by Raven East Brook 

A few weeks ago, Twin Oaks communard Keenan went on to Reddit and said that he lived in a commune in Virginia and invited folks to ask him anything. He got over nine thousand comments.

Many of the comments were very good questions.  However, a number of people asked if Twin Oaks was a cult and several commenters insisted that it was. And the more that Keenan said it wasn’t, the more that they decided that meant it was.

Of course, a good question is, what is a cult?

Merriam Webster defines a cult as: “great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (such as a film or book)” and “a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion”.

First and foremost, there is no great leader at Twin Oaks or any of the other communes; no one is the object of “great devotion”.  There is a reason we call ourselves “egalitarian” communities. There is no one in charge. About the only thing that everyone agrees to at Twin Oaks is that sharing is a good thing and I doubt that many people there would say that they are “devoted” to sharing. 

There is also this notion that people are trapped in cults; that they are not allowed to leave. We are definitely not cults by this definition. People leave Twin Oaks and the other communes all the time.

A third way that cults are talked about is claiming that everyone is required to believe the same thing. As I said above, about the only thing that everyone believes in, in the communes, is sharing and I am not even sure that everyone believes in that. On any other subject, I am sure that if you talked with ten communards, you’d get twelve different opinions–at least. 

I suspect that what these commenters mean by cult is that we are different. We’re weird. I am not disputing that. In a capitalist, individualistic society, where people are encouraged to get what they can for themselves, and maybe a few loved ones, doing this radical amount of sharing, and working on being as equal as we can be, is very different. 

The idea that we could share everything is very threatening to some people. They want to say that it would never work, but it’s been working at Twin Oaks for more than fifty years and it is still working. So they dismiss it as a cult. 

I am not claiming that this level of sharing will work for everyone or that this is something everyone should do.  I am just saying that this is a real option and it can work. 

We are not creating cults at the communes, we are creating culture. 

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