How would you build a more utopian society

Great Debates
1

I don’t want to distract from the discussion from The cure to soulless crushing modern society is a life of narcissistic sociopathic hedonism (or why humans can't have nice things):

But if you had the power, how would you make society better so people have happier, more meaningful lives?

I would drastically increase the social safety net so the US was spending closer to 25-30% of GDP on social welfare programs (universal health care, free education, paid maternity/paternity care, pensions for the elderly and disabled, housing for the homeless, etc).

But I would also fund a lot of free public third spaces that are built around people’s work lives. Right now the library is about the only free third space for people, but funding a variety of third spaces where people can learn skills, make friends, find social support, feel less isolated that worked around people’s responsibilities and didn’t require them to spend money.

I’d also invest more into neuroscience since ‘quality of life’ is just our stupid primate brains triggering the right reward mechanisms.

I’d invest way more in doing things like stopping child abuse and neglect, or making sure children felt safe, validated, healthy and well fed. A lot of dysfunction as adults can be tied into abuse, neglect and trauma in childhood. Mental health checkups should be mandatory for children the same way physical health checkups are.

I’d work harder to remove environmental toxins that cause neurological damage (lead for example).

I’d support a system like they have in Germany where workers have mandatory seats on the board of directors in companies they work at. This helps prevent exploitation of the workforce.

I’d promote more work from home for people who want it, as avoiding toxic workplace drama and commutes does a lot to help people’s quality of life.

I’d pass regulations that acknowledge that media that keeps people angry, afraid or addicted create more ad revenue, and pass regulations so that ad revenue is tied to media that provides useful information people need to function in modern society. How many people actually know what % of GDP actually goes to taxes for example, despite how much people talk about taxes and government spending.

2

Alvin Lee said it best 55 years ago; “Tax the rich, feed the poor, 'til there are no rich no more.”

3

I think one reform that would go a long way would be a salary cap. Something like, “Your highest-compensated individual in your company cannot make more than 100x your lowest-compensated individual. Employers that comply with this rule will pay only 10% corporate income tax. Those who don’t, will pay 50% tax.” There would also be a lot of rules in it to prevent cheating, such as outsourcing to foreign workers or trying to count compensation as non-compensation.

And like the OP said, vigorously getting as many toxins like lead, methylene chloride, microplastics, etc. out of everywhere as possible.

I have a lot of other ideas, but didn’t want to spit out a 50-item long list.

4

Go for it

5

I think the big debate is between the people who like that line, and the people who think it should have been “… 'til there are no poor no more”, isn’t it? There are worse illustrations of the difference between communism and socialism.

6

I mean, pretty much all the major problems we have right now can be traced back to the consolidation of far too much money in the hands of far too few people. The richest of the rich literally have the power to buy laws that benefit them at the expense of everyone else and force their bizarre ideological bugaboos on the rest of us.

That’s the foremost problem that needs to be solved.

7

Oh, absolutely - things have gone way to far, and government by the people, for the people needs to be reasserted. But our goal here isn’t vengeance or even justice, it’s to make things better for everyone. So long as everybody’s happy, I don’t care if some people are slightly richer than others.

8

Across the board wealth tax, at a rate determined each year by the number and dollar amount of those population in/below poverty. Hey rich fuckers… you think you’re so smart? Solve poverty with your wealth and genius, and no then voila, no more wealth tax! Otherwise, wealth tax, mother fuckers.

Make solving poverty an existential crisis for billionaires until one of them is gone.

9

Is “society” here global, or just one country? And how much power do I actually have? Because depending on that, my answer could vary from “abolish capital” to “tax the rich more”

10

Universal healthcare obviously (though for most of the Western world thats as much a utopian fantasy as working sewers)

Universal income is the obvious more utopian idea. Though IMO that’s going to be become less utopian fantasy and more the only practical solution to avoid complete societal collapse.

11

I’m inherently distrustful of any society that claims to be “utopian”.

Despite the situation our country is currently in, I do still believe in Democratic and Liberal values. I think the reasons that this system is not working very well for us right now have to do with an ill informed and disengaged population rather than inherent flaws in the concept of Democracy.

So if I could make changes to society to make it better (not utopian :nauseated_face:), I’d make people slightly more engaged and much better informed. And probably most importantly, I’d restore trust in experts. There is nothing more toxic or damaging to our country than the anti-intellectual, anti-expertise, conspiracy-ridden brain rot that has infected us.

12

I mean that is good advice in the sense of a bearded hippy who wants you to move to the woods and set up a utopian society, absolutely distrust that guy.

But in a general sense I think it’s not. We should be trying to make our society a utopia. Accepting its injustices and suffering as just an unavoidable fact of life is an immoral attitude IMO. Even if at the moment “a little bit less dystopian” is quite an ask :frowning:

I would add that an even worse attitude, is the idea that nothing short of completely tearing down society and setting it up from scratch as a utopia is acceptable.

13

Can I just wish all religion away? That would be a start. Most of society’s woes are down to tribalism and the way it is exploited to keep power and wealth in the hands of the few.

14

Religion is caused by tribalism, not the other way around. If we got rid of religion, we’d just find new reasons to form antagonistic little groups.

15

Build a strong support system for banishing people to the wasteland?

As the OP for the original The cure to soulless crushing modern society is a life of narcissistic sociopathic hedonism (or why humans can’t have nice things) thread, I’ve kind of come to the conclusion that the reason people fantasize about ditching society to become an outlaw and tear it down because it’s freaking hard trying to make one that works.

Some of the sorts of questions that need to be answered:

  • What is the minimum standard of living?
  • Should there be a maximum standard of living and what should it be?
  • How do you decide where people should live?
  • How do you get people to do work that needs to get done but no one wants to do it?
  • How do you reward those who contribute more to society?
  • How do you increase production and distribution, particularly for scarce resources?
  • How do you treat criminals? What do you consider a crime?
  • To what extent do you allow things that maybe aren’t great for society, but people want them anyway?
  • How do you handle people who disagree with your policies (there will be a lot, regardless of what they are)?
  • How do you account for the fact that most people are stupid selfish jerks?

Also are we assuming we are building our society based on current technology?

If we’re just wishing for shit then you can just wish everyone a beach house, a million dollars, and a unicorn. I think you’re going to have to abolish religion the old-fashioned way.

16

Suffering is unavoidable, unless you destroy all life on Earth to prevent anyone from suffering like an Anime supervillain. I don’t think injustice is unavoidable but I also don’t think that a society that is as free from injustice as possible is utopian; I think utopia is inherently impossible, hence why the word means “no place”.

17

utopia is impossible because our brains are evolved to survive in an environment full of instability, scarcity, danger and competition. Evolution invented concepts like pain and suffering to discourage us from experiencing these unavoidable and inevitable threats to our survival. The movie the matrix was onto something when they said they tried to create a utopia and it failed because the human mind kept rejecting it.

But making the world a better, less bad place is an admirable goal. The world is much better in 2026 than it was in 1650 for an endless number of reasons (vastly better medical care, more democracy and human rights, less starvation, more science, more education, less poverty, more travel, more entertainment, less physical pain, more information, etc). Ideally the world of 2100 will be vastly better than the world of 2026.

18

but hasn’t there always been a valuation in our country for “common sense” as opposed to listening to “eggheads”, “pointy-headed intellectuals” et al

19

To an extent, but it’s worse than ever today, and more widespread across the political spectrum to boot.

20

Creating a perfect utopian society is easy:

  • Establish economic practices that balance free markets with proper regulatory guardrails and strong social safety nets.
  • Incorporate public transportation, renewable energy, and sustainable living
  • Utilize modern New Urbanism and smart city design in planning and zoning.
  • Divide society into distinct social classes based on function, temperament, abilities, and personality types.
  • Automate as much as possible using AI.
  • Genetically engineer everyone to be:
    • Attractive and athletic
    • Perfectly suited to their role/class in terms of intellect and desire
    • Eternally youthful (or at least physically youthful for as long as they are alive)
  • Use a combination of VR, managed communications, and smart sustainable design to craft an ideal habitat for your civilization.
  • Segregate your living areas by the class structure you created
  • Invent some sort of monolithic mysterious figurehead to pass wisdom down through the ages to help guide society (AI can help drive this).
  • Craft a plausible lore that help define why your society can only work the way it works
    • the origination of your society
    • lessons learned from the fall of the old world
    • the ascension of whatever figurehead you created
    • existential external threats
  • Develop mood-altering drugs help people maintain
  • Remove all unnecessary distractions (like books)
  • Create a hierarchy of make-work jobs that don’t really do anything but convey status (remember automation is really doing all the actual work).
  • Normalize hedonistic and intellectually bankrupt recreational activities.
  • Invent some sort of mechanism for culling your population as needed. It should just feel like the “natural order of things”, even though it won’t seem particularly “natural”.
  • Put controls in place to identify and weed out misfits, outliers, anomalies, divergents, in-valids, and other defectives.
  • Apply the “4R’s” for dealing with defectives: Reeducated, Renewed, Refrigerated, or Rejected into the Wasteland.

Celebrate that people no longer have to experience the horrors of early 21st Century living!
:smiley: :smiley: :smiley: