Can a utopia exist?

[Gatto]

 

[Gatto]

 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bhutan-television/bhutan-wonders-if-tv-really-brings-happiness-idUSSP29261020070513

 

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2003/jun/14/weekend7.weekend2

 

https://www.discovery.com/shows/man-vs-bear

[Yatogami]

Impossible, even a limited one. Human nature forbids it. The best we can do is function somewhat well.

[Gatto]

 

[gisiebob]

2 hours ago, Yatogami said:

Impossible, even a limited one. Human nature forbids it. The best we can do is function somewhat well.

ah, human nature

that thing that told us how to divide, to push water through our gills, to seek out warmth that our own body cannot provide, to reproduce in the summer before we die off in the frost, to climb trees to find safety, to distrust any face that isn't found in our small tribe of less than 30.

 

don't worry, no one is going to ask you to lift a finger for this better world that doesn't clearly immediately benefit specifically you (that impediment you described having) 

that just means that the better world won't start building until after you.

[Gatto]

 

[Yatogami]

On 1/23/2020 at 2:13 AM, gisiebob said:

ah, human nature

that thing that told us how to divide, to push water through our gills, to seek out warmth that our own body cannot provide, to reproduce in the summer before we die off in the frost, to climb trees to find safety, to distrust any face that isn't found in our small tribe of less than 30.

 

don't worry, no one is going to ask you to lift a finger for this better world that doesn't clearly immediately benefit specifically you (that impediment you described having) 

that just means that the better world won't start building until after you.

It is not a matter of how many people could make the world a better place by choice, its the problem of the few who do not want to. It only takes one person saying no, to unravel everything. 

[Zagadka]

The problem I notice is that people just want different things. No matter how nice of a utopia you create, there will always be a significant part of the population that views it as hell. Even if everything is cared for, people will just want a different system. You can just look to Trump and Brexit, modern support for these things that are so, at least to many, dystopian. There is a movement in the UK to actually close the NHS while there are those of us in the US in a desperate struggle for universal healthcare. It is impossible. We can't have nice things.

[thyristor]

Copy-paste from this thread (which really was about something completely different):

 

Quote

It depends on how you define world peace. It is not necessarily the absence of conflict; as you mentioned before, the absence of conflict would be nightmare-like boring. I think all rules or -isms or principles or whatever need to have a certain flexibility to them, like bridges or any constructions: if they are too rigid, they will just break if they are not strong enough, or make other things break if they are strong enough not to break themselves.

 

So, I like to think of world peace as a range of states to be in. One attempt of mine to define one aspect - the aspect of armed conflict, which is definitely not the only aspect - is this:

 

If out of 100 areas, no more than 15 have, let's say, something like street demonstrations, that is many people being very explicitly angry about something, that's okay, that is still world peace as long as we can handle that so that it will come and go, the problems will be solved at least once they rise to the surface for example through demonstrations.

 

If out of those 15 "conflict areas", 10 will be solved (while maybe 10 others arise somewhere else), 4 will remain status quo and one will turn into some kind of armed conflict, that could STILL be called world peace as long as the one armed conflict is not just blind killing of civilians and as long as it is very shortlived and will make everyone alert so that the problem can finally be solved. Right now it seems we have conflicts in 90 out of 100 areas, 80 of those are armed and 70 of those have been going on for ages AND are for completely irrational causes, that's certainly not world peace.

 

Please, don't put too much into the numbers, they are just my way of explaining the concept of being flexible in some way; obviously we would need to refine and define all those things. We can't reach an absolute state of zero negativity, that would probably mean zero positivity and be so boring. But that should not stop us from trying to learn how to make use of the methods we know to keep the amplitude of the wave between minus and plus within reason.

 

The same goes for epidemics, food shortages, natural desasters, individual crime and violence, etc, they will all still exist in some way. They have to, or we will not even know to appreciate when we are sheltered from them. It's like children's literature: you have a thief, you have a policeperson, you have a victim, you have a hero. But the amplitude need not be so enourmous.

 

I don't know it this makes sense to anyone, I hope so though.

 

[thyristor]

On 1/14/2020 at 10:12 AM, Skycaptain said:

One person's utopia will almost certainly not be someone else's utopia. 

I dealt with this problem already at the age of ten or so, when I realized that the "heaven" we all were trying to get to after death must exist in one personal edition for each person, since I consider person x as part of my paradise while person x might not consider me part of their paradise and person y might not consider person x as part of their paradise, so, since God is omnipotent, it means He must be creating my personal heaven with clones of everyone. (FYI: not religious anymore)

[Gatto]

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jan/25/how-we-live-together-quakers

[Gatto]

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/25/observer-anthony-burgess-runner-up-bjork-utopia-rennie-mcdougall

[Gatto]

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/freedom-and-liberty-not-enough-to-save-galts-gulch-chile-libertarian-community-from-bureaucracy-and-internal-dissent

[Abigail Rose]

Perhaps what one should strive for is personal utopia within the confines of their own personal living space which others generally can not interfere with. 

[Gatto]

 

[Acing It]

Apart from your title unavoidably being a contracition in terms. I think not. One person's utopia is another person's hell.

[Gatto]

 

[gisiebob]

but the idea of a utopia isn't for an individual. like if you describe a utopia as benefiting some or most, but not all, what you are thinking about isn't a utopia. it ain't an easy idea. 

[Gatto]

In Germany many readers, blandly ignoring the implicit criticism in the novel, tended to see in Hesse's cultural province nothing but a welcome Utopian escape from the harsh postwar realities. More discerning European critics have usually been so preoccupied with the fashionably grave implications that they have neither laughed at its humor nor smiled at its ironies. In part these one-sided readings are understandable, for the humor is often hidden in private jokes of the sort to which Hesse became increasingly partial in his later years. The games begin on the title-page, for the motto attributed to "Albertus Secundus" is actually fictitious. Hesse wrote the motto himself and had it translated into Latin by two former schoolmates, who are cited in Latin abbreviation as the editors: Franz Schall ("noise" or Clangor ) and Feinhals ("slender neck" or Collo fino ). The book is full of this "onomastic comedy" that appealed to Thomas Mann, also a master of the art.

• Theodore Ziolkowski, on The Glass Bead Game (1943), in a Foreword to a 1969 edition of the novel.

[brbdogsonfire]

On 10/28/2019 at 6:22 PM, SithEmpress said:

Not a perfect utopia, but maybe a limited one. I'm thinking of the way we view our future. Do we think it'll be like Futurama where things are basically the same, but our prejudices have shifted to something else, or something like Star Trek where, at least in TNG, Voyager, DS9, and on, it's essentially a utopia on Earth while they experience weird crap going on elsewhere. There's no hunger, no economic problems, no more war, etc. on Earth and the way it's described sounds amazing. (There's even a some Cracked material that suggests that maybe the reason they go out exploring so much is that their own culture is so perfect it's boring.)

 

There are other versions of our future predictions as well, but I'm curious what others believe.

 

Personally, I'm not sure whether a utopia can exist, even if limited to a small area or not. I'm not sure human nature would allow itself to become the idealic future Star Trek imagines, and I'm more prone to thinking we'll end up like Futurama where everything is basically the same, but different. 

Based on what I know about history, and how people behave I believe a true Utopia is impossible. It would require perfect people to have a true Utopia, and people are far from perfect. 

 

With that said we do seem to be slowly moving toward a better future as a whole. The amount of people as a percentage that are starving or in poverty has been decreasing worldwide for the last 2 centuries. Quality of living is increasing, and the personal freedoms granted to the overall population is also increasing. We can point to individual issues such as abortion right in many developed countries as counter evidence to this, but I am speaking of the overall situation.

 

I don't think it will ever be truly equal among everyone though since humans are innately a selfish species. As long as the human heart prioritizes the self over the group.

 

Specific points in history I feel provide evidence of what I say:

French revolution in 1848 (this is not THE French revolution leading to Napoleon) resulted in a psuedo communist takeover of Paris while at war with Prussia. Individual wants and concerns overcame the general welfare causing the inability of the new government to fail to organize a meaningful resistance to the prussians. This war started the animosity between France and the nation that formed the German empire and is a big cause of WW1 or the Great War.

 

The Haitian revolution against the French empire during napoleans reign was initially about driving off the foreigners and freeing the slaves. When the initial revolution was over the land owning black and white community who were Haitian born betrayed the slaves that fought alongside them and reenslaved them. This eventually led to France retaking the island and causing a second revolution in which the slaves over three their oppresors and they then slaughtered all whites and land owning blacks on the island. The government became a dictatorship after.

 

The American revolutions explicit goal was to establish a nation of free people and still had slavery. I assume most people here have a rough understanding of this event so won't go into detail. If you need a description pm me.

 

The Russian revolution in 1916, (might be 1917) caused the rise of the Soviet Union which is well known for its autrocities. This was a popular movement in Russia meaning wide support from the masses. It was to establish a classless post capitalist system. Arguments are made that the population lose during WW2 (Great Patriotic War in Russia) caused the economy to suffer, but if population and economic growth are normalized to account for population lose it becomes apparent that no single sector of the economy managed to keep up with capitalist economies .

 

Sadly humans are greedy so it is unlikely we can ever have a perfect system. Sadly a system based on exploitation such as capitalism works because it preys on our greed.  

 

[AmusedSkeptic]

Like many people before have mentioned, everyone has a different idea on a perfect world. One of the key traits of humanity is diversity. Utopia for one person will be different for another. We can try and change the world for the better, try and teach people what is right and wrong, but there will always be gray in between (like sexualities). I don't think perfection is possible, but that doesn't mean life can't be pretty great. The bad parts might be what keeps life interesting. The bad parts might give us goals and purposes.

 

One of my favorite books explores this idea. It's called Scythe by Neal Shusterman.

[__shiva_c]

Any historical conceptions of a functioning utopia have always failed to account for the full impact of integrating diversity. The reason is pretty simple: Two perspectives of what is ideal might be so different as to be mutually exclusive.

Sounds like an abstract concept and I'm just throwing words around?

Let's try a concrete example.

One person wants simpler access to a highway and another person wants a bigger kindergarten in the same general area. Hmm, okay. Doesn't sound that insoluble, does it? But take into consideration that this example is just one thing I thought up while typing this sentence. I betcha things can become a whole lot more complicated.

At the end of the day I think it's logically inconcievable to please everybody by the simple fact that nobody sees things identically. This isn't necessarily only about knowledge, acceptance and tolerance. It's also about needs. Of which are easily mutually exclusive.

[Gatto]

https://davidbyrne.typepad.com/db/page/29/

 

We were talking about fundamentalist Christians, I think — someone at the table had mentioned how the right made abortion the pivotal decisive issue in many elections. I mentioned the talk I’d heard by Jonathan Haidt at the New Yorker conference in which he attempted to briefly delineate the 2 kinds of morality at work in the world. (There’s a good interview with him in The Believer as well.)

 

Anyway, Haidt says something like this: in a cosmopolitan society like New York, San Francisco, London or many other contemporary cities in which various people and cultures must coexist, personal morality adjusts itself to accommodate the multiple moral codes of the surrounding people. The tendency is for people in multicultural places to adopt a live-and-let-live moral philosophy — what others do is OK as long as it does harm anyone else. This, however, is vastly different than the traditional set of moral codes that most societies live by. In most societies, where most people are more or less culturally the same, there exists a network of moral codes based on family, loyalty, respect for authority, justice, fairness and purity. Haidt claims that “liberal” societies have abandoned many of these moral codes — purity, for example — as being a personal matter for each individual and not something to be imposed by society. You can have religious laws inside your temple or house, the liberals would say, but don’t try to impose them on the whole society. In traditional societies — and, one might argue, also according to our genetic predisposition — the larger network of values holds sway. The two moralities, by nature, are mutually exclusive.

 

To me it seems that the ideas of the enlightenment have resonated out and are now tearing the world apart as they come into contact with traditional cultures, whether in Colorado or Lahore.

 

Here’s a paragraph from Haidt and his collaborators:

Moral foundations theory proposes that five innate psychological systems form the foundation of “intuitive ethics.” Each culture constructs its particular morality as a set of virtues, values, and ideas based on or related to these five foundations (as well as to many other non-moral aspects of the evolved mind). The current American culture war can be seen as arising from the fact that liberals try to create a morality using only the Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity foundations; conservatives, especially religious conservatives, use all five foundations, including In-group/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. The theory is an extension of Richard Shweder's theory of the "three ethics" commonly used around the world when people talk about morality: the ethics of Autonomy, Community, and Divinity.

So…apropos all of this, Michael mentioned he’d recently been to a town in Pakistan near the Afghan border where they practice a rather extreme form of self-punishment. Even little kids whip themselves with blades imbedded in the whips leaving steams of blood running down their backs. Some Western journalists were on hand to view the spectacle, and along with Michael they were rounded up and taken to a “safe” viewing area. I’d seen a similar spectacle in Malaysia, a Hindu ceremony called Taipusam, in which the adepts stick metal rods through their cheeks and hang limes from hooks stuck into their chests. Significantly, no blood gushes forth during the Taipusam ceremonies — there’s a mind-over-body control at work.

 

Michael got to talking with some Pashtun lads who were asking him questions about the United States. At some point he could tell they had more burning questions but were hesitant in asking. He said they could ask him anything, no problem, anything they wanted to ask they could ask.

 

So they asked him, “Why do Americans have sex with animals?” This was, it seemed, not a question about some freakish subculture of zoophiles; the assumption was that it’s quite common in America. This is what Americans do. These boys have limited access to TV or any media — they may have seen some Hollywood movies — and apparently at sometime or other they viewed an American porno featuring animal sex. (My guess is those pornos are paraded and distributed as examples of the decadence of the West. Michael confirms this — “The lads were shown the film by the Wahabi religious leaders in the area! Its a direct way of controlling and rallying the culture against the west.”) These boys also made no distinction between what they saw in movies and what might be reality….movies which would include the decedent sexy behavior of the parade of tarts and slutty women featured in most Western films.

 

To these lads, whose morality is of the first, traditional, type, there is no question this is ungodly satanic behavior — which should be stamped out for the good of mankind. By any means necessary. And it is proof that the West, whose representatives are surrounding them in increasing numbers, is certainly Satan’s republic.

 

For members of the Christian Right I suspect the same viewpoint holds sway, at least amongst the churchgoers. I suspect a good number of the ministers, like Ted Haggart, Jimmy Swaggart and the others, are natural-born hypocrites who have become addicted to the power they have over their flocks. But for the congregation an issue like abortion, as Haidt implies, is not an isolated issue — it is a sign that the godless hoards are at the gates and must be stopped before the moral chains that hold us together as human beings are torn asunder.

 

It all seems pretty hopeless. Reconciliation, I mean. The worlds and viewpoints are mutually exclusive. There is no middle ground. Maybe understanding and empathy is possible, and that is a start, but from across a great divide.

[KiraS]

I think I'm going to take a cue from Ursula Le Guin here. The point of writing utopias isn't necessarily to provide a blueprint for an ideal society, which will probably never exist. Literary utopia can be a way to point out that the existing systems of power are arbitrary and constructed, and can be intentionally and plausibly deconstructed. 

[Gatto]

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/04/quiz-which-dystopia-have-i-found-myself-in

[GingerRose]

On 10/28/2019 at 8:22 PM, SithEmpress said:

erfect utopia,

Wouldn't a perfect utopia just be a dystopia in another person's eyes anyway?

I don't think there can be a utopia, because the idea is so subjective.

[GingerRose]

Just now, Arodash said:

force what I want on other people

I think I would, because I think it would make the community better, but people would be mad.

What are some of your ideas to making the world a utopia?

[Arodash]

1 minute ago, GingerRose said:

I think I would, because I think it would make the community better, but people would be mad.

What are some of your ideas to making the world a utopia?

Its a very small government kind of world. Where people are left to live their own lives to how they personally see fit. Like me, I wanna be left alone on my homestead. A place that I can make my own. A world that encourages and teaches self reliance while at the same time strong love for community. Its a world that respects the individual

[GingerRose]

58 minutes ago, Arodash said:

Its a very small government kind of world. Where people are left to live their own lives to how they personally see fit. Like me, I wanna be left alone on my homestead. A place that I can make my own. A world that encourages and teaches self reliance while at the same time strong love for community. Its a world that respects the individual

Would the individual survive with the threat of violence? Who is there to say no when violence breaks out over matters?

[Arodash]

34 minutes ago, GingerRose said:

Would the individual survive with the threat of violence? Who is there to say no when violence breaks out over matters?

Small government doesnt mean you dont still have police. And a means for settling disputes in a peaceful manner. And I tell you someone comes to my doorstep today with a threat of violence they wont enjoy how I respond.