Tag: photopia

Plato Was a Dope

photog Current Events, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy , , ,

The original utopia was Plato’s Republic.  And in that hypothesized city-state one of the most important precepts for producing good citizens was proper education.  Now, if you’ve ever read “The Republic” you know it’s literally gibberish.  Plato proceeds from unsubstantiated statements to illogical conclusions throughout the argument he uses to design his state but one thing I think he was right about is the necessity for highly superior education.  So, my republics will incorporate the most scientific and practical methods for educating and testing the young in order to maximize their future value as workers and citizens and to provide a worldview that would allow them to harmonize with their fellow citizens.

Now, since I am not an educator or a psychologist, I have no fixed ideas about methodology or even the content of this educational regimen.  I will hazard a guess that mathematics should still have a very important place in these schools.  I think thousands of years of western educational practices has proven the link between mathematical learning and general mental fitness.  But beyond that I’ll say that identifying the curricula for the various levels and types of schooling is something that will be of the highest importance for these communities.  And by no means do I intend for schooling to be strictly academic.  Specific vocational training is something I see as extremely valuable for individuals of all types.  Even a particle physicist or a concert pianist could benefit from knowing how to solder a component onto his computer motherboard or snake a bathtub drain.  But all of this is tangential to the main reasons why education will be critical to making these communities successful.

The schools will identify the academic capabilities of the children and combining this with their interests the correct academic and vocational curricula will be provided as choices.  This should maximize the probability for a successful citizen.  But the schools will also educate children with the ethos and expectations that the community is based on.  In this way the young will align themselves with the goals that are expected from them as members in the association.  In this way, the likelihood that these later generations will fit in with the community is maximized.

As with every other aspect of the community, feedback from the testing will inform the goals and needs of the community.  For instance, suppose the community is lacking in machinists.  So, the forecasting will be used to increase the monetary incentives for machinists.  And so forth for whatever other imbalances occur.

And education can also apply to other aspects of life.  For instance, men and women need to find mates in order to produce the next generation.  Education can include counseling on adapting to married life and even providing a dating service to locate compatible mates.

Now, Plato had his citizens indoctrinated with myths that justified their strange lifestyle.  For instance, he did not want the nuclear family to interfere with the loyalties of his citizens and so the children were raised together as a pack.  And he had stories that supposedly reinforced this lifestyle.  I wouldn’t expect these optimized communities of mine to attempt to destroy families.  On the contrary, I would expect them to do everything possible to prove that their lifestyle and community provide the best human environment possible.

I wonder what aspect of my optimal communities I’ll talk about next?  Well, maybe that’s enough for a while.  I better post on something else tomorrow.

Utopia and Nukes

photog My Fiction, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy , , , ,

Okay, I said I’d get down to details in setting up “photopia.”  Well, where do we start?  The first question is how do you start such a thing from where we are now?  In the past the founder would be a prophet.  Moses, Jesus, Mohammad, Joseph Smith, L Ron Hubbard (!).  For my founding I’ll settle for a trillionaire with virtually unlimited resources of artificial intelligence.  Then he’ll have to be a humanitarian, a philanthropist, a lover of mankind.  Because he’s going to have to take the long view.  He’ll know that to save mankind he’ll have to start by rejecting a good chunk of humanity at the start.  Because as humanity currently exists, there is a definite percentage of the population that can’t be included in an optimized human environment.  There is a twenty percent group that is hopeless.  Some of them are uncontrollably violent.  Some are completely unwilling to do work.  Some are anti-social to the extent that they habitually commit various types of crime.  It goes without saying utopia has no place for such individuals.

The system that our founder builds must begin by trying to select a core of people that are unmistakenly outside of this 20%.  The only way that the system can be founded is to start with the best starting material.  So extremely careful biographical research into the initial candidates will have to be performed to rule out any unacceptable or even sub-optimal individuals.  Ideally, married couples and even families of the highest quality should be incorporated in the starting material.  This will build additional stability in the structure.

But one thing that will be true is that even within this foundation of selected individuals there will need to be a continuous weeding out mechanism for people who fail or for the offspring who will be identified as failures.  And if offspring are rejected, often the parents and siblings will find it impossible to stay inside the group.  And not because this community is a hermetically sealed bubble.  Everyone inside will be in contact with the outside world continuously.  But if children of group members become dangerous, they must be kept outside of the community and that is hard to enforce unless the rest of the family is ejected.  So, it becomes apparent that policing the group for anti-social activity will become one of the most important activities of the administrators.

And as I mentioned in the earlier installment of this essay, those who are ejected are given the equity that they’ve earned in the community when the leave so that they can find their own place in the world.  So, what exactly are the rules of this club?  Well, the founder gets to decide those.  If he’s wise, these rules are ones that will tend to increase stability, prosperity and social cohesion.  What exactly these rules are may be dependent on the values and personal traits of this “prophet.”  And ideally, there could be a number of different foundations to allow for the different but equally valid personality types that exist in our species.  And maybe some of these will be failures and some will thrive.  But over the course of time by trial and error a calculus for creating human communities could be derived.

Now, what happens to those who can’t be included.  Well, nothing.  They’ll be on their own.  This assumes that the larger human community still exists outside of these enclaves and that it has to deal with the full spectrum of human types.  And that is why prisons and welfare exist.  And that brings up another point.  How would these societies be viewed by the outside world.  My guess will be; poorly.  I believe many nations would try to destroy them or at least force them to accept members that they would reject.  And for that reason, the location of these societies may be one of the most important questions that the administrators will have to decide.  Of course, trillionaires can do wonders with the right amount of bribery.  But let’s just say that a nuclear weapons program may be a necessity for this utopia of mine.

When I write the next installment (and I may have to think about it for a while) I think I’ll talk about education.

photopia

photog Current Events, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy , , , ,

“It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.”

Theodor Reik

 

When I think about what is going on in the world, I have to wonder whether the nonsense that we see all around us can go on forever.  Now it goes without saying that human folly is a tapestry that envelops all of us in a pattern that generates pain, fear, violence and death at a prodigious rate.  And that there has never been a full century in history when the majority of human beings lived in peace and happiness.

And this isn’t anything surprising.  This is just what human beings do.  We’ve always lived in a state of wary hostility even when we were nothing but small family groups living around a campfire to keep the cave bears and sabretooth tigers at bay.  We’re not peaceful creatures.  We may live now in enormous groupings measured in the millions and even billions of individuals but at all times and in all places, we seem to end up at each other’s throats.  But, does this have to be?  Could it be possible for humans to organize themselves into groups that interact in ways that lead to long term and abiding cohesion and satisfying cooperation?

The track record for utopian communities is definitely poor.  Some of the religious groups have thrived and shown some ability to cooperate in many community endeavors but this is a small minority of the human race.  And even they can’t completely eliminate anti-social behavior.  Currently, communities that live in affluent areas and support a robust police presence and a conservative judicial philosophy seem to do the best at creating a workable human environment.  But as we’ve seen since 2020 the forces of chaos can unleash barbarism even in the most affluent areas of the country.

But what if technology can provide a system to guarantee both social cohesion and material security?  We’re seeing the dystopic version of this in the Chinese system of social control called the “Social Credit System.”  Here those who don’t follow the rules are blacklisted and denied access to various important social advantages like good schools and better neighborhoods.  But think of the opposite.  Imagine a multitude of organizations that figure out ways to find compatible people and build social systems that bind them together and allow them to thrive.  I imagine these as completely voluntary associations.  And if someone doesn’t work out, they get the equity that they put into the system and are assisted to find another association where they would fit better.  But such an ejection would be considered a failure by the organization, which would use the most advanced research to analyze personalities before candidates are accepted into the association.

In the next installment I’ll discuss what facets of life would and wouldn’t be included in these organizations.  And I’ll talk about what I think are the human realities that make something like this extremely difficult to pull off outside of a science fiction story.