A clothing-discouraged commune, and an education in what people do when nobody makes them
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
A commune just over the Oregon border at Takilma, near Cave Junction, functioning as a destination resort for Berkeley hippies. Milton Jonathan Hare built a cabin on an abandoned logging road among old-growth redwoods at Gasquet, California, and the boys spent summers and Christmases between the two.
It drew doctors, creatives, technologists and horticulturalists, many from wealthy families, a number driving Swedish cars as a nod to Scandinavia. Despite his father's constant arguments with members over insufficiently pure adherence to Marxist-Leninist principles, Hare's assessment is that the idealism there was genuine.
The commune now has its name in the record: the Magic Forest — where, per S-085, the people were lovely and the buildings warmer than Milton's cabin, though the conversation was not.
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As the only children present, the boys were subject to no chores and no child labor rules. They simply helped where they enjoyed it — milking Rosie the cow, fetching eggs, tending strawberries. The reward for an hour of hard voluntary work was immediate and physical: a fresh strawberry off the vine.
That is the Catalyst Network's entire premise, learned at seven. Contribution that is genuinely voluntary, attributed to whoever made it, rewarded in proportion to what it produced.
A child watching an unfiltered cross-section of humanity with no stake in any of it. His conclusion, which the whole architecture rests on: when people are free of top-down coercion and fear-based social convention, their actual natures emerge. Some of what emerges is good.
The commune's one true outlier owned a twin-engine WWII transport plane and drove a bright orange WWII German military four-wheel-drive. When Jonathan was ten, TJ taught him to drive by letting the boy sit on his lap working the wheel and gearshift while TJ picked up young women hitchhiking to the river — declaring the polite blond boy a great asset to the operation. For Jonathan it felt strikingly like being dragged to his mother's National Organization of Women meetings in downtown Berkeley: a child as pure observer, watching an unfiltered cross-section of humanity be exactly itself once fear-based social mores were switched off. The record files it as era texture and early fieldwork, which is what it was.
A destination resort for Berkeley hippies: doctors, creatives, technologists and horticulturalists, many from wealthy families, driving Swedish cars as a nod to socialist-adjacent Scandinavia. Rabbit Babbitt walked proudly and fully nude, occasionally distracting the sheriff's deputies searching the rafters for marijuana. Milton battled the members constantly for insufficient Marxist purity, and the idealism was genuine anyway — both of those at once, which is the whole place in one sentence.
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Selma, 1965 — and the promise
Open →improbably, also lived thereThe interface — and The Magic Forest
Open →where the debates continuedKnew Lenin. Was with Trotsky when he was killed.
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-085The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-157The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-192The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →This record is not biography attached to a technical claim. Each runs into the other: the experiences below produced the mechanisms, and the mechanisms are what those experiences turned out to require.
This page is the anecdote — the thing that draws you in. The explainers are where the mechanism is set out in full, with the problem it solves and the condition on which it fails.
The mechanism, set out in full with the condition that would defeat it.
Open the explainer →Consilient Innovators NetworkThe mechanism, set out in full with the condition that would defeat it.
Open the explainer →Quantum Adaptive Systems TheoryThe mechanism, set out in full with the condition that would defeat it.
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