" I’ll tell you why I’m dubious. These will be young people in this garden commune, I assume. That means they’ll be stoned half the time–one of the things you can grow in gardens is
Cannabis.
That won’t go down well with the neighbors. Neither will free-form marriage or the natural-credit Communist economy. They’ll be visited by the cops every week. They’ll be lucky if the American Legion doesn’t burn them out, or sic the dog catcher on their wild life children.”
“None of that has anything to do with
them.
It only has to do with people outside.”
“Sure,” I said, “but those people aren’t going to go away. If they won’t leave the colony alone I’ll give it six months. If it isn’t molested it might last a year or two. By that time half the people will have drifted away in search of bigger kicks, and the rest will be quarreling about some communal woman, or who got the worst corner of the garden patch, or who ate up all the sweet corn. Satisfying natural desires is fine, but natural desires have a way of being both competitive and consequential. And women may be equal to men, but they aren’t equal in attractiveness any more than men are. Affections have a way of fixing on individuals, which breeds jealousy, which breeds possessiveness, which breeds bad feeling. Q.E.D. "

― Wallace Stegner , Angle of Repose