Introduction
Go to section page: Project GPreface
In the original Utopia post, I pointed out that people complaining about the system ought to propose an alternative. This is mine, and I plan to make it a detailed societal plan, from city to government.
We are free to choose what we eat, and we become obese.
We are free to spend our money on whatever we choose, and we throw it away in six months.
We are free to express whatever opinions we want, and we mimic others.
Our freedom is the dream of an ignorant child come true.
Project Objectives
- Reparations: The system must minimize the human footprint and reduce our cancerous nature, and be prepared to repair the mistakes of its predecessors.
- Sustainability, longevity: The government must continue to exist for a long time.
- Environmental – a system which does not give back what it takes is not sustainable
- Economic – a system which depends completely on growth is not sustainable
- Justice – a system which oppresses its people is not sustainable.
- Simplicity: An absurd level of complexity makes it easier to cheat. Also, the KISS principle.
Basic Ideas
In creating the “ideal” government, we need to define “ideal” and “government.” A government is, by my definition, the organization which makes decisions for everybody else, and with the existence of other organizations, such as corporations and foreign countries, it represents the people’s interests. The real, foremost issue at hand, is whether it makes the “right” decisions or those that forward the goals of the people, and generally those are:
- Longevity and Self-defense
- Quality of life
- Other goals that could be explicitly outlined
Reasonable, right? We have to accept that humans are prone to error, and no governmental body would have a 100% success rate, especially when dealing with such long-term planning.
One of the issues that comes up with direct democracy is how you’re supposed to vote on something you have no knowledge of. In representative democracy, the politician is supposed to know these things, but seldom has expertise. The solution is technocracy, to have experts make the decisions, which is… well exactly what we’re looking for. The way to make a “right” decision is to have someone or someones highly educated on all aspects of the matter make the decisions.
But how to implement it?
When criticizing the US Governmental system, I was asked if it was better than the dictatorship of some stereotypical dysfunctional third-world country. And the answer is of course, it is better, but not by as much as one might think, if one considers the impact the US Government will have on our future. Furthermore, while it is “better” it is far from best. That is the other objective of this project: find the “best.”
In particular, I was concerned about the government’s “responsiveness” and it seemed like an all-powerful dictator is the epitome of responsiveness, but I thought about it more, and this is not necessarily true. The issue of “responsiveness” is really our government’s difficulty in deciding on hot-button issues, and how we appearing to be staving off doing something really substantial about those issues. For instance, we need to be switching away from fossil fuels at the largest possible rate. Our government is not capable of those sweeping changes. It can raise the gas tax and slowly convince people to switch. But I doubt it can uproot all the resources devoted to automobiles, and use it to figure out alternatives. Even if this was within its power, there’s no way it would pass through congress, and that is the problem. A lot of the lack of “responsiveness” appears to result from the two-party system. Also resulting from the two-party system is a departure from making the right decisions due to politics, this on top of heavy corprate influence guarantees our decisions will go astray.
In this “responsiveness” we also have a time consideration. We don’t want to be hasty, nor procrastinate. One body making decisions which go into effect immediately will be fast. But we would like some “separation of powers” to keep that body from going out of control, or to contest clearly fallacious decisions. It takes more time for a group to reach consensus than an individual, so a dictator is faster, unless they’re very carefully deliberating. Which they should be, but they might still be faster. The dictator can’t really be an expert at all things, and the group ought to have a tendency to make better decisions, if the error of each human tends to cancel out. Also, a group reduces the propensity of corruption and power abuse by dilution. So a group, while slower, is better if arranged properly.
The Objective
We have two choices before: become hunter-gatherers, or advance technology so that we don’t undermine the biosphere. Our decision is to do both.