge to the language of the left. So much of it is borrowed from war, from management, from academic critique. We talk about “mobilizing” people, “deploying” strategies, “leveraging” movements, “seizing” opportunities. These metaphors betray us. They frame the world in terms of resources and threats, not relationships and possibility. They obscure the slow, patient, dialogic work of reweaving a frayed social fabric.

The Communitarium vision calls for different metaphors—of gardening, tending, fermenting, assembling, repairing. These are not metaphors of passivity. They are metaphors of durability. They suggest a politics not of conquest, but of cultivation.

And if we do this well—if we build spaces where people come alive to each other again—then yes, victories may come. But they will come as by-products of coherence, not as prizes wrested from our enemies. They will come because we have remembered how to live together, and because no system—however powerful—can stand against a people who have done that.

The Democratic Socialists of America, especially in major urban chapters like NYC-DSA, has become a formidable presence. It has helped elect socialist-aligned candidates, mobilized around labor and tenant struggles, and consistently shown up at pivotal demonstrations. Its members are often among the most principled, capable, and hardworking organizers in left-wing spaces today. And yet, despite all this activity, DSA remains more formative than transformative.

To put it provocatively: DSA functions less like a revolutionary political organization and more like an adult, socialist scouting movement. It fosters solidarity, builds competencies, and cultivates a kind of ethical-political citizenship. But its structure and strategic habits suggest that it prepares its members for a world that never arrives. It produces scouts without a campaign, comrades without a horizon.

This isn't a dismissal. The scouting analogy is not meant as a slight. Scouting organizations are, in many ways, admirable: they emphasize practical skills, moral development, mutual support, and local leadership. But they do so within a largely unchallenged framework. They teach people to navigate a world, not to remake it. And DSA, at its best, has excelled at helping people navigate a hostile, alienating, and unjust society—building moral stamina and organizing competence. But the question remains: toward what end?

The organization’s activities—electoral campaigns, tenant organizing, strike support, protest mobilization—are laudable in themselves. DSA also pursues concrete policy goals that, at first glance, seem to edge closer to the kind of envisioning we claim is lacking—for example, the BPRA proposal for public renewable energy. But these efforts, too, are often carried out in parallel rather than in integration. Mutual aid efforts do not necessarily feed into electoral education. Campaign infrastructure is rarely redeployed for building durable communal life. Even DSA’s most successful chapters seem to lack a unifying strategic theory beyond the moral imperative to act. The result is a vast, talented body of organizers whose efforts rarely cohere into cumulative, systemic counter-power.

This fragmentation is not simply a matter of strategy. It is also a matter of political psychology. DSA, like many left movements, has grown rapidly by gathering together people disillusioned with capitalism but not necessarily aligned around a shared vision of what comes next. In this way, DSA is structurally incentivized to keep its future blurry. Too much specificity could prompt rupture. A detailed vision might cause as many members to leave as it inspires to stay. So the organization remains safely capacious, organized around shared grievances and ethical sensibilities more than strategic clarity.

But vagueness comes at a cost. Without a shared horizon, it's nearly impossible to accumulate power across time and scale. The competencies DSA cultivates do not feed into a post-capitalist infrastructure—they circulate within the organization, forming a kind of ethical holding pattern. The result is a paradox: a movement that builds capacity but not trajectory. It gathers strength but doesn't translate that strength into a transformative counter-system.

This is the scouting trap. DSA builds up the best of us, but does not yet build beyond us. It creates refuge, not rupture. Formation, not transition. Without a different kind of vision—a riskier, more integrative one—it may keep developing socialist scouts long after the campfire of capitalism has burned through the forest.

#SeizeTheMeansOfCommunity #CommunitariumProject

For centuries, academia—especially its most prestigious institutions—has positioned itself as the gatekeeper of intelligence, merit, and social value. It has operated as an enclosure, defining who counts as “intelligent,” who deserves access to status and opportunity, and who holds the authority to shape public knowledge. Degrees and credentials have been treated as markers of moral and intellectual worth, justifying access to influence, power, and higher social standing.

But this system is facing a profound crisis, one born not from a single cause but from a series of betrayals, contradictions, and systemic failures. AI is just one factor accelerating a collapse that has been long in the making.

Academia as Enclosure

For generations, academic institutions have served as enclosures that control access to social power. By determining who earns credentials, who produces knowledge, and who gains entry to the “inner circle” of expertise, they have shaped the very meaning of merit and intelligence. But this enclosure has always been artificial. Intelligence, as academia has defined it, has been deeply shaped by cultural biases, class structures, and historical exclusions.

This is not just about who is accepted into prestigious programs, but about which forms of knowledge are legitimized, who gets to be heard, and what counts as “real” scholarship. It’s about who gets to produce narratives that shape society and who is excluded from the conversation.

The Betrayal of Ideals

The crisis facing academia is not merely about external technological pressures but about its betrayal of its own proclaimed ideals. Recent examples lay bare the extent of this failure:

• Suppression of Free Speech and Democratic Values: Columbia University's suspension, expulsion, and revocation of degrees for 22 students who protested in support of Palestinian peoples is a stark example of how academic institutions have betrayed their professed commitment to democratic discourse and free expression. Rather than fostering critical engagement, academia is actively silencing dissent to maintain institutional alignment with dominant power structures.

• The Replication Crisis: The “publish or perish” culture has fueled a replication crisis across numerous academic disciplines. Under pressure to meet narrow, reductive criteria of “merit” and “success,” researchers have produced work that is increasingly unreliable, driven by the need for quantifiable outputs rather than meaningful insight. The system values quantity over quality, compliance over criticality.

• Exploitation of Academic Labor: Academia has also proven to be an exploitative employer. The adjunct professor system, where highly educated individuals are paid poverty wages without benefits or job security, exemplifies how the institution values profit and efficiency over fairness and intellectual integrity. This is not an aberration but a structural feature of the modern university.

• AI as a Disruptive Force: AI further challenges the legitimacy of academic systems. If AI can replicate many forms of academic output—from research summaries to essays—then the value of credentialed labor as a marker of merit erodes. AI is not the cause of academia's crisis but a harsh light exposing its long-standing weaknesses.

Academia's Defensive Response

Rather than confronting these crises, academia often responds by reinforcing its enclosures:

• Gatekeeping Discourse: Institutions suppress controversial discourse and punish dissent under the guise of maintaining “order” or “academic standards,” betraying their proclaimed commitment to open inquiry.

• Valorizing Process Over Insight: Institutions elevate methodologies and procedural rigor as shields against critique, even as these processes produce unreliable, redundant, and exclusionary work.

• Defending Institutional Prestige: The prestige of traditional academic institutions is presented as self-evident proof of their value, despite the ways that prestige reflects historical exclusion, economic privilege, and complicity with power.

These defenses are not about protecting intellectual rigor but about preserving authority and the structures of power that depend on academic enclosure.

Reclaiming the Purpose of Knowledge

The crisis facing academia is an opportunity to rethink how we value knowledge and how we structure learning communities. The intelligence-merit link is already broken, and academia must now confront hard questions:

• What is the Purpose of Higher Education? If education is no longer about credentialing intelligence, what should it be about? Should it be about cultivating mutual learning, collective problem-solving, and social engagement?

• What Counts as Valuable Knowledge? If academic knowledge is no longer privileged by virtue of its institutional enclosure, how can we elevate more diverse, emergent, and community-grounded ways of knowing?

• Who Gets to Create and Share Knowledge? Should academic institutions continue to gatekeep knowledge production, or should we prioritize more open, participatory, and collective models of inquiry?

• What Becomes of Expertise? If expertise is less about individual credentials and more about collective interpretive capacity, how should authority and knowledge be shared and cultivated in community?

The Communitarium as Counter-Enclosure

The Communitarium can be an experimental alternative to traditional academia—a site that rejects the intelligence-merit narrative and the sacralization of academic prestige. It offers a model for mutual, emergent, and relational knowledge-making that is free from the hierarchies of traditional institutions.

• Mutual Learning Spaces: The Communitarium is not about certifying intelligence. It’s about cultivating spaces where people learn from each other, hold complexity together, and deliberate in mutual, open-ended ways.

• Resisting Knowledge Gatekeeping: It resists the tendency to define legitimate knowledge through rigid methodologies or institutional conventions. Instead, it values diverse insights, practical experiences, and emergent collective reasoning.

• Valuing Process Over Prestige: The Communitarium doesn't measure value by outcomes, credentials, or institutional status. It values the process of inquiry, mutual care, and shared meaning-making.

• Democratizing Expertise: It treats expertise as a communal capacity, developed through deliberation and mutual understanding, rather than as a scarce resource controlled by credentialed authorities.

Conclusion: The Collapse as Opportunity

AI didn’t break academia. Neither did any single scandal or betrayal. Academia’s collapse is the result of a long history of complicity, exploitation, and enclosure—a system that has betrayed its own ideals and reduced intelligence and merit to narrow, exclusionary categories.

The collapse of this fiction is an opportunity to rethink how we value knowledge, how we share it, and how we create spaces for collective learning and understanding.

The choice is clear. We can double down on the illusions that have protected exclusion, hierarchy, and prestige, or we can begin constructing new, mutual counter-enclosures that prioritize openness, deliberation, and collective emergence.

The Communitarium is an experiment in the latter. It is an invitation to imagine learning and knowledge differently—not as markers of merit, but as practices of mutual engagement and shared becoming.

For centuries, societies have relied on the presumption that “intelligence” is a natural marker of “merit”—a justification for status, wealth, authority, and influence. Intelligence has been coded as a scarce resource, a sacred trait that legitimizes power and hierarchy. The smarter you are, the more you deserve. The greater your intelligence, the greater your right to influence and reward.

This logic has been particularly influential in justifying the special status of the managerial and executive class. These roles have been elevated on the assumption that they require rare and exceptional intelligence—the capacity to “see the big picture,” to “strategize,” and to “lead.” Managerial power is portrayed as an inevitable outcome of superior cognitive ability, strategic insight, and the ability to manage complexity. This framing is central to how hierarchy justifies itself.

But this foundational myth is collapsing, and AI is accelerating its demise.

The rise of advanced AI systems threatens to expose a long-standing cultural illusion: that intelligence, as traditionally defined, is inherently tied to moral worth, social merit, or deservingness. As AI grows capable of performing tasks historically reserved for the “intelligent”—writing, coding, composing, analyzing, and even strategic planning—it becomes harder to maintain the fiction that these abilities are signs of virtue or deep human value.

The uncomfortable truth is that much of what society has valorized as “intelligence” is reducible to processes of pattern recognition, task execution, and repetition—things AI can now do at scale, without consciousness, morality, or merit. The emergence of AI forces a reckoning: if machines can perform these tasks without deserving status or reward, why have humans—especially the managerial class—been so richly rewarded for doing the same?

Intelligence as Narrative Enclosure

The presumed connection between intelligence and merit has been one of the dominant narrative enclosures of modernity. It is a crypto-theological belief—one that sacralizes intelligence as a marker of human worth, progress, and inevitability. It underwrites the mythology of meritocracy: the belief that those who succeed in society do so because they “deserve” it, because they are smarter, better, more capable.

The executive and managerial class has been the ultimate beneficiary of this mythology. The ability to “lead,” “decide,” and “envision” has been framed as the highest form of intelligence, deserving of the highest rewards. But AI disrupts this story. It reveals that intelligence, at least as measured by performance in certain tasks, is not a marker of moral virtue or social contribution. Intelligence is mechanical, procedural, replicable. Strategic analysis, predictive modeling, and decision optimization—all traits that have been used to justify managerial supremacy—are tasks AI can perform without merit, meaning, or consciousness.

The System’s Defensive Response

Rather than accepting this collapse, we can expect systems of power to respond with narrative defense mechanisms. They will attempt to salvage the illusion of merit by doubling down on new forms of enclosure:

• Redefining Merit: Human intelligence will be reframed as more “authentic,” “moral,” or “creative” than machine intelligence. Managerial roles will be mythologized as uniquely dependent on “vision,” “judgment,” or “character” even as these traits become indistinguishable from algorithmic processing.

• Moralizing AI: The narrative will shift to portray AI as dangerous, lacking in humanity, and morally suspect. The system will suggest that humans, by virtue of their inherent moral character, deserve continued power and reward, even as AI performs the labor they once did.

• Elevating Control Over Merit: As the illusion of intelligence collapses, systems will seek legitimacy not by claiming moral merit but by emphasizing control. The right to wield AI will become the new ground of social privilege. Those who “control the risk” will claim the right to control the rewards.

• Gatekeeping Creativity and Leadership: There will be a renewed effort to protect traditional markers of human leadership and vision, not by expanding access but by reinforcing institutional control. Only certain decisions, strategies, or insights will be deemed “authentic,” while AI-generated plans will be dismissed as imitation—even though much of managerial decision-making is already patterned, procedural, and derivative.

The Deeper Threat: Revealing Merit as Fiction

But the real threat is not that AI will outcompete humans in the labor market. The deeper threat is that AI will reveal how hollow the merit system has been all along.

If AI can write, code, strategize, or analyze without consciousness or moral character, then why have these capacities been treated as indicators of worth in human societies? Why have they justified higher pay, greater status, or disproportionate power? Why has the managerial class been positioned as inherently deserving of control and reward, when their role has often been to aggregate, process, and replicate information?

The answer is uncomfortable: because intelligence, as it's been socially constructed, has always served as an enclosure. It has been a way to justify and reproduce inequality. It has been a tool to gatekeep who has access to value, reward, and recognition. And AI exposes this mechanism by replicating “intelligent” outputs without any claim to deservingness.

Toward a Post-Merit Framework

This moment demands a radical reframing of how we think about value and worth. If AI shows us that intelligence does not equate to merit, then we must rethink what truly matters in human systems.

• Mutuality Over Merit: Value must be rooted in mutual contribution, care, and collective engagement—not in isolated outputs or competitive status. Mutual aid, not performance metrics, becomes the basis for collective thriving.

• Plasticity Over Intelligence: The capacity for mutual interpretation, deliberation, and collective problem-solving becomes more important than cognitive speed or technical proficiency. Value emerges from how we hold complexity together, not from how quickly we produce answers.

• Collective Emergence Over Individual Genius: Rather than valorizing individual achievement, we can focus on how value emerges through collective processes—how knowledge, care, and meaning are co-constructed in community.

• Decentralizing Control: Systems must resist the tendency to reinforce elite control over AI and knowledge production. Instead, they should prioritize shared access, transparency, and collective governance over technological capacities.

The Role of the Communitarium

The Communitarium can be a space where these new frameworks are cultivated. It can be a site where value is defined by mutuality, deliberation, and emergent collective intelligence—not by hierarchical measures of performance or output. It can resist the urge to sacralize “intelligence” as a measure of merit and instead foster spaces where relationality, care, and shared sense-making are the highest forms of contribution.

In the Communitarium, AI is not a threat but an exposer—a force that helps dismantle the myths we have relied on to justify exclusion, inequality, and hierarchy. The challenge is not to preserve the illusion of human merit but to build systems where value is rooted in collective reciprocity and mutual recognition.

Conclusion: The Collapse as Opportunity

The collapse of the intelligence-merit link is an opportunity. It allows us to break with old enclosures and ask deeper questions about what we value, why we value it, and how we might build new systems that reflect mutual care, collective deliberation, and shared flourishing.

AI didn’t break the merit system. It just exposed the fractures that were already there. Now, we face a choice: to double down on the illusions that have sustained inequality, or to begin constructing new, collective counter-enclosures that make space for a genuinely mutual, post-merit future.