Instead of focusing too much on all of the things that are currently wrong, could you please help paint a picture of what a future utopian society could look like?
My vision is heavily inspired by Terence McKenna. I imagine a world as it might have existed during prehistoric times. Lush forests teeming with exotic wildlife, clean air, and crystal clear water. No highways full of billboards, no parking lots, no shopping malls, and no cars. Just safe grounds and paths for humans embedded deep within all of this nature.
At a birds-eye view, it may look as if humanity has completely abandoned technology and regressed back into its childhood. Yet if you were to look out through the eyes of one of these utopian people, you would see the most wonderful augmented reality display.
Information, communication, entertainment, education, global economies… almost everything has been de-materialized. Humanity’s ceaseless pursuit of technology has been mostly divorced from our physical environment and mother earth is bustling with life again.
The only technologies that remain in the real world are those that help all of us live happy and healthy lives (modern medicine, delicious food, solar power, etc) all the while the shared virtual reality in our eyes is limited only by our collective imaginations.
We are finally living in accord with nature without having to forsake our innate desire for knowledge and progress.
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Everyone acting in good faith all the time. Yeah, it’s impossible.
Our cities would be compact, walkable, jam-packed with quality transit, and nearly car-free. Cargo would be transported with cargo ebikes, barges along rivers and canals, local freight rail, and cargo trams. People would move by foot and bike and trams and metro and high-speed rail.
The surrounding countryside would be home to ecological, sustainable smallholder agriculture, preferably with plenty of technology for efficient precision agriculture. Instead of massive monocultures of corn, we’d have diverse polycultures of dozens of different crops, both annuals and perennials.
Nature would be abundant, protected, and rewilded. We would remove most roads into wild areas and replace with trains and velomobile trails, which would be much lower impact on wild habitats. Every city would have easy, rapid transit access to natural areas by rail, so anyone can go hiking or exploring or whatever they like.
Our economy would be centered around productivity, not rent-seeking and speculation. We would use policy to reduce barriers to entry to create highly competitive markets. We would heavily tax externalities like carbon emissions and fertilizer runoff and PFAS contamination.
We would tax people on what they take, not what they make. Income taxes? Nah, you did the labor; that value should belong to you. Carbon emissions? That materially harms others so you should pay tax on that. Hoarding valuable god-given land? You didn’t make it, so you should pay taxes on the land you deprive from the rest of humanity.
Our democracy would be reformed with a much better voting system like mixed-member proportional representation (MMPR) or single transferrable vote (STV), so we could have healthy multiparty systems.
Our society would publicly invest more in research and development, open-source projects, infrastructure, and anything else that generates positive externalities. You rewilded 100 acres of native grassland? Society should pay you for your valuable labor.
The balance of power between labor and employers would be balanced. A citizen’s dividend or universal basic income, subsidies on positive externalities (like rewilding), and the economic general growth spurred by elimination of rent-seeking would allow for an empowered working class that could capture its own productivity gains, demand better pay, and demand shorter hours. Much like how the professional class can demand good pay and good working conditions currently.
In short, the economy would be centered around Georgist principles, environment and agriculture around permaculture, and democracy around technocratic and representative democracy. A shared, sustainable prosperity for all.
Meditation, study, gardening, self improvement are paid jobs. We’ve given freedom to those who are able to use it in a responsible manner. Hard labor is a 4 to 5 hour gig that we take turns doing, not because we are forced to, but because we understand the necessity and value of the work. Work is not seen as something we must do to have a house and food, but it is seen as participating in our society.
Compassion, tolerance, and freedom are primal virtues.
Personally I love work, I love the feeling of charity, I love learning how to better myself.
I still disagree with the capitalism though
Sure. It’s just, communism is not an answer. It’s human nature that fucks up these systems. We need to address human nature
No humans. Not even their skeletons… Even the history of humanity complete wiped out like they never existed.
Sign me the fuck up! Collectively, we really are a blight on Earth.
It is an egalitarian society where we all work for one another’s benefit. I can really dream can’t I. I like the idea of anarcho-communism in the style that was very much common in Native American societies prior to the racist/bigoted European settlers. This kind of society everyone was important and everyone played a key role in the success of the society. A leader acted more as a facilitator and less as an authority figure.
A world where all humans are autistic.
It wouldn’t solve everything, but at least there wouldn’t be room for chronic reification, useless charismatic narcissists, Cartesian dualism, etc to become big issues like they are in our world.
Speaking as someone with autism you are wrong and misinformed
Autism doesn’t give everyone the same static personality
We are just like you, we just process information differently to you and there’s nothing wrong with that
I’m autistic too.
My point isn’t that autistic people have a single, utopian personality, but that we’re generally less susceptible to certain social/psychological phenomena that tend to make societies shittier.
My ideal world is always communism where everyone has a role and those roles only export is prosperity and happiness. Something like the Rajneesh movement. It is deeply flawed and will never work globally but its a nice thought.
If you would have asked people 100 years ago they would be saying what we are living in today is the utopia. So this is always going to be a moving goalpost.
My ideal world is one where the population of humanity exceeds 10trillion, but the population of earth is <100,000 permanent residents with yearly visitation from tourism etc exceeds 100million thanks to the series of space elevators that have been built. The majority of humanity are living in space at various Lagrange points in O’Neill cylinders and at least a quarter of humanity are in living in generation ships traveling to distant stars many that are >10pc away.
The Asteroid Belt has been mostly mined out though that isn’t much of a problem as fission/fusion generation supplementing the solar dyson ring has transformed us firmly into a type 1 civilization.
