Visitors Get Five Star Treatment

When there were visitors to The Friendship Circle (aka The Environment) who Bob viewed favorably for whatever reason, they would receive five star treatment. A day sail on our 80' schooner. Some fine dining. An informal concert in the courtyard including a performance of Bob's Song. And sometimes they'd even even be invited to attend a group session, orchestrated to be all warm and fuzzy. 

That's how it came to be that Dr. Stuart Boyd, Bob's professor in college, wrote the sorry drivel that leads off chapter one of The Ethics of Interpersonal Relationships:

This is a community of some 100 or more persons -- women, men and  children -- who seem to have achieved the better life together with a minimum of dogma, political authority, withdrawal, mysticism, insulation ... There is no golden lie, no coercion, no constitution ... It is not, nor claims to be, Utopia. 

This is so wrong it's hard to know where to begin. It's easier to point out the parts that are true: 

• 100+ members
• Free of mysticism
• There weren't written rules 

Everything else is the stark opposite of how things were in The Friendship Circle.

I don't blame Boyd. It's easy for a visitor to get snowed by the five star treatment.