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Notes -
Everyone would have to do it all at once or the Amish are going to get crushed by people who retain modern technology. It's not stable for some people to retain modernity and some to go without.
Uh, then how have the Amish managed to survive so far?
A relatively tiny enclave of Amish can survive and keep their ways of living under the protection of a country like USA. Perhaps a relatively tiny country like the Switzerland or Monaco could survive being Amish while living under the protection of modern EU (and USA). Can anyone bigger do it and not become thirdworldized? Doubt.
A couple of points. First, although I suppose it wasn’t clear, I was responding to RandomRanger’s last sentence, which I do think is wrong. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a group that is more stable than the Amish, even though they have opted to go without modernity to some extent (the extent varies by Gemeinde).
Secondly, going back to coffee_enjoyer’s comment, I didn’t take him to be saying that we would need to adopt the Amish life wholesale, but instead that we could carefully pick and choose which parts we wanted to adopt (“incorporating such things into modern life”), just as the Amish carefully decide which parts of modernity they want to adopt. Some kind of synthesis between the two cultures would probably be a net gain over the current state of the modern West. If nothing else, I think the average modern person would benefit massively from the strong sense of community that the Amish have.
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