Perfect society
Sometimes political debate ends up mostly being about taxes up or down, yes or no to some small pitifull question which doesn't really matter and where both alternatives are bad in one way or another, and so on. Often when we're too used to certain society structures we tend to give up fighting for the best possible scenario, and end up fighting for avoiding the scenario to get worse than it is. I think that in order to achieve anything lasting and important in politics, you must define what the ultimate, perfect goal of those politics should be, then keep that in the back of your head whenever you make a political decision on the lower level. You may use either a reactionary or radical way of achieving this desired society, but in defining your goal you have to be totally radical, or you'll get locked by what earlier humans did when creating society, and given the history of and the purposes of most society structures (getting power and using the people for own purposes and struggles), that can never be a good thing.
So, I'd like to discuss this simple thing - what is a perfect society, what are the goals we should strive towards? Preferably don't mention secondary goals, but rather the primary goals. For instance, getting money is no primary goal, but getting the food you can buy for money is a primary goal.
Here's my definition of perfect society:
- no large scale conflicts between groups
- the survival of one group should not threaten the survival of another group, so that no group has a reason to fight another simply for the purpose of surviving.
- no group should be allowed to breed children en masse so that other groups are threatened in their survival. Reproduction should be on natural levels.
- every group should have a fixed area of land, with very large neutral buffer zones in between them
- people should live in the same group their entire lives, so that they can't: 1. be mean and then go elsewhere to be mean again. If they're mean they'll have to compensate for what they did, and compensate it in front of the group they were mean to. 2. feel alienated by constantly moving around between different groups. 3. when a group has been joined long enough, all types of sexual rival fighting tends to get calmer, and the group experiences full inner harmony. When new groups are formed, people need to measure themselves over and over again, feeling frustrated. When moving between many different groups, different status in different groups may lead to confusion, and it's very common that people who get problems in one group go to another and punish them for what the other group did to them.
- movement of people back and forth between the groups should be limited, and the buffer zones in combination with this would result in less spread of disease, which would mean much less suffering for mankind.
- all within the group should be dependent on each other in order to survive genetically in several ways, so that internal fights will punish whoever starts it because he'll wipe out himself in the process. This is achieved by a group status where women need the men to hunt for them, at least when they're pregnant, men need women to look after the children, and the men need each other in order to be able to successfully form a hunting team, and women need each other to form a successful team that can chase away predators when guarding the children. The groups should be around 500 persons large, so that inbreeding will be the result if people don't choose their partners according to their instincts. That way, there will be no unhappy love. This will also ensure that the group needs most individuals to take part in the reproduction, and that groups where a single male or female does most of the reproduction gets punished by inbreeding the group.
- there should be no laws. Very often, laws cause more problems than they solve. Scornful behavior and provoking people into committing crimes would never exist unless those guilty of it knew that they'd be protected by the police against those they make angry. The society structure should be so free of threats that nobody goes nuts and carries out killing or raping or anything like that. If someone would commit a crime of that type, that person should be killed, simply because he treatens the group, and it should be clear that it's ethically justified to do so and those who do so should not have bad conscience in any way. No punishments will have the character of being acts of some concept of "justice", they'll simply be practical deeds and as long as nobody behaves like a very real threat to the group, they'll have no problems. The ethical rules will be based on values that all humans share, and only situations where the ethical view of all humans is similar should be allowed to arise, so that there's never any conflicts about ethical values in any situation.
- the society structure should be kept constant so that suffering will be minimized. Whenever a society structure changes, it creates a different evolutionary pressure which removes people by driving them to suicide, stress, losing their will to reproduce and so on. If society is constant, the suffering and removal of individuals in painful ways is minimized. Death penalty has no effect at all in a changing society, but in a constant society it will help removing people who form a threat. Removing those who form a threat to the survival is self-defense in such a case. The society must however be completely perfect and fair for death penalty to be justified. If used, it should be used to punish crimes such as killing and rape.
- if there are any sexual rank fights, those should be decided by fight without weapons until either side gives up. It's up to the weaker part to be sensible enough to give up in such a case. Today's society where the weaker part gets society power and guns and kill the stronger isn't acceptable. But humans and closely related animals hardly ever decide partner choice as much by fight as by love instincts (i.e. correct matchup seems more important than survival strength alone), so this should hardly ever occur.
- there should be less than 4 hours of work per day to grant survival.
- the mutual need of the genders would result in oppression of neither men nor women, and lead to mutual respect.
- the lack of beauty ideals, stress, 8 hours work per day plus 4 hours travel plus domestic work would result in inner harmony for most people.
- there should be clear guarantees that no groups will ever become a threat to your group through breaking the rules mentioned above, through: 1. making it impossible for several groups to gather and achieve numeral superiority, 2. making it easy to see when a group is preparing any acts of war or similar, 3. any group which starts hostility andn refuses to move back despite warnings should, by combined actions from all nearby groups, be exterminated completely.
- the knowledge about other groups should be good and the insight in what they do good enough to assure that people don't fear the other groups being a threat of any kind.
- all people should have a good knowledge about philosophy, history and similar things so that they know how to, and why to avoid wars and conflicts of any kinds. The society structure must be made in such a way that any evil action punishes itself, more or less, so that a person that thinks rationally sees no advantage in committing evil actions. Similarly, a person thinking instinctively should also not see any advantage in evil acts. In such a society very few would end up committing evil acts.
- no paperwork, no taxes, no control, total freedom. This does not mean that the poor and needing aren't helped. It is in the interest of the group to help any of it's members through hard times.
- nobody should have any clothes(well, above 40 years olds should be an exception...)
- free sex and love, but I believe free sex and love would in practice mean most people would choose a single partner of the opposite sex, but with a large portion also choosing not to.
This is the natural pre-civilization society, and I think it's very much a perfect society. Only weakness it really has is that if humans are placed in it, they'll immediately be foolish enough to think they'd gain anything from breaking the rules of it and create a civilization, start wars with each others, commit genocide, persecute followers of different religions or ethnical groups, start misunderstanding each others so that conflicts are created, start murdering and raping so that laws are needed, start becoming alienated, start inventing technology for the purpose of needing to work less but ending up working 3 times as much per day, starting to feminize men and make women become males etc. etc.
I look forward to an interesting discussion...
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Originally Posted by Gelatinous Cube
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