I’m not sorry.

Fun fact, and background:

The Oneida Community were a group of Perfectionist Christian Communalists that lived in upstate New York (the area they settled known as the Burning Country for the large number of Christian sects that spawned there, from the Shakers to the Mormons) to pursue the open marriage lifestyle of the community’s founder John Humphrey Noyes. The community advocated the notion of complex marriage, or everyone having however many romantic partners he or she desires. Aside from this, they also practiced weekly group self-criticism meetings where the entire community would come together in the theater on the Oneida grounds and one by one step forward to have each member of the community personally critique them, according to them this not only let some steam off their chests in the complex social dynamic of the community but laid down what more work an individual had to do to become a perfect person according to outside criticism. Apart from Noyes, the only other notable Oneidan was Charles J Guiteau, notorious for being James Garfield’s assassin.

Guiteau was apparently an unpleasant person, as he was kicked out of the community a grand total of twice for the dubious honor of being “too annoying”. In the sarcastic study of Guiteau by Sarah Vowell for Assassination Vacation, Guiteau had the misfortune of being in a community where anyone could have sex with anyone, yet no one wanted him to get in their pants. He’d later go even deeper into insanity and kill Garfield in the name of not only God but Ulysses S. Grant and Chester Arthur (he was directly inspired by 1880 Republican infighting, and on trial declared himself the ‘Stalwart of the Stalwarts’, the Stalwarts being the supporters of former General US Grant; the rest of his trial is absolute comedy).

Other things the Oneida Community was famous for:

- Enforced mediocrity, no one could become professional at any skill and people were rotated to a new role or profession when they began showing any sort of master skill of it over their peers.

- “Positive eugenics”, apart from developing the personal skills of not knocking up a woman while between the sheets and thereby avoiding unwanted pregnancies Noyes also dabbled in a breeding program to theoretically make naturally better babies

- Silverware, after Noyes left or died his successor done away with the free love and turned the entire community into a silver ware factory before moving to Orange County, California where he became a lawyer and built the Orange County courthouse on spoon money.