The Amish are fascinating from so many different angles. Their history of surprisingly successful legal clashes with the US government (no selective service, no Social Security contributions, no education past 8th grade). Their decentralized legal system, which despite being famously strict, is pacifist and arguably anarchist. Their theology/philosophy, if you're into that. Their local economies. Rumspringa. Meidung (shunning). And of course, their extremely fast growth (estimated around 5% per year), which I've heard attributed to "traditional birth rates and modern medicine."
It is certainly interesting from a "segregation" viewpoint.
If the Amish were immigrants arriving in American today they would (Warning: generalization incoming) probably be demonized by a decent % of the population for refusing to integrate into mainstream American society, the fact they arrived a long time ago insulates them from that.
From reading about the selective service / social security bit it is almost like they are not US citizens and their lands are not US lands. Weird situation.
Much of the tolerance for the Amish has been able to happen because they didn't pose any sort of threat to their neighbours or Americans in general.
With a combination of a high birth rate and a large amount of money, this may change.
The Hutterites in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Montana form colonies similar to those of the Amish. From an outsider's perspective, the major difference between the Amish and the Hutterites is that the Hutterites embrace more technologies that have a primary work purpose. They may not have cars, but they do have trucks and million dollar combine harvesters.
The nature of their colonies makes the Hutterites very good at surviving and thriving the boom and bust cycle of modern farming. They save up money during boom years (like the past few years), and then buy up a large amount of land and equipment during the bust years (excessive rain has already drowned a large portion of this year's crop). The birth rate of the Hutterites means that they're always expanding. Non-Hutterite farms are expanding too due to the ever increasing cost and efficiency of farm machinery, but they're also selling out to the Hutterites as sons and daughters move to the city.
Having a colony expand into your area can destroy a community. Hutterites are good neighbours, but they are not part of the community. Your community school may close due to poor attendance. Machinery dealers that have a good reputation may thrive, but other businesses wither.
I think their "PR" is just really good, for some reason. I feel like most Americans that live near Amish communities (I did growing up) might gently joke about how weird it is to live like that, but I think we tend to think of them as a romanticized version of pre-industrial American farmers, despite that not being very accurate.
I don't think they are considered not US citizens or their lands not US lands. They pay local and state property taxes on their land.
They are largely pacifist, known for incredible work ethic (work alongside one at a manual labor job and you'll understand), and isolationist. Basically they are how we perceive older generations of Americans (romanticized no doubt given the "pacifist" label isn't quite applicable to early-stage Americans).
They don't try to force their views on general society and leave well enough alone while providing unique cultural contributions for those who visit them and purchase goods/services. Not really "PR," they just leave others alone and have enough positive traits that everyone seems to respect.
They were here before there was a United States of America, and they never really signed on for that whole social experiment, so I guess you could say they are like Native Americans in that regard.
You left off the one that is perhaps most directly relevant to HN: their approach to technology. Contrary to popular belief, they are not opposed to adopting modern technology. They are just cautious about it, wanting to understand both the good points AND the bad points of it first (unlike most of us, who ignore the bad points until we have become dependent on the new technology and it is too late to do anything about the bad).
Yeah, that's what I meant by their theology/philosophy. As I understand it, they evaluate technologies on a case-by-case basis, the key judgement being whether the technology makes members less dependent on the community, without regard to "how modern" the technology is. And the decision is on a per-community basis, and their communities are quite small (although they do generally fall into larger regional groups that share many decisions). The Amish near where I grew up have what appears to me to be a fairly modern lumber mill that must be powered either by grid electricity or (more likely) internal combustion generators.
Just wonder what bad sides of electrical engineering they had found, then.
I totally get conservativeness of not jumping right onto the hype wagon for the latest tech fad of the year or even decade, but I find it strange they oppose more than a century old scientific concept that hadn't shown any negative effects (some particular implementation did, but as I get it they're generally opposed to the applied use of the very phenomena, not case-by-case implementations like avoiding those fossil-burning stations).
To summarize tptacek's link, the Amish generally refrain from using the public power grid, but they use electricity from their own generators or even solar panels. The idea isn't to ban things that are modern or things that save time, but rather things that make members more influenced by the world and less dependent on their own community.
The main reason for their exemptions is their demonstrated track record of self-sufficiency. They have a very strong sense of taking care of each other - there are no poor people in Amish communities. So the courts allowed them to opt out of Social Security, because they have shown they provide their own. Similarly with education - their system works with only a minimal formal education, so the courts were happy to leave them be at that point.
They are required to register for selective service. If drafted, they declare themselves to be a conscientious objector. This may include working in a hospital or other non-military role, but usually they request and get a farm deferment, to work on Amish or Mennonites farms, producing food as their "war effort."
Basically, the Amish found that of the men who do non-combantant military service or work as nurse aides in hospitals end up being away from the Amish community for a couple of years, "only about half of them chose to return to their communities when their service was done, and not all of those chose to join the church." The Amish set up a committee to negotiate with the US about a solution which would work with both the US government and their own community.
As soon as I saw, "owned the Super Fruit in Chambersburg", I knew who this joker was. Man, I doubt this guy even sold the Super Fruit, I bet he went bankrupt. That place was a dump. He probably only told everyone he sold it for a lot of money. And even if he did sell it, what he thinks is "a lot of money" was probably only a few dozen kilobucks, maybe enough to live a year in Chambersburg.
I grew up in Chambersburg and the surrounding area. I now live in DC and am trying to get my parents to move out of Chambersburg. It may be cheap to live there, but there are other cheap places that aren't as awful. There is a certain culture of two-faced, get-rich-quick scheming there. Every redneck and his brother is trying to work an angle, trying to convince everyone they know the score, they did the leg work, you should invest, when all they really did was watch something on Discovery one night. This entire story is just not terribly surprising.
See, the problem with the Amish isolating themselves so much is that it makes them incredibly naive about the rest of us that they call "The English". They think we're all awful people, that we praise Satan with our morning cereal. You do anything that clearly demonstrates that as false, like... I don't know... letting them see you be a normal person for more than 15 minutes, and it breaks their brains. They don't know how to deal with it. So Moffitt handing out free fruit probably short circuited everything they knew about "The English" and they just lapped up his bullshit with a deer-in-the-headlights-look. But if they weren't so cut off from their surrounding community, they would have never paid attention to the guy.
Read up on their history. Their reason for coming to America, as well as a bunch of other other Germanic religious groups around the same time, was basically, "you know what? I may be a simple farmer, but I think our local church is wrong and we should be a lot more strict about our religion. But what's this? Most of the other people in our town don't want to be flogged for not going to bed at 8pm? Religious persecution! Let's move to America!"
So they cut themselves off and didn't live in their geographic community. If they were involved with The English, they would have known Moffitt was an asshole. I've seen this script played out so many times IN THIS VERY TOWN. It's probably the reason I haven't ever fallen for an MBA idea-guy's scheming, I had plenty of practice listening to the bullshit streaming out of old guys' mouths back home.
Interesting story on the nature of trust. In this case it wasn't some random guy turning up on the doorstep with a dodgy investment, but somebody they had known and worked with for years. Is it the case that you can never absolutely trust somebody, regardless of how long you've known them or what they've done in the past?
My dad grew up Amish and while I don't interact with them regularly, I do from time to time. There are a few factors which contributed to their fleecing here:
- Inexperience of Amish in investing/no one to mentor their investing
- “It's the lure of easy money, it's got a very strong appeal." No one is immune here.
- There is a very strong sense of conformity among the Amish - no one was willing to recoup their investment if everyone else was staying in.
- The Amish have a knee-jerk distrust of just about anything government-related.
TL;DR (Spoilers): Amish families were duped into investing into a Florida RV park (which is still basically just vacant land), and lost $15-$20 million. The man responsible, Tim Moffitt, has not yet been held accountable for his crimes.
It sounds like there is a huge opportunity for real justice here - the "records" say that $15-$20 million was almost all spent on the project, but clearly it was not. That type of money does not disappear and must be somewhere - perhaps in other houses/property that Tim bought.
With part of the moral, for me at least, being that while isolation (physical and technological) may have its merits to those in the Amish community, it makes it easier for them to fall for something like this. (Although why people trust somebody with the gift of the gab handing out oranges and visiting RV parks for 5 years is beyond me; I run a mile when I encounter people like that.)
I read through the first 5 pages, still didn't get what the article was going on about. Who has time to read 10 pages worth of full-on wall text these days? I came here for the comments to read the tldr version.
Why do summaries and abstracts exist? Why people do TL;DR versions on Reddit? Well, these things exist for the same reason that you visit links that you don't have time to read.
By the way, how do you know if an article is 10 pages long or 10 words long before actually visiting the link? If you visit an article because the title sounds interesting and then you find out that it is 300 pages long, would you read it? Or you would be crazy enough to read the TL;DR version?? But remember, if you read the TL;DR version, keep it in secret, otherwise someone will come and ask you why the heck you visit articles that you do not have time to read.
