Utopia

[David]

(Inspired by a post by TP in the Whitlam thread):

Let's imagine you can design a perfect society. It can be as free or as regulated as you like. You can decide how the taxation system works or whether one exists at all. You can decide whether you want everyone on happy pills or working in the mines from the age of 5. You can have robots and virtual reality, or have us shut down the power grids and live off the land. You can set it in the here and now or the distant future. It's entirely up to you.

So, how do you imagine your utopia would look? And how would it differ to the society we live in now?

[Pies4shaw]

Everyone is compelled to learn the piano from the age of 4.

Those who can't play Liszt's Concert Etudes before they're 10 are forced to moderate bulletin boards. Or shot - whichever is worst.

[OEP]

[Jezza]

A utopia would consist of Collingwood winning non-stop and never losing!

[David]

Really? Wouldn't we all get bored eventually?

[Jezza]

Of course not!

COLLINGWOOD DOMINATION ENVY OF THE NATION!

[David]

Seriously, though, you're studying law atm—have you spent much time imagining how an ideal society might function? What legal reforms, for instance, do you think are most urgent?

[think positive]

[stui magpie]

Half the problem with designing utopia is that everyone will have a different idea of what it looks like, so if you build your version you're just another tyrant imposing your will on the populace.

Likewise, I don't think an ideal global utopia could exist, there's too much variation in human beings to have a large scale system that worked for everyone.

What would my model society look like? Never actually given it a lot of thought, but some of the boxes I'd want to tick off were.

Universal safety nets, everyone has access to the human needs of food, shelter, medical attention, education etc. No one would starve, be homeless, etc.

A proviso for qualifying for that would be that every adult is required to make a contribution to the rest of the society in a form that best suits their capabilitty. Whether that be a financial contribution in the form of a tax, or by some form of work or study, but they have to do something (within their caoacity and capability) otherwise they get expelled. %$^£$%^&%% thee off to the wilderness.

Above the safety net, you'd want some differentiation of reward for effort to provide incentives for people to contribute above the base requirement. You'd throw away the current means of determining remuneration and go back to more of a proportional algorithm involving effort, capacity, capability and value added.

Privacy would not exist. Everyone's assets, actions and belongings would be public knowledge. No theft or crime as a result

that'll do for now. I have to go check what people are praying to me about.

[pietillidie]

As Stui said, you can't fix a social form as everyone has a different conception of it, and our conception of changes over time and sometimes takes abrupt turns. Not to mention that at that scale of construction there are too many plausible combinations to even start listing them.

But you can push towards better conditions for human expression and achievement, and that involves at the very least (a) an increase in environmental stability with a commensurate decline in authoritarian hierarchy; (b) massively increased access to facility, with a commensurate weighting of capital in production over capital in hoarding (use it or lose it); and (c) a decisive weighting of non-destructive incentives over destructive incentives.

For the point of the exercise, let's look at how we might promote non-destructive incentives and dissuade people from destructive incentives.

As a society we still tolerate violence and destruction in aid of "success" or "greatness", and favour childish, "good and evil" caricatures. Some of this is intrinsic, but a lot of it is cultural and discursive because we have never been given the resources to let go of the security blanket of the childish story.

But the incentives of primitive control which we use to drive ourselves, rooted as they are in primitive "good" and "evil" caricatures, no matter how good they might feel in a narrow sense, are inconsonant with billions of people living in interwoven, global urban complexes.

Simply having the psychic motivation to do big things is no longer something worthy of praise; plenty of destructive people are more than amply "motivated", and many have even achieved what have been called "great things" (according to extremely low historical standards).

So there's a big shift needed in our mental conceptions of the world, and we certainly have the tools to make a shift in a more mature direction.

One first practical step would be to make human development and "awareness of the self and others" core school subjects alongside maths and English, helping people develop the insight needed to recognise the subjectivity of their own motivations and "selves". We need to start valourising the struggle to live well as complex beings, not accept the cheap motivation of primitive, infantile stories.

This sort of "cognitive-emotional" discipline would then flow on through all manner of things. As a simple example, just think of the ridiculous way we interpret both "history" and the contemporary world, turning all manner of psychiatrically disturbed people into "great figures" and exemplars, without even the slightest hint of irony.

So it's not about utopia to me, it's about enhancing stability, access and constructive motivation, and seeing what we can make of it.

[Jezza]

[Pies4shaw]

Equity and trusts could each do with an overhaul. Occasionally, I think they are less opaque than is apt.

[Mugwump]

If we can start from scratch with no resource scarcity, it’d all be a bit too easy. The challenge of almost any society is how do you manage resource competition, and how do you manage change ? Assuming I can’t wish these away, my five practical spiritual and political reforms (today) would be :

• Fix the Australian housing market. Abolish negative gearing for existing developed land/properties, and direct that subsidy (and more, if required) to new-build housing. In a short time, we might actually stop enslaving young Australians with debt in return for a basic human need. No more people dying of carbon monoxide poisoning while sleeping in their car, no more tax-funded investors competing at auctions with those who need a roof. Poorer estate agents would be utopian in itself, naturally.

• Reduce the press harassment of politicians and reinstate parliament as the major place of debate. Yes, you read that right. We rely on politicians to make considered, long-term strategic decisions, and then we place them in a kind of daily cockfighting ring. I worked at a senior level in the British Civil Service for a time. One minister remarked to me over lunch, “we are in fact the executive branch of the media. Our main job is managing the press, not steering the country”. I saw this every day, and it makes long-term thinking impossible. So I’d limit media interviews with politicians, demand that the mainstream press provide some balanced coverage, ask each party to provide an annual report to all citizens, strengthen the national audit commission, and televise parliament via an ABC channel. I’d also police parliamentary standards severely. Then I’d hold an election every four years, with a short campaign. I think we’d get better government with less politics.

• I would demand proper Keynesian discipline. In times of growth, a substantial public surplus should be built. Now, we have deficit budgeting as a norm even in good times, and we enter recession with a zero balance at best, or a net debt burden. This makes Keynesian reflation almost impossible without spooking debt markets, and makes us rely on monetary policy alone. That enriches capital holders and leaves us prey to further bubbles. The great Lord Keynes' legacy deserves better than endless vote-buying through deficits.

• I’d try to dismantle the curse of largeness. We have evolved too many massive institutions that are far too remote from the people they serve. The banks are a good example, with their call-centre arrogance and me-too behaviour, based on soft collusion. Government is, however, another. I would constitutionally restrict government to a certain percentage of GDP, and force choices about where it does most good. Breaking up large corporates is not easy (they are mostly multinational), but I’d make them subject to a service-level test of some kind, to force them to fully subsidiarize their Australian operations.

• I’d subvert the offence and outrage industry. In today’s society, I feel like I am in a room of Aunt Gleggs (George Eliot – The Mill on the Floss). You have a right to be offended and outraged when you are personally injured. Otherwise, you’re just trying to mantle yourself in victimhood as a means to power over others. You should be satirised back into a mature state of citizenship, where social reality is debatable and not owned by you.

That’ll do for starters. Utopia ? Not in this world, not by a long shot – but a few hundred miles down the road to it. I'm not comfortable that there's nothing about inequality, but I can’t see a practical answer other than my housing idea, sadly. Raise taxes and curb CEO pay and they'll just move offshore, losing the whole tax base.

[pietillidie]

^That's a rare moment of virtually 100% agreement (as long as you don't confuse the genuinely nutty outrage industry as played out through the media with "necessary force" as required to counter actions which violently damage other humans).

[Mugwump]