The concrete Ideal of Utopia

Philosophy
1
an imaginary place or state in which everything is perfect
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/american_english/utopia
A utopia is an imaginary community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its citizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia

 

This ideal,
To think about, explain, compare and discuss.

How is a utopia perfect?
What makes a utopia perfect?
Why can’t it be done?
Summarized
What exactly makes it perfect and why can’t it be achieved?

 

It is somehow the hidden question after the perfect State/Nation/Society. In order to determine this perfect State, I think it is advisable to first fathom the reason and purpose of a State. What is a State actual supposed to do? And how to achieve this goal perfectly? Which leads us to the practical properties of what makes this State perfect. Furthermore the inpossibility on how to actual achieve this perfection should give us the reason why this remains always imaginary.

2

 

Take care and beware:

  • Utopia means nowhere …. Perfection is not in our world, whatever it appears to be. And ideals change. In More’s Utopia, slavery is a fact.

  • More, all utopian states are totalitarian. All people share same way of living, same ideology, and there are not dissenters, or these ones are criminalized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(book)

Would modern Utopia be the Brave new world of Huxley ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

 

3

The Ideal state/nation. I think the task of a state is to organize society on a basic level. Born and created out of society, by society, for society, to ensure a level of stability, a framework.

What I would propose for todays humans:
A general imperialistic structured global nation. With full direct democracy on the bottom local level, declining upward, to a total dictatorship over the state as a whole. Each of those extremes shouldn’t dictate over each other so that the different levels of scopes do not mix.

On the bottom local level with its democracy the people doesn’t ned to be perfect in “governing”, because every competence and incompetence is reduced by the mass of the people and vanishes into the blurriness of average.
On the top level with its single dictator, any competence and incompetence will be fully felt. So this person who is the dictator has always to be perfekt.
In between the extremes of bottom and top, there is a smooth linear gradient.

In the end perfect capable people are needet to let a also perfect utopia rise, all of it depends on the perfectness of the people. And therefore without perfect people no perfect utopia.

4
What I would propose for todays humans: -- didrius
I forget the philosopher that proposed this, and it's something anyone can understand; we are better off listening to a diversity of ideas and encouraging input, rather than picking from one of the many possibly good ideas currently available and putting all of our energy into imposing that one. I don't think we are anywhere near smart enough yet to start putting a system on paper that would look anything like a utopia.
5
"...putting all of our energy into imposing that one" -lausten
In any case, the best way to implement an idea would be without imposition. If an idea has to be imposed, then the idea does not fit what it is imposed on.
"I don’t think we are anywhere near smart enough yet to start putting a system on paper that would look anything like a utopia." -lausten
Maybe not, but I find it anyway interesting to think about such hypothetical constructs. And that's how we may notice it as soon as we're smart enough at some point.

 

By the way

"What I would propose for todays humans: — didrius I forget the philosopher that proposed this, and it’s something anyone can understand;..." -lausten
The first time I was called an philosopher; I had no Idea to make that impression. Though not worthy of being remembered. So a terrible philosopher. - Thanks, I guess?
6

There are no Concrete Ideals! Ideals are always abstractions. All Ideals involve a balance or symmetry which must be maintained or the Ideal will shatter due to “symmetry breaking”.

Why can’t it be done?
"There is no free lunch"

Newton’s 3rd Law of Motion does not only apply to Physics it also applies to abstract Logic.

The third law states that when one object exerts a force on a second object, that second object exerts a force that is equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first object.
 
The Exponential Function predicts that growth in a limited environment and resources always results in a state of exhaustion of these resources.
Therefore, to obtain a state of Utopia, an equal amount of work is required to achieve and maintain the benefits of this socio-economic model.

The modern world has enjoyed the benefits of Utopian luxuries, but now it’s time to “pay the piper”.

Nature requires a balanced equation of behaviors or the resulting imbalance will create a demand for “corrective” processes.

7

The first time I was called an philosopher; – Didi

Sorry, didn’t mean you. I meant the idea of listening to all ideas, and not picking one as the best and only idea

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I don’t think we are anywhere near smart enough yet to start putting a system on paper that would look anything like a utopia.
I can do it in just three words. :-)

World Without Men.

Seriously. The overwhelming vast majority of violence in the world is committed by men. Remove the men, and a HUGE burden of suffering would be lifted off of humanity, and the trillions of dollars now needed to manage male violence could be redirected in to life affirming activities like health care and education etc.

The result wouldn’t be utopia in the sense of perfection. There would still be problems of course. But it would be utopia in the sense of having finally achieved the ever elusive “world peace”, at least in comparison to the current status quo.

Are we smart enough to even talk about this seriously, let alone do it? No, not currently.

But that’s because smarts is not the missing ingredient. What’s needed to reach this utopia is not smarts, but pain. More pain. Lots of pain. Human being learn primarily through pain. At some point the pain will reach a threshold where we begin to expand our vision of what is possible and necessary. Necessity is the mother of invention.

Yes, I know, this sounds like crazy talk. To see how it isn’t actually crazy talk, just flip the scenario on it’s head. Like this…

Imagine that in the future we somehow arrived at a world without men, and 95% of the violence which now afflicts humanity was gone, and health care and education were universally well funded. Then some naive young gal has a big idea and stands up and says, “Hey, let’s bring back the men!” Her friends sit her down in front of archival footage of the war in Syria and ask her this…

“Are you out of your ##%^&^$# mind??”

As you’re watching the horrendous global violence pandemic in your news feed, ask yourself this question. What is so important about male humans as to justify such an enormous cost?

If men were already gone, would it be rational to bring them back?

9

I can see the poetic logic of what you write, but being a health male specimen, who rather enjoyed his life, guilty of sins and virtues, I wouldn’t want to take it too far.

More to the point:

Are we smart enough to even talk about this seriously, let alone do it? No, not currently.

But that’s because smarts is not the missing ingredient. What’s needed to reach this utopia is not smarts, but pain. More pain. Lots of pain. Human being learn primarily through pain. At some point the pain will reach a threshold where we begin to expand our vision of what is possible and necessary. Necessity is the mother of invention.


All things considered within this actual physical reality we exist within, that up there is the key to future mental health survival. Only those who can convert pain into learning and adaptation have any chance in this future that’s now rushing at us, with all its unstoppable cascading consequences.

10
World Without Men.

Seriously. The overwhelming vast majority of violence in the world is committed by men. Remove the men, and a HUGE burden of suffering would be lifted off of humanity, and the trillions of dollars now needed to manage male violence could be redirected in to life affirming activities like health care and education etc.


I’m not sure if we need to eliminate men, but you are correct that a matriarchy generally makes for a much more peaceful society.

A wonderful example is the Bonobo society which is probably the most peaceful society of all the Hominids, even as they are cousins to the common chimp which display very human character traits, including waging war with neighboring troupes for territory, especially during fruit harvest season.

The Bonobo matriarchy has evolved into a “loving” society, which led to the evolution of sexual emotional response to irritants and even as an occasional dispute breaks out, rather than settling it with a fight, the participants resolve the dispute by making love. When strangers wander into a troupe’s domain, they are welcomed with food and sexual favors. When food is abundant they share their harvest territory with many other animals.

One researcher/observer remarked that you can go to sleep at night, assured that you will be alive in the morning because emotions like jealousy and envy are practically unknown.

Apparently, this was possible due to the fact that in this matriarchy good male behavior is rewarded with sexual favors by the females, but when a young male tries to exert his manhood, the females band together and set him straight in a hurry. The reward/punishment system seems to have worked with remarkable success and there is no known incident where any Bonobo has been intentionally injured by another.

 

11
I’m not sure if we need to eliminate men
Ideally we wouldn't need to eliminate all men, because most men are peaceful. The problem is that no society in history (to the best of my knowledge) has figured out how to keep the peaceful men while removing the violent men. Thus, to have men is to have violent men, and to have violent men is to proceed towards civilization collapse.

An ever accelerating knowledge explosion empowers everyone, including violent men. Thus it seems safe to predict that violent men will continue to spread chaos as they always have, and will be doing so on an increasingly larger scale. Sooner or later that leads to chaos that can’t be cleaned up, and it’s game over for this edition of civilization.

Most people understandably resist the idea of a world without men, because they think we have the option to choose, and this seems like a crazy option. Once one realizes the choice is a world without men or die, the world without men idea starts sounding more reasonable.

 

 

12

From a Pearl Jam song - If you hate something, don’t you do it too. We’ve seen in many cases where a non-white-male is not in charge, so like a woman is in charge, a minority, etc. And guess what? They turn into a-holes just like the white-men they claim to hate. So I don’t think it’s men that are the problem. It’s the circumstance any leader, regardless of skin color, gender, etc finds themselves in. And the circumstance that gives rise to all the corruption, etc. is lack of resources (food, shelter, etc.), which boils down to lack of money (or what passes for money). Remove the need for money, i.e. the need for money as the means to obtain resources, and I’ll bet all (or most) of the negative traits we associate with old rich whitey would go away.

13
Once one realizes the choice is a world without men or die, the world without men idea starts sounding more reasonable.
I wouldn't go that far. Men have existed for all this time and life has continued somehow.
14
What I would propose for todays humans: A general imperialistic structured global nation. With full direct democracy on the bottom local level, declining upward, to a total dictatorship over the state as a whole. Each of those extremes shouldn’t dictate over each other so that the different levels of scopes do not mix.
Sounds a bit like the direction of globalization we see now. Give Amazon and big tech just a little more time.

 

In the end perfect capable people are needet to let a also perfect utopia rise, all of it depends on the perfectness of the people. And therefore without perfect people no perfect utopia.
Good point. Perfection doesn't exist so it's all nonsense anyway.
15
The overwhelming vast majority of violence in the world is committed by men. -- Tanny
I don't care much for the solution, I guess I'm biased, but the assessment is correct, and I think it's more than the history of civilization, I think it is the history of the species. My evidence is the culture and stories that have been passed down, ones that developed before written language. They are often about a young man who is disruptive and how an elder or something magic forest being guides them, or three brothers and one of them has some caring trait and wins the girl or something.

I don’t think you can eliminate this energy from the species, it’s just part of brain development that happens outside of the womb.

16
I don’t think you can eliminate this energy from the species, it’s just part of brain development that happens outside of the womb.
I agree. After all, it is a result of some 4 billion years of evolution and natural selection for the best survival mechanisms.

The problem is that our very intelligence is not a product of gradual evolution but a drastic mutation (chromosome 2) and we may have become too smart and violent for our own good. Man has become an invasive parasitic species that kills everything that annoys it and thereby destroys the very environment that actually sustains it.

Man is NOT symbiotic to the rest of nature. We are greedy and that is not allowed by the laws of conservation of energy!