If Sir Thomas More could write a book about an utopia, why can’t we start a thread about one?
Rules:
It has to be a real utopia. Sorry, no magical fairyland where rainbows and butterflies live with pixies and gumdrops–we’re talking about a real utopia, and how to achieve it. There’ll need to be laws, trade policies, culture standards… everything.
No changing human nature. People often argue that utopia can never be realized because human nature is imperfect and people can become corrupt, criminal, and dangerous. So, this isn’t about making people perfect–it’s about making the perfect society.
To start out:
What kind of laws would we need in our Doperland utopia?
(I first took your title to refer to a purely Doper society, probably a commune outside Chicago, ruled by strict but benign Mods and Admins, with a tax of $14.95 a year and $7.48 after that, where troublesome citizens are exiled to other, inferior lands…)
A Udopian Constitution is the first thing, perhaps based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Perhaps if there were included a line about how none of this is written in stone, it could prevent later fanaticism–like those people who ferociously uphold the Second Amendm…oh, wait. Never mind. Well, a mutable constitution is a must anyway.
This points to one problem. As Kythereia mentioned, human beings aren’t perfect. Some go astray, with varying levels of deviance and malevolence. Violent people will need to be dealt with, and the remainder will need to be protected from violence.
Some people will not be happy unless they are able to protect their own families from intruders. If guns didn’t exist, they would use the deadliest weapon otherwise available. But, guns do exist, and it will be nearly impossible to keep them out of Udopia.
However, that isn’t to say we shouldn’t continue to try to create our perfect world. To be realistic, I need boundaries. How big will our perfect place be? Are we taking over the world? A commune outside of Chicago? Or something in-between?
The keyword there is “mostly”. Criminals will bring in guns. That’s the sort of thing some criminals do.
It’s one reason we need to define the size of our utopia. If we take over the world, the solution will be to ban the manufacture of guns worldwide, and destroy every gun we see. But then we have a very large area where we need to enforce these laws. How are we going to prevent a crime syndicate from making their own? A syndicate that possessed the only guns in the world would be quite formidable.
The smaller the utopia, the easier it will be to police. But then we have to deal with the black-market, and gun smuggling.
I don’t want to get stuck on the gun issue, but it’s one thing that needs to be dealt with.
Personally, I might be somewhat happy in an Amish setting. It seems to be a much simpler lifestyle. But it would require a lot of hard work…cultivating farms to grow crops, tending herds of animals to feed my family and friends. That would be somewhat rewarding, but I would miss my relatively high-tech lifestyle. And honestly, most people wouldn’t consider farm life to be utopian.
Which are both relatively small islands with controlled points of entry. We have thousands of miles of land border with two contiguous neighbors and another several tens of thousands of miles of coastline. It’s a LITTLE harder to keep things out of the US than it is to keep them out of the UK or Japan.
You guys are raising good questions already. I knew I could count on you lot for a Great Debate
The size of our land? Hmm. Let’s say for arguments sake that Udopia (I love that name) is a landlocked area roughly the size of Manhattan, and that we reside within the U.S.
So! Let’s draft a constitution:
Udopians have the right to leave whenever they wish, under any circumstances.
More seriously: The first thing I’d tackle would be population limits. Maybe have a fee-per-kid thing. Forget tax credits for having children–I’d like to see a massive child tax.
And if they had 'em anyway, they’d be tax-evaders and we’d have a range of options available–repatriation to their country of origin, wage garnishment, asset forfeiture, labor camps, etc.
We’d play nice first, though–maybe set up a low-interest installment plan for them, and make some form of birth control a condition of their probation.
(Just to be clear–“labor camps” was a joke. Udopia won’t have labor camps. In fact, I’d like to see the “penal” system be focused entirely on rehabilitation.)
