Mental/ physical changes to get an utopia

I think it's quite obvious that, human beings being human, it's impossible for us to quite get at building a Paradise on Earth. Obviously, the advantage of Sci fi/ fantasy is that it can be populated by races other than humans, or it can modify humans to suit the needs of the story.

Which leads me to my question: what changes do you think we would need to do to the human race in order for it to be able to build an actual utopia? I think of an utopia as a place where: - There is no need for police. - There is freedom of speech. - There is little need for money. - People are genuinely happy. - People are long lived and healthy.

Suffer not the witch to live.

In short, we must think of a situation in which people have no need to commit crimes, think destructive thoughts, want, feel less than satisfied at all times, and have their health. ...I get the feeling you put that fifth one in to prevent 'everyone dies' being a viable option.

(This all assumes that 'people are genuinely happy' means no forced happiness, rather than eradicating capital-d Depression, and that all of these include 'fix all mental disorders'.)

Widespread (planetary) mind control. Something along the lines of what Great Professor Bias did, not the Angel Halo.

Widespread Lotus-Eater Machine style distractions. One of those games - Star Ocean or something - did something like that, where the 'game' world is much more vibrant than the 'real' world in-universe.

Total hive mind, no exceptions. I suggested one here, but no one took me seriously. That, or some form of active telepathy, like what Char Aznable tries to bring about.

Drugs. Lots and lots of drugs. I'm thinking Brave New World here.

Forcibly open up a number of alternate modes of being - essentially every afterlife and The Dreaming, giving people so much to explore that they don't have the time to be petty.

Solve the many, many, many crisises... crisisi? Crisis-plurals? That plague Earth, and bring about a golden age. My preferred solution is a one-in-trillions genius running things with the help of several supercomputers, to nip sources of unhappiness and strife in the bud.

Remove the human need for religion, alcohol, politics/inequality, and non-reproductive sex through genetic manipulation. In short, make everyone an irreligious teetotaler with no desire to outdo their neighbors - especially in bed.

Exterminate everyone who is unable to comply with a planetwide desire to happily get along. I think we'd end up with... 60% present population that way.

Create a viable means to create space colonies with, and begin moving up into the sky. Reduce the current global population to about half this way, so that resources are more readily available to those who remain. Alternately, send the other half out to explore the universe, to find another Earth-like planet.

...That's what I've got, anyway.

edited 28th Sep '14 8:25:25 PM by DeusDenuo

As I believe Deus Denuo just adequately established, any one person's utopia is someone else's dystopia, so what you are asking is an impossibility.

For example. :)

edited 29th Sep '14 1:15:50 PM by Noaqiyeum

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

@Deus Denuo: I disagree, I believe.

In particular:

Aside from the biological elements (removal of disease, etc.), all that's really called for is that everyone choose to not commit crimes, etc. In some cases the removal of poverty and an institution of universal education of a high standard would probably be a significant factor, as well as enforcement of a healthy environment.

(Note: when I say that ""all" that's really called for" above, I don't mean to imply that this would be easy.)

I also thoroughly disagree with this; none of those seem inherently problematic to me, even looking at the world around me. How people handle these things, and respond to issues related to them, is another matter.

[edit] One caveat, however: I'm assuming that a utopia doesn't need to never have anything untoward happen, only that issues are dealt with quickly, affect very few—if any—people other than perpetrators, and are extremely rare (even if that's in the order of one event every ten thousand years).

[edit 2]Hah, touche! XD

edited 29th Sep '14 1:16:31 PM by ArsThaumaturgis

My Games & Writing

I don't think that's obvious at all.

None. Society will need to be radically rearranged, but we won't need to alter ourselves beyond the baseline 1.0 human being.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

I will note that the requirement that people be "long lived and healthy" might—depending on how far one wants to take that for a utopia—call for either significant advances in medical technology or some sort of alteration to the human body (which might call for significant advances in medical technology... :P).

edited 29th Sep '14 3:56:54 PM by ArsThaumaturgis

My Games & Writing

Eh. I figure, we could reasonably attain any given two aspects of this 'utopia' without resorting to dystopic means. Any three would begin to require actions of questionable morality, possibly infringing on one of the remaining two aspects (and I kinda can't see worldwide freedom of speech and no further need for police existing at the same time). Any more than that (I feel) would be realistically improbable without doing something deplorable.

Okay, so I'll take a more optimistic view of things.

Between worldwide safety, tolerance, plenty, happiness, and health... Hm. We're closest to just 'health' and 'tolerance' now, I think, the former more than the latter. 'Happiness' might be next (and it would require a significant softening of all religions, so it's a couple of generations down the line), but I kinda doubt we'd ever attain 'safety' or 'plenty' without considerable effort.

EDIT: Okay, 'significant softening of all religions was a bit much in retrospect. I should've said 'most' religions.

edited 3rd Oct '14 8:35:19 AM by DeusDenuo

Why not?

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

Because the extremes of free speech tend to butt up against the safety (perceived or physical) of others, and I'm not so optimistic that I can see every malignant troll on the internet ever just up and becoming decent people in all interactions. I don't think it's impossible, just that I can't foresee or imagine a situation where real people would act that way.

I think that that may be where we differ, Deus Denuo: your relatively optimistic approach is still a bit more cynical than my perspective, I think.

(And I really don't think that all religions would call for any softening; there are plenty that seem to get along pretty well as they are. I am, in all fairness, somewhat biased on this, but I'm not thinking only of my own by any means.)

My Games & Writing

If you think utopia is humanly possible, how would we achieve it using realistic means? My idea of utopia is most certainly impossible to achieve using human methods.

The changes for such a utopia would include:

• No death, aging, diseases, or pain. Humans have perfect bodies.
• Humans are given perfect and identical consciences and a natural tendency to do the right thing. Written law would no longer need to exist to tell humans what is right and wrong, because they would know this and do this inherently. Written law exists for the lawless.
• Humans have free will, and also perfect control over their desires. In our current human world, a person's desires can greatly contradict their own conscience (despite knowing something is wrong, we still want/do it). In utopia, this is impossible; no desire can exist without the conscience allowing its existence, thus wrong cannot be commited without first deceiving or corrupting the conscience.
• When necessary, humans are judged by an omniscient being with the same sense of justice as our utopian selves. No longer do humans have to settle for human judges, juries, and lawyers who have no greater inherent authority than those judged and who judge based off of incomplete knowledge and can make mistakes.
• Humans have an unselfish nature and treat others as well as they treat themselves.

edited 1st Oct '14 4:59:58 AM by shiro_okami

I'm not sure why any of that calls for a police force, though. Social opprobrium should be enough to silence trolls and bullies, if you more widely have a culture of equality and respect; and on top of that, in such a society we won't have the toxic factors that lead people to undertake (for example) misogynistic trolling.

I mean... even today, with all the structural inequalities of global capitalism, most people *aren't* malicious trolls — not even on the Internet, where it's easy to obtain anonymity.

: I think we're working under different definitions of utopia. To me, a utopia isn't somewhere where nothing bad ever happens, but it is a place where everyone's needs (food, shelter, entertainment, family, love, community, etc.) are met. There would still be the very rare murder or rape (not so much theft, though), but we'd be talking about a few dozen cases a year across the globe, and the reaction would be one of shock and introspection on the part of the communities affected.

While I would have no fundamental objection to making people immortal or something, I think that altering the human race to the extent that we're essentially automata is more an act of genocide than the creation of a utopia. Similarly, I would suggest that if you need everyone to be up to their eyeballs in psychiatric medication for your society to function, you have created a prison rather than a utopia.

As for how to achieve it from where we are now? Well. It won't be easy. There will be a lot of bloodshed along the way, both in waiting for the general population to become radicalised, and in the subsequent revolution (those in power will not willingly give it up; the enemy will not perish of himself). And there are many pitfalls even further along that path; neither success nor failure is inevitable.

It will take a global communist revolution, in short.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

I think... either I should've said more, or you misunderstood. The 'social opprobrium' (a new word for me, which I appreciate needing to look up) you mention is never a unified one; even when it seems to be, it tends to be affected by the specific culture of the individual, which is unlikely to match up with the others in that group even in a monoethnic culture. It's the meatspace version of what trolls do on cyberspace (or should be - it still requires them to have a conscience of some sort), and past a certain point is the same police-requiring sort of free speech that it intends to silence. There are several ways to attain anonymity nowadays, and while it's easy to do online, it's still pretty easy to attain as part of a crowd throwing rocks (both in terms of one's identity and the excuse that you were forced to go along with everyone else).

Shiro_okami's utopia is a post-singularity ideal. Aside from the 'never aging or dying' part as that would cause overpopulation, you could probably attain it in the very near future by rigidly following instructions from an app with a worldwide distribution. No bloodshed, just logistics and a worldwide human identification system to expedite consequences for deviation.

HG Wells was a Utopian - in that he hoped, and worked, for Utopia on Earth - but, like the OP and others on this thread, intelligent enough to realise that Utopia could not be achieved without extensive changes to the nature of humanity.

His book Days of The Comet has the dust from the tail of the eponymous comet alter all of humankind to rid us of greed, violence and other negative traits and bring about Utopia on Earth.

The rich redistributed their wealth/goods to those less fortunate out of compassion, crime ceased and the world was a great place - but only due to a massive fundamental altering of human nature.

Not all Humans Are Bastards but there are enough greedy people out there that Utopia would require either removing such tendencies (or the people that have them) or establishing rigid laws to prevent such greed from affecting others - which wouldn't be a "Utopia" from the point of view of the people whose idea of an ideal world is one in which they're far far better off than the "lesser" people...

So you'd certainly have to remove human greed and covetousness - not only from those who would illegally take things due to their greed but from those who legally make themselves over-privileged at the expense of others to the point that people are in such a state of hopeless privation that they are driven to commit crimes just to get what they need.

Religion, too, is problematic and not just from the "forcibly imposing your viewpoints on the dirty heretics" standpoint.

Certainly, the "Utopia" of a religious extremist may well be "dystopian" for those who do not share those views (or don't belong to the privileged class/sex of that religion) due to the extreme religious laws inflicted on everyone and such extremists wouldn't enjoy a world in which freedom of religion was enforced and the "wrong" people (or sex) have equal rights.

But also, a caring/moderate religious person is not going to be happy in a "Utopia" where freedom of religion is a core tenet if they sincerely believe that many of their friends and neighbours are going to be royally fucked in the "hereafter" due to believing the "wrong" thing while alive.

In fact, they'd be downright miserable, surrounded by people they genuinely care for who are intrinsically "damned".

Humans are too diverse for Utopia to exist - and removing that diversity would be a dystopia that would give George Orwell screaming fits.

Unless you divvied up the world into lots of smaller "Utopias" and sorted people into them (and even then, knowing that "over there" is a "Utopia" where human rights are only extended to men or women or a certain class is going to make a lot of people miserable...)

You don't think that that is what I was suggesting, do you? Because it's not.

Even for your definition of utopia, that is not much of an answer. We have already seen communism fail as a system of government/economy, what makes you think your idea will succeed?

Really not seeing how that will lead to the world I described. I don't see how following a worldwide app will somehow change human nature that has persisted for thousands of years.

This is precisely the reason why I think utopia is humanly impossible. In order to achieve utopia, not only do you have to remove diversity of morals and values, you need to have the citizens of the utopia realize that its removal is a good thing.

edited 1st Oct '14 5:56:25 PM by shiro_okami

Following it religiously, one might say.

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

The ability to achieve a utopian society would, almost by necessity, remove the need for a utopian society in the first place.

...not all that much, because it's like withholding life-saving medicine. The ability to achieve utopia begs the question of why it hasn't been done so already, and that 'why' is usually the stuff of dystopias.

Yes, exactly. (Kinda like following a forum topic, yeah? )

Shiro_Okami I imagine this theoretical app to be like a timer or health plan for a diabetic - it tells you what to do at a certain time, and you follow its suggestion rigidly with the knowledge that you risk a consequence for ignoring it - but for human nature instead. The idea isn't to change that undying human nature directly, but to channel it in a certain healthy direction on a wide enough scale. Think of it as the 'App Religion' if you like (and I wouldn't be surprised if that was already a book title for some trendy book by some trendy author somewhere).

edited 3rd Oct '14 8:50:24 AM by DeusDenuo

I'm just trying to point out that your plan involving "eliminating" or "significantly softening" the "human need for religion" merely replaces it with another one of your own devising.

This sort of inescapable irony is exactly why I said an earthly utopia is impossible - because every utopian is just another proud voice in the cacophony, shouting "Everything would be perfect if only you all agreed with me!"

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

For one thing, you would need someone to make such an app, and I do not think any human would have the qualifications or authority to do so. Additionally, while it would not truly eliminate free will, it would suppress it; humans who followed the app would have it dictate their actions rather than making decisions for themselves. Not really ideal.

If you change human nature itself, humans will be capable of making the right decisions on their own, preserving both the use and spirit of free will.

Er, no. That 'religion softening' thing from earlier (by which I meant they had to move towards the moderate spectrum, and not ...whatever it is you were thinking of) and the 'app religion' are responses to two different definitions of Utopia; it's a bit unfair to conflate them. And either way, in any Utopia, it'd probably be necessary to have to be a symphony of voices with little to no cacophony, all saying 'we are good and safe'. (And I'm sorry, I just don't see where the irony in common agreement is.)

We already give up a comically absurd amount of information and control to any company with a certificate saying they can be trusted with it, regardless of qualifications or authority (which we can't easily confirm anyway) - I don't see the 'app' as being too much further of a step, especially if it had [insert trendy startup/giant name here]'s name on it, or someone's star power attached to it. ...here, how about this: I bet you use a touch-screen smart phone, yeah? Those pretty much weren't a thing before Apple and Steve Jobs decided they were a thing in 2007, and seven years later they are approaching ubiquity.

Plus, your requirements didn't say that their free will couldn't or shouldn't be suppressed, just that they needed to have it. I don't imagine the 'app' as being much different from telling a teen to be home by 10 and to stay out of trouble - and then sending approving or disapproving texts according to their actions. I see it as a voice telling you that there's real-life Video Game Cruelty Potential upcoming, and you can choose not to act towards it. (Or it's a car navigation device for your conscious self, either-or.)

I don't want to put you on the spot, but... since you bring it up, how would you change human nature while leaving free will untouched, Shiro_okami?

I thought I had already explained that back in my first post.

Even with a well developed conscience, a person may still choose to ignore it and fulfill a desire even if they consider it to be wrong. Humans can also do bad things simply because we don't think about our actions. Humans are essentially slaves to our desires. If you change human inclination to have human desire be more in line with the conscience, if you harmonize the heart and the mind, then you greatly lessen the internal struggle. Note that this would not make humans utterly incapable of evil, it would only make them much more inclined to do good, supposing that they have a good conscience. And lessening the conflict between conscience and desire would not suppress free will at all, instead it would increase the amount of free will humans would have.

edited 5th Oct '14 2:57:13 PM by shiro_okami

Oh that! Okay, gotcha. That didn't even register earlier. That's... Hm. It's an alteration of 'human nature' to the extent that only 'free will' matters. The main thing I see with it is, it's a Depression-sufferer's nightmare - does 'desire' include 'the desire to live past the day'?

I should've been more specific: what actions and/or mechanisms would bring about this change? The 'app religion' wouldn't even work for it (and I just went on and on about it... ugh), but the Angel Halo might. I feel kinda silly for only realizing this now, but I've been thinking of the topic in terms of the means to affect the 'mental/physical changes to get an utopia', past the changes themselves. I suppose everyone's getting a good laugh off of me.

Utopia is often interpreted to mean things it was never intended to mean. Freedom, free will, and democracy are 'worship' words that are often used without clearly defining their meaning. More's Utopia was hardly a free society. People were tightly regimented and not allowed to 'do anything they wanted'. Private property did not exist. Slavery existed and women were second class citizens subject to their husbands. Claiming that utopia means perfect is nonsense. A far better definition would be a society that provides the best benefit to the largest number of people for the longest time. If we use Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs triangle then we can say a society that fills the needs of the most people up the the highest level in an environmentally steady state might be considered a utopia. How to get there is a question of balance between modifying human nature and modifying human society. The denizens of the horrific Hellstrom's Hive as described by Frank Herbert might have thought their lives were actually very utopian, certainly more utopian than the hate filled fascistic Amerika that surrounded them. The changes in human nature should be looked at from the standard of utility for the specific goals that are to be achieved. Getting the most 'bang for the buck' is important. Most utopians don't bother to look at our nature as instinctive social animals except to decry those as limitations. Far better to look at them as potential tools that can be manipulated to permanently achieve a more amenable mindset for a prospective utopia. Examining successful social models in the animal kingdom that may lead us to a utopian social structure with the least disruption of the human ego is important. Without an emotional buy in from the majority a utopia is doomed to failure.

I think you are still confused. Strengthening free will would only be a side effect. Harmonizing the heart and mind would not stifle all desires, just harmful ones. And do note that what we were talking about was only one of several changes necessary to achieve utopia.

I thought this would be obvious, but what would bring about this change would have to be supernatural in origin, which is why I keep saying that utopia is not humanly possible. Only a deity could have both the power and moral authority to bring about all the changes I mentioned.

edited 6th Oct '14 3:38:46 PM by shiro_okami