[an excerpt from a math4wisdom post]
In my post-military and/or slightly para-military asylum city refugee camps, we keep the fun parts (helicopters) and lose the dumb parts (e.g. murder, mayhem...)Quakers, eventually a business-oriented bourgeois sect, evolved as a part of the trend away from organized religion and the oppressive tyranny of the English caste (class) system. Per Quaker lore, we invented fixed pricing which made wholesale / retail catalogs possible (it didn't matter what your title or position in society was). We owned Barclays Bank, Lloyds of London, Cadbury Chocolate... (but never the Quaker oats company).
A newish book called Quakernomics (not by Quakers) documents their middle-class capitalistic utopianism, which was centered around the idea of a company town, with jobs, health care and education for all. Most industrialists didn't care for this socialistic model, but it's part of New England Transcendentalism as well, this impulse to form egalitarian communities that are also prosperous (not unlike the kibbutzim in some ways, although I'm no expert).
We (the Quakers) reached our apex in power during the industrial revolution in England. Pennsylvania was to be our utopia but we were quickly outnumbered by other Anglo-Euro immigrants eager to engage in Indian Wars and other forms of awkward jerkiness characteristic of their clans.
Quaker Rufus Jones helped establish the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) as the Quakers' social action arm. I've worked with AFSC quite a bit over the years, in various capacities, lots in my online journals.
Founder George Fox, popular in some military circles, advised worshippers to escape the "steeple houses" (everyday churches) and join him in talking to God directly, yet collectively, in a silence imbued with a sense of expectancy, and from meetinghouses instead (no steeples).
Religious Society of Friends is the formal name, and comes from a passage in John wherein Jesus says he wants friends, not servile servants and sycophants.
