A Utopia, if you can keep it.
The idea of utopia (a perfect society) has its origins in Plato’s published writings titled, “Republic”. In this book, Plato proposes a society that is composed of 4 classes: The gold, silver, bronze, and iron classes. The gold class would be trained for 50 years on how to rule so that when they assumed leadership, they would be benign and wise in how they structured and ran society.
Ever since Plato, this idea’s has evolved like we have. For most of history a Utopia was depicted as a place where all the prerequisites for survival were satisfied. These prerequisites included a stable government and a society where people could have all the food and nourishment they could possibly want.
As the industrial revolution took off however, our idea of what a Utopia is changed since food and nourishment became a given rather then an ideal to strive for. In this period, Utopia as an idea became anchored to our desire for security. We wanted a society that was free from the chaotic uncertainty of industrial capitalism, and any ill which threatened the security of our property, body, job, health, family, and resources.
This desire for security led to ideas such as communism, socialism, universal basic income, immortality, post-scarcity, environmentalism, and safety in general informing our conception of what a Utopia would look like. As technology and science advanced over the course of the industrial revolution, idea’s such as communism and socialism have fallen out of vogue due to the high living standards of our capitalistic system. What has remained in our conception of Utopia however is the idea of a place that is environmentally friendly, ecologically sustainable, devoid of material scarcity, devoid of aging and disease, and one where everybody can be secure from criminal victimization on a daily basis.
As technology evolves, we will eventually construct a society that accomplishes all of what our current vision of Utopia entails. Renewable energy, smart lighting, cloning, carbon-capture technology, vertical farming, growable meat, nanotechnology, digitization, 3D printing, space mining, and complex resource sharing schemes will allow us to conquer scarcity and establish an ecologically sustainable and environmentally friendly civilization. Precision medicine, genetic therapy, genetic engineering, medical nanobots, quantum computers, and stem cell therapies will allow us to conquer aging and disease. When it comes to being secure from criminal victimization, predictive policing, blockchain technology, quantum communication, cryptocurrencies, digitization, the internet of things, tracking chips, and advances in law enforcement technology will allow for us to create a society where the criminal victimization of one another is an extremely rare thing.
Once we achieve all of this within the next 100–150 years, our conception of Utopia will change once more. Utopia will no longer be about security and conquering the challenges of the external world. It will become more subjective in its aim, and as a consequence, innovation and societal efforts will be pushed towards more subjective ends. Once society makes this shift, there are going to be dangers rooted in our human nature that’ll threaten to take us backwards, or worse, towards a dystopia.
As humans, our desires are infinite. Since our desires are infinite, we also have a desire to progress so that we can continually realize these ever more ambitious desires. Infinite desire and the desire to progress have been a beautiful thing historically speaking for the human species since it has led to ever higher standards of living, more educated people, more technology, a globe which is fully explored, a man on the moon, the establishment of great civilizations, and the scientific project which has unveiled many of natures greatest mysteries. The risk when it comes our desire to become ever more however, is that (like all emotions and drives) it can become destructive when it lacks clarity. When a society primarily aims at achieving things in the external world, these objectives can be easily measured and verified. If the U.S for example doesn’t own Canada but wants to, we can simply look at territorial control as a metric for determining our progress towards achieving this goal. Likewise if our society wishes to make progress on the public health front, life expectancy is a relatively easy tool to calculate and use as a measuring stick.
When society starts to strive toward funneling our collective desire to progress into subjective public policy goals such as making sure that everybody feels loved and belonged, the clarity that objective reality provides becomes no longer present. Since love and belonging is an emotion, it waxes and wanes much like the tides of the ocean. Furthermore, to feel love and belonged has always been a task reserved for the individual. If the individual wishes to have relationships with friends and/or family members that provide a sense of love and belonging, then it has always been up to the individual to put in the effort into finding and cultivating those type of relationships. It isn’t obvious how civilization would bear this burden, and what it could do to effectively push us towards this goal.
Now the reason why a lack of clarity is an issue is because if a goal is difficult to impossible to measure, then progress in the direction of that goal becomes one based on faith and feelings rather then on data and evidence. This is a perfect recipe for ideologies to take over which can easily lead civilization astray and add rather than subtract from misery. If for example I believed that people feel a greater sense of belonging when in the presence of humanoid robots as opposed to when they are alone, this might inspire me to radically increase the number of humanoid robots in public areas to make people feel more belonged. This of course could backfire since people would be more likely to opt into communication with robots since it is easier and less intimidating, which in effect would reduce their overall level of belonging since in the long-term they’d be substituting human interaction with something which was artificial. Without a proper way to measure happiness and belonging though, we’d have no idea that the humanoid robot policy caused us to collectively feel less belonging and as a result our policy makers might be inclined to continue this disastrous policy.
Let’s assume an alternative scenario however. In this alternative scenario, there have been advances in social science which have allowed us to predict with high degrees of certainty the level of love and belonging that the population experience in their lives both in the short and the long-term. In this scenario we run into the different issue of how civilization can meaningfully move the collective toward higher levels of love and belonging in their lives. What happens if this is a failed project and that we can’t move these variables in a positive direction? What if people’s desire for progress leads us to demand unrealistic results in this area? These questions are worth asking considering what happens when a population doesn’t get what it wants in a representative government. What happens when the status quo fails to satisfy the wishes and desires of the collective? What happens is that conventional ways of thinking fall victim to alternative and sometimes radical ways of thinking.
It is possible that if progress stalls on this issue, the population could become radicalized and embrace dystopian measures in order to quench our desire for ever more “progress”. Certain political candidates could propose the mandatory usage of pills which artificially induced a feeling of bliss. For those politicians who wanted to take a more insidious path, they could instruct government agencies to “accidentally” leak these bliss pills to the public so that large portions of the population could get addicted. This would help their election prospects when they were up for reelection and the data showed that under their watch feelings of love and belonging went up.
As the issues we focus on become ever more subjective, the odds that society will be ineffective in addressing them will rise until eventually we will hit a point where the status quo becomes an inevitability. At this point, humanity will destroy what most of us would consider a Utopia due to its rabid and insatiable appetite for more in a world that was never meant to bestow upon its inhabitants the title of God.
If we wish to one day live in a world that operates at the ceiling of human potential, we need to go through another period of enlightenment. We need to learn how to be thankful for what we have, and to not obsess over what we don’t. We also need to learn that true fulfillment isn’t found in acquiring certain experiences or owning certain things. Fulfillment is found in the cultivation of the soul, and the possession of certain perspectives which allows you to see the good in life.
If we can really learn to internalize these truths as a species, then perhaps there is a chance that we can collectively achieve a state of sustainable happiness. A chance that we could actually achieve and keep our Utopia here on Earth.
