Paradise Possible
firstthings.com
firstthings.com
Discovery has improved greatly. Even if my set of beliefs, values and preferences are quite rare I can still use the internet and related technology to discover other like-minded people. Outcasts and eccentrics more easily find that they are not quiet as alone in the world as their face-to-face experience would lead them to believe. The outsiders can find those with whom they can be insiders.
Social media and all forms of modern communication technology enable a form of community without requiring geographical proximity. But is this sufficient?
Dispersed, technologically connected communities of like-mindedness still feel hollow to me compared to villages and communities of people living together in a communal way, face-to-face, sharing tragedies and triumphs and the very human basics of sex, companionship and some form of family.
How is the instinct toward Utopia changing? What new forms of Utopian experiments are possible today that were not in previous generations?
- people are free to form and move between physical communities as they like
- there's a single central entity that does following:
a) enforces and protects the freedom of association and freedom of movement,
b) ensures, with overwhelming force, that no community starts a war against another,
c) handles various practical details like economic issues of the type "what if someone from community A moves to community B in order to take their free education, and then moves back to A without ever contributing to B's economy?".
The gist of the expected outcome is summarized by the last sentence of the linked article: "the end result is that the closer you come to true freedom of association, the closer you get to a world where everyone is a member of more or less the community they deserve".
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[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-...
We need to integrate into society structures and technologies that not only allow us to measure, analyze, and when necessary, work together, more holistically, but at the same time need systems that are more decentralized, resilient against over-centralization, and evolve more freely. It seems on the surface that these are just opposed, but by taking a ground-up approach, doing enough experimenting and iteration, and leaning on our newer technologies, I do believe we can make dramatic improvements to society.
> There doesn't exist a way that will satisfy everyone's wishes.
I disagree with that in terms of theoretical possibility. In practice, of course it's not possible now (or in nearby future). But in practice, our world is so, so far from a theoretical utopia that we still have a lot of space for improvements without causing too much disagreements. It's also true we can't satisfy everyone, because some people harbour desires inherently incompatible with desires of the rest of humanity - I'm thinking of various sociopathic tendencies - but they form but a very small minority, and frankly, their needs have to be accepted as not irreconcilable and ignored.
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[0] - https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Fun_theory - a general summary of the post sequence.
[1] - https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Fun_Theory_Sequence - the actual posts.
This is a difficult, multi-faceted challenge to address. This behavior is rampant in the world, and IMHO it is only getting worse at the moment. Up until relatively recently, the US and some developed nations tended to express less of this than the rest of the world, so I suspect overall relative wealth, maybe even lower inequality, spread across a tremendous sector of the population can ameliorate the tendency. Concrete examples are the product return policies that in the past I observe tended to be fairly generous and could only be commonly found in the US and some developed nations' marketplaces. These policies are tightening up and in some cases dropped altogether. There is a cultural element at play as well, complicating the picture.
I like how the U.S. Founders tried to approximate a solution: a group of federated states, and each state's residents had the power to set up its own idea of what came close to their ideals. We eventually should have ended up with 50 separate, concurrently-running, dynamic experiments competing with each other for residents. Our current federalism prevents this from happening, though.
The Founders didn't design that. The colonies, started by various people or groups for differing purposes, existed long before the Founders were even alive, they just wanted to group them into a confederation for trade and mutual defense purposes. This isn't unique in history at all.
>We eventually should have ended up with 50 separate, concurrently-running, dynamic experiments competing with each other for residents. Our current federalism prevents this from happening, though
We tried this before, and it didn't work. Go read about the "Articles of Confederation", which governed the US before the Constitution was adopted in 1789. It was a disaster; the central government wasn't strong enough to get anything done because the colonies couldn't agree on anything. Not only was this bad for defense from outside invaders (i.e. the British), it was bad for trade because the colonies got into trade wars with each other. You're not going to have a functioning nation when the different regions are at war with each other; just look at pre-EU Europe for an example of what happens when you have a continent full of very small and diverse nations that get into trade wars with each other. It's not pretty.
The other problem with your "competing states" idea is how you handle interstate commerce issues. Without a strong federal government, it's hard enough, but what happens when you have actual cities spanning multiple states, as we have with DC, NYC, Louisville, Philly, etc.? It's bad enough the way we have it now, but in your system it'd be a complete disaster.
There may be a way to transfer a significant amount of the federal government's authority to the states without incurring the sort of chaos seen by the confederacy in the 18th century. Or maybe not, but at least it's not obvious.
Either way, the current system leaves most of us disenfranchised in a lot of ways that a less centralized system would not.
If you really want something closer to a confederacy, the first step is eliminating all 50 states and redrawing all the state borders. But this isn't going to work well either, because then the rural people will want their own, separate states. But then after a while, they'll find out that their states have no economic power at all, and can't even provide basic services, because there's insufficient population and tax base to do so. So they'll effectively turn into 3rd-world countries, and people will empty out of them even more into the cities, if the city-states don't clamp down on immigration.
If you want to see examples of countries where they have both urban and rural populations, and very little internal strife, these places exist now. They're in Scandinavia. They don't need to separate the urban and rural people into semi-autonomous regions to get along. But they aren't big countries with hundreds of millions of people either. And they're very culturally homogeneous, something we just don't have here, and likely will not any time soon, even if you just look at the dominant caucasian population: there's very little similarity between the cultures of Trump-voting white nationalists and urban liberal Millennials, and the two actively despise each other and want completely different things as far as government policy.