dobnits Posted:

I’m speaking of an IDEAL society here.

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If you’re gong to start talking ideal society, I think your number one mistake is bumuming that money should even exist. Money is an artificial creation meant to give us motivation to work because otherwise too many people wouldn’t bother getting jobs. In an ideal society we wouldn’t rely on greed motivation to get things done and it’s this greed motivation which drives Capitalism that allows for the Southparkian Gods and Clods we’re talking about here.

Ideally, people would work because they want to benefit society as a whole and they would do what they can with what knowledge and ability they have, which if lacking they would go to school to increase. If unable to learn for whatever reason or unable to find a vocation they specifically enjoy, they may be relegated to the jobs your so called “ambitious elite” might not care to do such as driving a big rig. On the other hand some people simply love to drive, some people love to cook food, clean up, build houses or furniture. When the motive is simply the betterment of society as a whole it may not be a perfect distribution but the lack of a profit motive would allow people to follow their own dreams or at very least explore opportunities without being forced into a job they don’t like in order to “get that pension” (I work with so many angry people who claim to be trapped by their pension) or to simply pay the bills.

Without money floating around, there would be absolutely no need for jobs such as banking, insurance, or even most service positions as people could simply pick up whatever items they needed and ideally as they would not be driven by greed and materialism, would not fill their houses with useless knick knacks. With all of these people in the work place suddenly not working, we could divvy up the workload so that we’d only need to work 25-30 hours a week to maintain the same productivity which would free up the artists to work on making our lives more interesting and beautiful with their music, art, movies, games etc… While those lacking artistic talent would do their part to support artists as they create or others as they learn.

There would need to be an organizational structure to divvy up resources and this would take the place of a government which would no longer be necessary (If people can care about others we don’t need to be forced to act civil to each other so their role on our lives can be minimized). They could then simply direct building projects and city works to make sure everyone has homes, running water, roads, parks and so forth according to who actually needs it.

Of course I’m talking ideal society here and most people are thinking how this would never work, but it does work perfectly well in small scale with the family unit. For the most part people will clean and maintain the home, or their section of it, simply because it needs to be done. Someone will cook and clean because others are hungry, they do what they can to support their children while they go to school and learn and as they do their responsibilities increase until they are taking care of their parents in their old age. Admittedly in our society taking care of our elders is becoming more rare and this is unfortunate since we are in a capitalist society which tells us to “**** everyone else for our own personal gain” That is the entire basis of the system with a complex theory that ends with everyone being well off anyways. It doesn’t work too well in practice however because if you make the basis of a society ****ing everyone else over, someone will be ****ed over and as such it cannot be ideal. Hell without money and with everything being free combined with a mindset of “having what I NEED, plus a bit to amuse me in my free time” there would also be no crime to have to worry about.

If we were to have a society that became more and more ambitious and worked harder and harder to achieve power and richness, eventually it would become so cutthroat that people would be unable to relax. Everyone would have to make sure that someone else wasn’t trying to take their job, their home, their money and they wouldn’t be able to show any weakness as a more ambitious person would exploit that to get more for themselves. Everyone working non stop all day scheming in order to maintain a balance sounds a bit less ideal than relaxing and helping each other out.

The one thing that would be a little less hippie-tastic in my view of an ideal society would be the eugenics portion. We are devolving as a race and while I’m not saying “let’s kill the genetically inferior” we are also suffering from overpopulation, depletion of natural resources and we’re everyone able to live the same standard of life as we have in first world countries it would be impossible to support. If those who had crippling genetic diseases simply didn’t have children we could start lowering in population and hopefully fairly quickly. We need a certain population growth at this point to maintain our economic structure but without an economic structure to support it would be less of a problem.

As the population declines and actually starts to become healthier as time goes by, we would have no need to have our cities and towns grow along with our resource acgreat timesulation to support the growing number of people. Construction efforts would be relegated to maintenance and improvement of existing homes and infrastructure as well as beautification projects while nature would be able to reclaim all of the extra space created. Resource consumption would drop, fish populations would come back, forests would regrow, pollution would decrease… As it stands this will only happen once we hit the population limit and wipe ourselves out in a global catastrophe but selective breeding would help with that.

We would need only get rid of one thing which is the genetic imperative to spread our own genes. Those who want kids but have cystic fibrosis can be caretakers, adopt, run daycares, help raise their nieces and nephews. We would all be involved in the raising of children to a greater extent for the betterment of society as a whole (as opposed to the betterment of ourselves only) and while they may not be OUR genes, once we get rid of an individualist attitude, we would be able to see our contributions in the raising of a child as equally valuable. Certainly it would be a better mark left on the world to help raise a child who makes an impact than to insist you have a diseased child simply because those muscular dystrophy genes happen to have “belonged to you”.

Personally it saddens me that we are moving further and further away from such a society, even on the familial level, but I do believe it possible to create and maintain. Even if a small country were to manage it they could export their own resources and simply have currency on a national level to import those resources they lacked. We need to start thinking of each other instead of just ourselves in order to start heading in the right direction but despite my “hey, if everyone loved each other…” hippie, communist anarchist attitude. I think it will only be possible once we rendour ourselves nearly extinct and start over again. Even then it’s not 100% but it sure as hell isn’t happening in my lifetime without it. In the meantime I’ll try not to let that stop me from living as best I can like those who would live in my ideal society and try to convince one or 2 others that maybe It’s not that crazy an idea.

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