HowTo:Establish a Commune

Everybody wants to rule the world, but we all know that you’re too lazy to deal with such pressing world issues such as Interracial politics, Nuclear Arms, the Ocean, your math homework, the economy, and your crippling urge to end your own life. So because of your current ineptitude of taking care of any personal responsibilities, why not start a little smaller and establish a small commune instead?

Why Start a Commune?

Throughout history, several groups of people have developed small communes for various purposes. Therefore, it’s a great solution to pretty much all of life’s problems that involve society. Here’s just some of the very intriguing reasons for you to start your own commune today:

• You can be king
• You won’t have to deal with your bitch wife anymore
• You can tell other people what to do
• You no longer have to care about the world, which is great because the world didn’t care about you anyways
• Money is only worth its weight in natural resources

Step 1: Gather a Population

Getting people to join a commune is like trying to convince people to join your multi-level marketing scheme: it’s easy to reel in the stupid ones, but anyone with a smidgen of intelligence you’ll have to savagely beat to get to join you. Since you’re lazy, you won’t be beating up anybody anytime soon, and since you’re trying to start a successful commune in the first place, you run the risk of potentially being outsmarted by some of those stupid ones.

Here’s some places to start when searching for people to join your commune:

• Yourself: Think long and hard about this. Would you want to live in your own commune? Would you really want to be a part of a society that YOU created from the ground up? If you cannot give a clear answer to this question, or your answer is a resounding and earsplitting “no,” you may want to focus on becoming intellectually fit to handle creating a commune first. Otherwise, congratulations! Your commune now has its first (and with any luck, its last) member!
• Family: To trace back to multi-level marketing for a moment, one of the best places to start rounding up members of your new hellhole could be your own bloodline. Unless your family is cruel or otherwise neglectful to you, they’re more likely than not to let their trust in you cloud their much better judgement. Either that, or they’re also just as stupid as you.
• Friends: You’re really getting desperate now. Unless your friends are dumber than a bag of stones they almost always tell you to consider changing your mind on the subject of starting your own civilization. However, you must persevere: don’t let their confusing myriad of questions such as “What’s it gonna be like?” or “Where is it?” or “Why are you in my home?” prevent you from living your dreams. If, however, you do manage to convince some of them to join you, remember: they are going to be the first ones to attempt to break free from your society. How you deal with this event depends on the form of government you choose later.
• Pets: household animals are generally worthless for labor but do make for some tasty meals during the dry season. Plus, they don’t need to be convinced of anything because they’re also stupid! There’s a lot of unintelligence involved in starting a commune, isn’t there?

Step 2: Decide a Form of Government

Commune vs. Dictatorship

Despite what the name may lead you to believe, a commune doesn’t have to be ruled upon the ideals of communism. A commune is simply an escape from reality that you create out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, and therefore can be whatever the hell you want. Wanna rule with an iron fist? Sure, if you can handle it! Wanna make people pay, if not in labor, than in currency, in exchange for goods and services? Go ahead! Wanna just let people be free and make their own life choices, similar to you when you started this project in the first place? Congratulations: you’re a pussy!

Forms of Government To Choose From

The International Society for Commune Creation and Establishment has deemed these to be the acceptable forms of government to select from when starting your very own commune:

• Communism: The most common type of government when starting a commune. Usually chosen because of its popularity with the disenfranchised, who are scientifically more likely to start communes in the first place
• Capitalism: Great for if you have high hopes right off the bat. Since capitalism only makes sense until you start really thinking about it, its very difficult to establish right away, but if you can eventually pull it off, you can succeed at making your people feel just as shitty as when they were participating in real society
• Fascism: Only try this one if your both brave (like, really brave) and hate everyone. Trying and failing to establish this form of commune can have dangerous consequences
• Buddhism: only works if you’re fat (like Buddha)
• Tribalism: If you really don’t care about what exactly happens in your commune, and don’t feel like putting in any real work, then this is the commune for you. I mean, why would you set out to make a commune in the first place and then not want to put in any real work to do so? You really are a communist!

Step 3: Finding a Place to Start

Every good commune needs a good starting place! Make sure you find somewhere with plenty of life-sustaining resources such as water and the Internet, as well as some perks such as mineral deposits, animals to hunt (unless you brought your own), and blind faith.

Once you have a good place to live, you’re ready to start your new society!

No! You Can’t Start in These Places and Here’s Why:

• Siberia: already claimed by another commune
• The Moon: if these guys can’t do it, then what chance in hell do you think you have?
• Your Current Place of Residence: Your own home is too obvious and will likely lead to complications down the line if you try and start a commune there. Apparently, this is not common knowledge.

Step 4: Delegating Jobs and Getting Resources

If only starting a commune wasn’t so emotionally taxing, wasn’t it? Now you must do the painstaking task of assigning people to roles to play in your commune.

The Leader

Traditionally, the one who starts the commune is the one who is the leader and gives all the jobs to everyone. If you don’t do this and instead give someone else this job, your commune is bound to collapse. They tried it in Lord of the Flies and how did that turn out? Then again, they were also children, and since you’re stupid you probably didn’t invest in finding any of those to help you with this endeavor.

The Farmer

The farmer or farmers are in charge of acquiring food for the tribe. The more members of your commune you have, the more farmers you will need. This is known as basic math and is a good skill to have if your job isn’t to do all the boring manual labor in society.

The Hunter Gatherer

For Best results, make sure to give this job to someone that you both like the least and also happens to be rivals with whoever you chose to be farmer. Although they both are tasked with feeding the population, the farmer will typically be the one with the ability to hand out more food and ultimately sustain the people. Then, you can consistently pull the hunter-gatherer to the side and tell him how poor of a job he’s doing and say that if he doesn’t up his numbers that you may be forced to send him away.

The Banker

If you didn’t choose a capitalist form of government, then you can skip this one. However, you can still have it anyways and give it to the nerd of the group to give him the illusion that he’s helping.

The Cleric

Someone has to give the people a false sense of hope! And since you’re not going to be doing this job yourself — you’ll have much more important tasks to be attending to — this job will need to be delegated to someone capable. Choosing a cleric is a process that needs to be absolutely perfect or your society may collapse, so make sure to test the waters with any potential candidates by considering these questions:

• Are they capable of handling an uprising in the event of low community morale?
• Do they have a history with run-in’s with the law?
  • Have they done illegal things without having run-ins with said law? If so, you may have a priest on your hands and you may not need to consider any further questions.
• Are they batshit insane enough to convince strangers to listen to them?
• Do they have an affliction, such as alcoholism?

Step 5: Civil War

As with every good commune, civil war is bound to break out shortly after establishment. This is because people have a tribal instinct to only care about themselves, and your fun little group of delinquents are bound to be no exception. If you delegated power in the commune to someone else at this point, you are fucked. Otherwise, you’ll have to start dealing with that one person in the group that started the revolution against you. You know the one: the person who always thinks they have better judgement than anyone else, the one who always thinks they should be in control; these people usually end up with careers in politics. So to hopefully dash their dreams of being the next Bill Clinton before they get anywhere near to having any real kind of influence, you must assert dominance the only way they’ll understand: by kicking their ass in a fight.

Only the smartest commune starters are capable of handling this early uprising. But since you’re obviously a fucking moron (judging by the fact that you thought this was gonna work anyways), you’re going to have to be the smartest of the stupids and feign intelligence. It’s going to take a lot of work, but don’t worry: you can ease off again once this all blows over.

Quick! Call the Cleric!

If you did your job correctly, you’ll have picked a cleric obedient enough to follow with your train of thought and be obedient. You should’ve also selected someone who would be capable of calming down a massive, angry crowd. However, you’re still screwed because chances are that the angry revolutionaries targeted and killed him first, since he would be the most prominent symbol of your current leadership. This leaves you next in line to deal with the situation.

Preparing Your Army

The War will usually start out by your aggressor getting people to side with him. At this point you must do two things. First, you must do the same and convince as many people as possible to side with you. Second, you must assure your aggressor that you can and will kick his ass. This step is likely to have little to no effect, as your aggressor will always be the selfish asshole of the group described earlier and will be so sure of himself that he’ll think you couldn’t POSSIBLY defeat HIM in a civil war. Of course, he will be sorely mistaken.

Strategies

• The Rocky Surprise: Since your commune at this point is likely to be no more than a few strewn about rocks & sticks and a bunch of sweaty idiots, its not worth putting in the effort to come up with a real attack plan. So your best bet is to find your biggest rock and throw it at him. If you hit him, hopefully he’ll go unconscious and the uprising will come to an anticlimactic conclusion. However, you’ll also need a good aim for this plan because if you miss, it is sure to escalate tensions.
• Gas-lighting: If you cannot convince the aggressor himself that he is in the wrong, perhaps you can do similar things to his followers. They will be more stupid than both you and your aggressor, so it should be easy to sway them to your side unless you’re morally despicable. Once everyone is on your side, you can effectively deport your aggressor or kill him with the Rocky Surprise.
• Fistfight: Not recommended because the smartass of the group is typically also the strongest physically, but if you’re feeling daring you can cheat by throwing dirt into his eyes.

Step 6: Business as Usual

Once you’ve effectively shown everyone else in the commune that you aren’t fucking around, you will now be able to continue to build your civilization. Build houses, plant crops, keep records, all that bullshit.

Repeat steps 5 and 6 until you have somehow created a functional civilization. Hey, it worked out for China!