@SpukiKitty: Frankly; As much as I LOATHE theocracies and dictatorships, I don’t have much issue with small enclaves set aside for people who WANT to live under that if it’s a compromise.
While I agree with that sentiment, and it could work in theory, there’s a caveat: Want. Some of the people who are born in places like that really don’t belong there. The compromise would be that you’re free to treat your own citizens as you wish, even if it’s highly abusive by the standards of the rest of the world, provided you don’t prevent them from leaving. “Preventing them from leaving” includes cutting off people from information about the rest of the world and outright lying about what it’s like. Some children will be traumatized, but at least they can find a better place and heal as adults.
Unfortunately, the more necessary this is for any particular enclave, the less likely it is to be applied in practice, were they to be completely autonomous. This would mean either they can’t be completely autonomous, or in else in many cases the “compromise” would only be with the enclave’s first generation, and after that they’d be more of a self-enforced containment zone than a freedom zone… to the detriment of people born into a nightmare which requires both heroic effort and abandonment of everything they’ve ever known to escape, assuming they even know there’s anywhere to escape to at all. And then there’s the issue of what if they start excluding outsiders completely, do the next generation of similar-minded extremists born elsewhere get their enclave too, and then maybe eventually exclude outsiders as well?
I’m not saying we shouldn’t do this, hell, a lot of the time I think we should - there are a lot of non-mainstream subcultures which can’t truly live out their lives according to their own ideals, and not all are inherently abusive. Those deserve their spaces just as much as or more those who crave theocracies. It’s just… there’s a lot of limitations and drawbacks to that approach.