Introduction
The state of our world has become increasingly volatile. The ’26 and ’41 crises have plunged a majority of countries into economic ruin and recession, and wellbeing for people everywhere has begun a decline. Russia and China both look to be on the brink of civil war. America has lost its grasp on international relevance as its domestic issues loom large.
What is the cause of this devastation? At the very core, the problem is with the socio-economic system that runs our world. At the very core, the problem is with capitalism. This system, where wealth, which is relative, more or less equates with success, is essentially a zero-sum game in which everyone plays against everyone else. The consequence of this is that only a select number of people can be successful. The rest can only be left unsatisfied. This inherent problem is compounded by a variety of other factors that reveal the system that govern our world to be completely untenable.
First and foremost is the instability in our markets. This is an instability that has resulted in the destroyed livelihoods of billions. 13I years ago, it was the Great Depression that bankrupted countries and caused the rise to power of dictators. Today it is the Global Collapse that has triggered the renaissance of warlords in Africa and Asia, drug lords in South America, and seen 21 changes of heads of state in the Western Hemisphere over the past 18 months. We’ve been waiting for a Great Moderation to happen in our markets for a whole century; it’s become clear it will never happen. The instabilities are here to stay.
Another symptom of the poor state of our society is our population levels, which have been constantly increasing. The vast majority of predictions of an optimum population have fallen around 2 billion people; our population will be a whole order of magnitude larger than that within the turn of the century. This is self-evidently unsustainable in the long term. We’ve already seen food crises. In the past, our improvement of farming technologies has kept pace with the growth in population and the decline in growing conditions. But now it’s become increasingly obvious that this cannot continue forever; the famines occurring worldwide go a long way to illustrate this. Water shortages are also affecting more areas than ever; droughts are widespread thanks to human-induced climate change. Maintaining our current population will result in a steadily diminishing quality of living; maintaining our population trajectory can only precipitate a catastrophe. In the search for continued capitalistic growth, we have put ourselves in this position. The economists in the past argued that technological improvements would today be the main driver of economic progress. We can now see that they are plainly wrong, and our recent growth has been driven almost exclusively by unsustainable population increase.
Pointless costs are also emblematic of our current system. A world that fosters a throw-away mentality and a focus on the next shiny toy will inevitably produce large amounts of waste products. Amazon has released six domestic robot models within the past four years. Over sixty million of these have already found their way to the dump. Jobs such as advertising are another pointless cost. Tens of thousands of people work on a task that would be obsolete if our system were planned. Tens of thousands of people, needing to be sustained by food, water and shelter, but don’t add anything.
It’s clear our society has finally outgrown the monstrosity of capitalism. But, having recognised this fact, what should replace it? Many have pointed to the total failures of socialism in multiple countries as evidence that though capitalism has many flaws, it is the best option available. In reality, it is through a want of trying that has led to this conclusion. It’s already been sixty-five years since the fall of socialism, yet a design for a new society, one that is egalitarian, sustainable and values happiness and utilitarian good over the individual acquisition of wealth has not even been suggested, even though almost everyone would consider it to be far superior to our current society. But the time has come, something has got to give. The problems clearly cannot be solved by maintaining the status quo. There must be a reset, a re-evaluation and ultimately a new world.
As a civilisation that prides itself on its logical and rational thinking, it has come time for an application of these virtues into the running of our society. A recent Zoch paper has managed to reduce the underlying structure governing our physical world to an irreducible indeterminism that manifests itself in probabilistic behaviour of subatomic particles. This indeterminism, when applied to sentient beings suggests that though actions are not pre-determined, they are also not the result of free will. Instead, since behaviour and action is governed by chemical processes in the brain, and these are in turn governed by the movements of atoms and subatomic particles which have been shown to be probabilistic, a model of incompatibilist indeterminism has now become standard. This allows us to rid ourselves of the notion that freedom is inherently good. It doesn’t even exist. Our society should therefore be run in a way that reflects our newfound knowledge.
Utopias are reliant on control. Without control humans are free in the sense they are physically able to do things that would stop the society being utopian. Atavistic and selfish impulses drive humans to take advantage and advance goals, goals which in our capitalist society, are the acquisition of wealth and power by any means possible. Murders, thefts, assault, manipulation and deceit exist across human society currently, even if great effort has been taken to condition them away. Even in countries of extremely high social-economic status and where wellbeing is extremely high, these actions still occur on a regular basis. These problems prevent us from reaching the next level; they prevent us from transitioning into a utopia. It has often been noted that a lack of free will would destroy any notion of ethics. If humans couldn’t choose their actions, they need not be condemned for them. Thus, it is often argued that if this is taken to account in the running of society, chaos would ensue. Justice would seem to be redundant. This is a ridiculous response. Our realisation that freedom is unnecessary should instead allow us to create a utopic society with the state having full, unadulterated control. In the past, this has been near impossible. Even in literature, the existence of a society with absolute control has been non-existent. However, we now have the technology and the intellectual capability to realise this society. We must act.
My vision for the practical aspects of this state is detailed in the following chapters.
The New World
General
The institutions of nations and states that have governed our world have become farcical. Each protecting their own interests at the cost of lives and the greater good for humanity. Each playing out a soap opera of “international relations” that are characterised by childish one-upping disguised in expensive suits and long titles. It’s a travesty. Instead, the world should be run as thousands of small communes, united by a single leader, monitored by a central body, and made to be virtually independent of each other but with standardised rules and laws.
The advantages of these small communes are numerous. Firstly, they limit bureaucracy and problems associated with managing large amounts of people and resources. The co-ordination of people; their education, production and consumption can all be made easier in these communes only 1I,III strong. Also, if strife breaks out, it is much easier to contain when it occurs in an independent commune as opposed to a world state with billions in population freely travelling. Disease, for example will only have a real impact on the commune it first affects. If it kills off all members of the commune, it has nowhere else to spread since the communes are physically separated. The central control would only spring into action if a disaster of this magnitude occurred and would be tasked with “restarting” and repopulating the affected commune. Another clear advantage of having small communes is that the produce and production of the people of the commune can be adapted to the environment the commune is situated in. This includes growing only crops suitable to the biome, such as growing oats and wheat in communes located in more arid environments, while growing rice in communes located in wetter environments. Each commune will have the benefit of coherence and consistency with the greater whole, while being able to be customised based on its individual circumstances. Unlike countries, the system is not based on arbitrary geopolitical relations, and thus doesn’t suffer from the drawbacks of the state system. Its borders are not drawn based on the word of those with the pointiest sticks and the best negotiators. Instead, it is characterised by trust, peace and co-operation. It’s based on function, not history.
These communes will be perfectly efficient in every sense of the word. It starts with education. Only practical skills like farming, mining, construction, manufacturing and operation of specific technologies will be taught. These are the only skills that are necessary. In our current world, we value creative talents and inventiveness highly, even more than skills that are more practical in nature, blindly following a belief that artistry and technological progress ad infinitum is good. It is not. The aforementioned must be married with a maturity and unity that focuses progress into producing positive effects. And that has not been happening. Some innovations, nukes and giant death robots come to mind, are used to destroy and ruin; others, such as disposable holograms, are an unadulterated waste of time and money. The industrial revolution was largely hailed as a great leap forward for mankind. Ultimately, future humans living in a ravaged world will see it as the beginning of the end of the earths’ habitability if nothing is done. In a similar vein, when mankind stepped on the moon, many viewed it as the greatest achievement of humanity. Taken objectively it was really money badly spent. The twenty-four and a half billion dollars that it costed then could have rescued millions from poverty and starvation. The technological improvements the program achieved, while admirable, could have been made at a fraction of the cost if the context of going to the moon was taken out. The point is, while we almost universally admire artistic and technological feats, they do not provide any tangible benefits compared to their sunk costs, other than a “feel good” effect or a temporary feeling of novelty. Efficiency can only be achieved through doing what is necessary, and doing that well. And that is why the skills taught in the new world are only practical in nature. This practicality means that the skills are significantly easier to teach. Requisite knowledge of the required disciplines can be easily and deeply imprinted in the minds of the citizens of the new world through simple rote learning: Listening to a recording, followed by intense repetition, then by practical work. This can be scaled to any and every situation necessary. Easy and efficient.
Another aspect of education in the new world is conditioning. Much like in Brave New World, a good, yet imperfect basis for any attempt at utopia, conditioning will form a large part of childhood development. Every aspect of good citizenship will be deeply imbedded into the minds of everyone. What this will mean is that from a young age, those in the new world will absolutely love every single part of their life. For them, the food they eat will be utterly sublime, their home, perfectly suitable, their work, fun and rewarding, their peers, genuinely amiable and agreeable. This lays important groundwork in constructing a permanent happiness in the population. Similarly, there will be things that the youth will be conditioned to dislike. They will hate the outside of their commune and will detest the thought of ever venturing outside. They will also be hesitant to venture into places that they are not be allowed go in, such as the residence of the leader. The mere thought of rebelling, of doing anything outside the norm would be odious and detestable. They would not think to steal, to murder or even hurt one another. This is the great power of conditioning. It serves two purposes of the utmost importance; first, as a positive influence on one’s happiness and second, as a preventative for anti-societal behaviour. However, conditioning has long been the target of moral complaints. Being able to engineer and manipulate the thoughts and feelings of humans seems evil to some. They are able to accept a worse evil, the state of our current society over this perfectly benign process. What they don’t understand is that even in our current world, conditioning still occurs. Deliberately or not, our parents, our schools, our friends and their actions as well as random events all have a conditioning effect on our lives. We take after our parents, modelling much of our actions on them. Schools restrict us and imbue in us the norms of society, while our friends, through peer pressure, forces further homogenisation. Every event influences our psyche and forces us into patterns of behaviour. We are not free in ourselves. It is externalities that shape how we feel and what we feel and what we think and how we think. In our current society, this semi-random conditioning produces widespread unhappiness and negative thoughts and feelings on a regular basis. It espouses contradictions and paradoxes. Parts of us will be conditioned to wish to do one sort of thing, and another part will be conditioned to do another. It is damaging and dystopic, causing us to feel uncomfortable, detached and unbelonging. The conditioning I propose here is just a more structured version of the conditioning that already exists. Its structured basis allows for it to be focused, instead of contradictory and thus allows the greater purposes I have elucidated to be achieved.
Also important to the stability and efficiency of the new world are the combined elements of genetic modification and so called “hard test-tube babies.” Genetic modification has long been seen as an innovation that would finally free us of the shackles of natural selection and allow us to improve our human selves. The only reason this has not already happened is because of some superficial issues. These “issues” stem from a few beliefs. Some people believe that genetic modification is unsafe, some think it will affect genetic diversity while others decry the “ethics” of genetic modification. Firstly, on the safety issue, it has become established through multiple recent studies that genetic modification is perfectly safe to be done on humans if done correctly. We have genetically modified plants and animals for decades, allowing them to better survive and taste better, with no apparent drawbacks. There were fears over the safety of IVF, a treatment that became mainstream and almost universally accepted only a few decades after the first procedure. Our fear of genetic modification of humans being unsafe is really a fear of the new and bold, a fear of progress. The issue of genetic diversity is certainly a much more pertinent one. And in a society of humans with homogenous genetic makeups, it may pose problems, when disease is factored in. A single disease could target a specific gene and wipe out vast quantities of humans. However, as I have discussed earlier, the existence of separate communes is a preventative of mass extinction. A superbug realistically could only appear in one commune at a time. And then, even if the bug was so effective that it killed all those living in the commune, because there is no method of transmission from inside the commune to outside the commune, the bug would eventually die out with no host. The commune can then be slowly repopulated. The last critique left of genetic modification is that it is in some way unethical or immoral. The argument of religion is the most common one. Genetic engineering apparently contradicts God’s will and means humans are playing God. This argument falls flat for a number of reasons. First, what even is God’s will? How do people know what it is? And why would a God will against something if there are no independent reasons to, other than the people claiming that he does? The other part of the argument is that humans would be playing God. That’s just plain wrong. It is nature that determines our genes through selection, not God. So then we have the next most popular argument, the appeal to nature. Genetic modification is unethical because it is unnatural. Another argument that’s just totally invalid. It is based on the premise that only what is natural is ethical; an opinion, not a fact. So the only barriers to genetic modification are muddled and illogical people. We should ignore them and press on. Genetic engineering of humans and other life forms will only further increase efficiencies. We can make ourselves faster and stronger, with a lessened need of sleep, food and water. Humans can also be adapted to their physical environment through modification. As mentioned earlier, we can have increased cold tolerance in colder climates and increased heat tolerance in hotter climates. But it’s not just pure physical improvements that can result from genetic modification. Humans can also be improved mentally; to be more accepting of authority, to have a more stringent body clock and to be able to learn faster. This is just the tip of the iceberg, and there is so much good that genetic modification can do that this short treatise cannot do it justice.
So we move on to hard test tube babies. First described as “decanting” in the 2Ith century novel, Brave New World, the technology has only recently caught up to the fiction. But what awesome technology this is. For those uninitiated, hard test tube babies are babies created completely independent of parents or any other humans. A single piece of DNA, some technological wizardry and an incubation period of 9 months is all that’s required for a newly minted human being. What this means is that the potential for mistakes and errors is significantly reduced, approaching zero. When human conception and pregnancy is taken out of the equation, ridiculous mishaps like miscarriages, genetic abnormalities and other defects that often occur in procreation also disappear. The technology in the creation of hard test tube babies can be perfectly calibrated so that the babies that are created will have exactly the right genetics for their future roles. Hard test tube babies allow for an unparalleled level of control, a control that is required for the ubiquity of uniformity in mankind that precipitates utopia. What it also does, along with genetic modification, is allow a world without biological gender, an unnecessary and detrimental blight on our world. Gender only exists as a product of nature’s obsession with evolution. Its function is in its forcing of competition, allowing only the fittest to procreate. That was before our modern societies developed; when humans were still struggling to live past fifty years. Back then, natural selection was a necessary evil for the improvement of humankind. Now, we have genetic modification and hard test tube babies. Gender only acts as a barrier to equality and acts as a distinct differentiating force that creates divisions in humankind. Rather than the dichotomy that exists today, a dichotomy that has endured even when it has lost its utility, we should aim for pure unity, a genderless world. This is the way of the future.
The questions of work and jobs have been partially answered by these above descriptions. However, there are more in depth concerns that must be raised. Foremost is its allocation. Allocation of jobs will be based entirely on age. Those younger and fitter will do the physically tougher work; farming and construction, and while their life progresses, the physical workload of their occupation will diminish accordingly. Those nearing the end of their lives will be placed in jobs that are suited to them; working on a production line or in a hospital. This method of labour allocation ensures work done by each according to their own abilities. What this means is that there will be no choice of occupation. Of course, that is the goal. The abilities of those of like age will be the same, and thus they naturally will have the same job. Also relating to jobs is the amount of production that should be derived from work. It would at first seem, with the benefits of genetic modification having been championed, that the amount of production achieved should be as high as possible. This is not the goal. Instead, the speed at which citizens complete work should be perfectly calibrated through genetic modification and conditioning in order that production should be no more and no less than is necessary, whilst ensuring that work will make up all the time not spent on sleeping, eating and cleaning. That is to say, citizens will have no leisure time, and will be conditioned and genetically modified so that their rate of work, multiplied by the amount of time they work will produce the exact amount of output that is necessary. This will mean that there will be no surplus nor deficit of energy, produce and time; with perfect efficiency the supreme guiding principle.
While we have discussed birth, we have neglected to speak of death. Death in the new world will be a voluntary act of suicide. Sixty years is enough of a time to enjoy existence, to contribute to the maintenance of utopia and to live the good life. It is also short enough so that life does not become a burden on others, so that death comes gracefully; the mind having not lost its lucidity and psyche. An acceptance of death is both noble and practical; this fact will be made clearly known to all who live in the world. They will understand their duty when their time comes. In this way, the efficiency and overall happiness of the society is maintained. If there were no impetus for a structured recycling of population, then slowly but surely the state of society will begin to decay. The fluctuations in population will result in imbalances between people and jobs, and will undermine the egalitarian nature of the world. If the old are removed from their job, then others will have to work more to maintain their life. If they remain, the wellbeing of a younger generation will diminish, and their sense of purpose will be totally absent; what would have been their job remains occupied by a septuagenarian who performs poorly. Death will not be a choice, but through deep conditioning, it will be a voluntary and agreeable act. The citizens will approach it with peace.
As has become evident, the economic model of this new world will not be based on any exchange of goods or any equivalent of money. Money, through its implication of a private economic system, would undermine control. Thus, there will be no free market; no ready exchange of goods for cash. Necessities: food, water, clothing, shelter and tools, will be distributed free of charge by the state. Nothing else will be needed or wanted. Nothing else will exist. The perils of our capitalist society have already been laid out. It has become clear that monetary systems do not work. If we try to maintain money in the new world, we would be committing a blatant act of suicide. In keeping something so obviously destructive, we would show ourselves to be stupid. However, the exchange of goods could also precipitate a rebirth of the capitalist model in the new world. This is a legitimate concern. Of course, goods will never be provided in excess; it will always be the exact amount needed for optimal nourishment, happiness and work. Conditioning, will also play a role in making trade a detestable idea and make sure that what every citizen gets will be exactly what they want. With these measures employed, our previous self-destructive economic system will never reappear.
Administration
The leader of the commune will not be subject to the same conditioning the others receive and will live separately. The necessity of this leader is debatable, but its inclusion is warranted on the basis of unforeseen circumstances that may disrupt and destroy the commune without separate intervention. Maybe a glitch in a system wreaks havoc on the conditioning of the citizens who then become rebellious. The leader’s job will be to fix this up and return the society to its previous state. The leader will also be responsible for smoothing the edges to allow the greatest efficiency. Maybe the genetic code of the citizens is slightly off, making them weaker than they could be and unable to complete enough work. Again, it will be up to the leader to make the tweaks to achieve a more perfect state. All of this means that the leader must know in depth everything about the commune. While this may seem like too much power invested into the one person, it should be known that even though the leader is not subject to the same conditioning as the other members of society, they will still be conditioned. This conditioning will make sure the leader is deeply patriotic, to such an extent that it would sacrifice its life if necessary without hesitation. It will also understand that its sole purpose is in its monitoring, improving and saving of society. It will not interfere with world in any other way, and will mostly be confined to its own residence. The leader will also be conditioned to condition its heir in the same way. The heir will be taught anything and everything that will be required to replace the leader. Optimally, they will eventually grow to become a replica of the previous leader, and this process will continue forevermore.
On top of the leader, there will be a central control of all the communes, responsible for saving the world from the most catastrophic of threats. Incoming asteroids, invading aliens, superbugs, natural disasters, a rogue commune; these are all problems that will be dealt with by this central control. This central control will comprise of a small township of free-thinking individuals, who are allowed and able to further scientific progress. Even then, they will only be working on preventing and dealing with the aforementioned events. Defence systems, vaccinations, and the like will be all within the domain of these people. They will be the ones who launch the rocket that destroys the asteroids on a collision course with earth, the ones who negotiate peace with aliens, the ones who seek and destroy a new virus. But of course, their own existence may be termed a catastrophic threat. Their freedom allows the possibility of selfishness; some may try to harness the communes for their own good and to improve their own lives. Some might want to just destroy the world. To have people with this sort of power seems like a recipe for disaster. Then again, maybe it’s only in this capitalist every man for themselves society that fosters this thinking, and the people who have lived their entire lives away from it will never even consider putting themselves before the greater good. But even if this is not true, I contend that this would be an evil that is necessary. It would be dreadful if, through much sacrifice, this utopia is finally achieved, only for an asteroid to crash down and destroy all progress. It is a matter of probabilities. If the probability of all the world-destroying events occurring was less than the probability that this central control would betray the state, then it would be hard to justify having this group of potentially havoc creating individuals. But the fact is that this is probably untrue, and a colossally destructive event would be more likely to occur than betrayal. This group will exist; a risky but important safeguard.
Happiness
On the topic of happiness, developments have occurred that have resulted in new understanding, and have shed some light on how needless and ridiculous the systems that run our current world have become. The developments in question have occurred in the field of hedonic adaption, a concept first raised a century ago. Recently released, decade long studies have all but confirmed this phenomenon. What is it? It was a theory, now a tenet, which describes a fundamental feature of our happiness levels. According to hedonic adaption, our happiness level has a baseline, determined largely by genetics, which it always reverts to. Happiness levels of lottery winners and people who become paraplegics see a sudden rise or dip when the altering event occurs, but years later, these levels revert to the level they were before the event. Thus, there is almost nothing that can be done that can tangibly change happiness in the long term. Material pursuits are useless. Social pursuits are useless. Achieving them will not allow us any long-term happiness. Some people then point to the extreme happiness of monks as contradictory evidence; and its true, monks are a lot happier than most other members of the general population even though in their genetics, they are fairly representative of the general population. The reason for this is that their lives are, like the citizens of the new world will be, extremely structured, with all their desires totally suppressed and meditation takes up a large portion of their ascetic lives. It is only from a full immersion in this lifestyle that allows them to reap the benefits. And this immersion still constitutes control, whether self-imposed or by the state. It is control which allows them to reach their state of bliss. Enemies of my proposition will indubitably hypothesise a world in which we all live as ascetics; another utopia, without all the technological impositions that I have proposed, which they illogically take exception with. While I concede that this world would indeed be great, there are some obvious problems with it. First and foremost is reproduction. A very short-lived utopia it would be indeed if modern technology and sex were both removed. Since its very essence is in its lack of any modern technologies, hard test tube babies and other artificial reproductive technologies would be excluded. Thus, sex would be necessary in this world. But there is clearly a reason those beatific monks live in pure chastity. Sex represents a relinquishing of control, a giving in to the most primal desires of our condition. And since utopia requires us to quash these sorts of desires, the same desires that cause us to be violent and to lust for power, sex would pose an inherent contradiction. Without its restriction, the whole system of self-imposed control would collapse. So a monk based utopia would either destroy itself if it excepted sex from control, or it would die out in a single generation; everyone having died of old age. Also, in contrast with my proposition, achieving this monk based society is totally impractical. It would require most of the world to change their mindset from one extreme to another. For this to happen without the use of any technology could take hundreds if not thousands of years. And by that time, we’d be lucky if our earth had not turned to a barren wasteland through human maltreatment.
It may be of some consternation that a realistic transition from our society to that of my proposition has not been detailed, especially since this would be necessary for comparisons to be made with any other utopia. Thus, I will explicate. First, there must be consensus reached among those in power to work together in achieving this utopia. Then the birth rate must be substantially dec