What would your utopia look like?

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How would you design your eutopa or utopia, your perfect world. What would be the government, society, technology, and culture? Actually More's original Utopia isn't so bad. A tad limited by the 16th century, but generally quite agreeable. Actually quite a few dystopias especially Brave New World, don't seem so bad either. And I would love to live in won of Ayn Rand's "collectivist" dystopias.

So how would you design your earthly paradise?

Loads of cats and nice women who wanna sleep with me (just the women I mean, not the cats too)

No annoying people

Silence when I want it and the weather how I feel like every day

No limits on personal behavior that doesn't harm others, everyone has the same ammount of money - no social classes or discrimination.

The United States of Europe.

I cannot think of any sort of place that I would call a utopia.

For utopia to exist, a fundamental reconstruction of human nature would be necessary, but once human nature is fundamentally reconstructed, we aren't dealing with human beings any more, and given the level of detail necessary to reconstruct, we might really be dealing with a biological form of robot more so than a human being.

In any case, the closest thing I can think of to "utopia" would basically be a more Nozickian view, that individuals can freely associate to create the kind of society they think would work best. It would still fail to be utopic likely, but it would at least allow individuals to best match themselves to a group that represents their ideals and way of life the best.

I tend to think less about 'utopias' and more about what is actually possible.

Last edited by Henriksson on 11 Jun 2009, 4:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I wonder often what a utopia would be like. I can only hope that it would not involve preying on the suffering of the less fortunate or attractive (in which case, I would not even call it a utopia).

My idea of a utopia right now is something exquisitely beautiful and well-designed, a kingdom of sorts with lovely sights everywhere in which happiness and compassion are sanctified ideals.

In contrast, I find the Christian division of the afterlife into Heaven and Hell quite disgusting, as well as its implied division of people in general into 'good' and 'bad.' I've thought about punishing people, yes, but I don't think I've ever wished that anyone be tortured forever. It seems rather selfish and has given me a low opinion of Jesus Christ.

Other than that, though, I do hope we find it, and if we can keep the cycle of reproduction continuing through eternity (I'm not yet convinced that the universe must end in heat death), then we just might find that perfect society.

I have wondered if humanity can get closed, at least in some issues to the Star Trek's utopian society, that if they don't destroy themselves first, that seems to be a great utopian world, but that may seem unlikely for now. Though, few people say that such utopia could be true if that satisfies all needs for everyeone such as ST represents, the ST's technological utopia is another thing that it would be of great advance if that could be possible to develope "replication" "teleportation".

well, I'm not sure if that has to be necessarily the case, relating to utopias as a whole, I would say that the thought of the abolishment of slavery, hundreds or thousands of years ago, could have been regarded as something ridiculous, unthinkable and possibly unnatural, and perhaps even utopian, although I am just speculating there, but it is easy to relate to that.

We probably live in a utopian-like world compared to the world around Utopia was published.


Hmmm, for that to happen there should be a need for an anarchist system? For a group of people to create a smaller society within a society, if I didn't get this wrong?

Gods home of Heaven for me.

There is no Utopia. It is a fantasy and an illusion. It is wishful thinking. Why? Because humans are what they are namely the baddest smartest apes in the Primate House. Only an evolutionary jump will enable our successors to transcend their primate limitations.

ruveyn

Well, that's the issue though, nobody EVER reaches utopia. Whenever society is "utopian" by a past standard, higher standards exist and people still generally show relatively high levels of dissatisfaction. Perhaps lower than in the past, but generally nobody has posted on this thread "we are already in utopia", and with good reason, what is keeping us from utopia is the fact that utopia is not a matter of simple material conditions but rather relates to the basic nature of others in relationship to human interests and in the basic nature of the human being itself, both of which are basically intangible.


That is pretty close. Nozick himself was a minarchist, but a lot of legal-ish responsibilities would probably have to shift to other groups in order to make these smaller communities be internally functional. These legal-ish responsibilities could be argued as requiring some form of state to enforce them, basically a Nozickian utopian society is perhaps ideally anarchist, but can function under a contractarian minarchist society.


This post agrees the most with mine.

The issue here is that I think what we consider "human" is still riddled with primate imperfections, so anything that "transcends" primate limitations will also "transcend" "human-ness" and thus basically be sort of more robotic than like a person.

That being said, I am not opposed to libertarian transhumanism. However, I would likely even think that our own objectives for a utopia aren't really "true" in that even with the most rigorously rationalistic interpretation of "how things should be" is likely just emergent from a bunch of contradictory desires and thus our words on "utopia" really are just nonsensical babblings of a primate, and thus utopia isn't even possible from a human/primate perspective, a major issue in this is that "utopia" usually must be populated by people in order to be utopic, as nobody would ever call an ant colony "utopia" despite the high level of agreement that ants have with their lot in life.

Peace, Food, jobs and Freedom of speech for everyone. The idealistic versions of utopia are pretty close to impossible in my opinion.

Billy Bragg had a quote along the lines of "Peace bread work and freedom is the best we can achieve" that I tend to agree with.

Protectionist economic policies
Mostly union labor
No gun control laws in order to facilitate self-defense
A very liberal application of capital punishment to keep crime down
The people that are left will give you a foundation and an economy to buiild a utopia

Er, did I really read that right?

I think he means those who are law abiding citizens rather than what it seems to infer.

All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

Meh, it might not meet some people's standards of utopia, but the modern developed nations are, on balance, a pretty nice place to be.