Utopia or Poo-topia?

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Utopia or Poo-topia?
what are peoples opinions on the idea of creating a utopia on planet earth (or any other planet).
And if you believe it could work, on what basis.

Interesting you should bring this up. I'm currently reading News from Nowhere by William Morris. It's about a man who falls asleep in the London he usually lives in and hates. Then when he wakes up it's a utopia.

There are less houses and people, more trees, no money system, no courts, no police, no authority, no divorce and nobody works because they have to but because they want to.

I recommend anyone to read it. It's the most optimistic book I've ever encountered.

I feel that with each person added into the Utopia, it becomes 1 person closer to becoming the POOtopia... In my opinion of a Utopia it would need to be clear of any potential conflict of interest between the inhabitants. In my view of a utopia, everybody living there would probably have to think almost exactly like me and vice versa... If i were to live in somebody else's utopia I would probably need to think more like them, which would be debatable if I was still me! I am not sure if humans could maintain a longterm atmosphere without any chaos/disorder... So unless the utopia thrives on a little bit of healthy chaos, I dont think its possible to exist unless all the residents are like-minded or drugged to be like minded. Unless of course we have several different utopias for people to choose from...

The problem with "utopia" is that it's very subjective. People have very different ideas on what they would consider a utopic society. Some people would consider it a society where nobody needed to work in order to get by (Communism). Others would consider it a society where everybody needed to work in order to make ends meet (Capitalism).

There is no definitive definition for what is "utopic". So the best we can do is try and find some sort of middle ground. Where people who want to get filthy rich can, but those who don't, aren't living off the potato fields.

It's a difficult balance and it's not a system that is designed to please everybody. But then again, that just isn't possible.

I think any utopian plan, breaking up a hierarchical system's checks and balances, will always turn in to a dystopia and the only way for something to approximate utopia to the best a culture can allow is an improvement that unfolds in an organic manner.

The grim reason for that is we're in destructive competition regarding mating and calling out who has genes worth preserving vs. not preserving. That will always be a huge motivator in human behavior because its implications on a person's life is unavoidable. Most of the really nasty social games we play, such as making shiboleths to weed out the weak and especially when the external environment does no such thing, are toward a sort of genetic quality-check. A lot of our tendency to acquire more than we need and even once we have way more than we need to keep getting more - that's a '---- you!' to our genetic and, by further consequence of that, all-around social competitors. People in other countries can be starving to death, you can have plenty to live the life you want and the normative wealth, success, etc.. of your culture can constantly tell you that by relative measure you're a disgrace and that you either need to make way more money than you already are or that you need to find a corner to go die in.

^^ The above is also a large part of why communism when implemented constantly turns into hellhole dictatorships - the basic rules of what human beings are get completely ignored, the most benign means for destructive genetic competition such as wealth distribution are taken away, and the consequences of that show up immediately.

Now, what does interest me is that this issue could be greatly lessened with a couple things - life extension (ie. a culture with a higher weighted average of experience with being human) and, if I'm understanding CRISPR correctly, we could increasingly find ways to modify our own genes and tap different people who would have been too far outside of normative functioning back in toward it.

Ultimately what I'm getting at - I think that if we have the capacity to increasingly mitigate the natural and biological needs for people to be nasty to one another we can increasingly have good odds of what might look like a utopia to someone of two or three years ago at any given time. The first step - guaranteeing people's staples means that people don't have to kill one another for food that's the first level of Maslow's heirarchy of needs covered. Also it's really helpful if the likelihood of your country being invaded and turning into a mass of torture chambers, rape factories, and mass graves is relatively zero. The next step, ie. what capitalism as we know it now, at least tries to enforce that those who are in the destructively competitive gene passing game (as well as LGBTQ - social status might not matter to an asexual quite as much but that's about it) have to earn their status and socially observed superiority by creating value for the rest of the society they live in - there are obviously ways around that like being a trust fund brat but outside of some relatively small circles this puts the hierarchical social climbing pressures people feel toward the task of self-proof by created value. The next step after that is finding a way to have better quality of living safety nets for the poor without bankrupting the respective country, because obviously it eats away at the foundations of the needs pyramid if that gets out of hand.

I think our next state of social affairs, if we're able to change people's genes and remove a lot of the maladies that keep people from being able to compete economically, since we'll still be running on genetic machines the hierarchy games will still exist just that they'll be likely to have their manifestations altered. What I do think is likely is that you'll gradually see morality and integrity become so paramount in terms of proving one's worth that those who have any sort of perceived legal infraction will be in society's doghouse. That's already here a little but it's likely to significantly amplify. The only thing that worries me, always with this sort of thinking, is just how far off course that cultures understanding of what's moral or immoral will be, how much of it will merely be practical, and how many people will simply be destroyed due to faults in that society's thinking that aren't reflecting bottom-line reality. A good example of this looking particularly bad is China's desire to have something like a morality score for its citizens where there's a potential score of 1000, to be in one type of fringe thing or another can deduct 20 to 50 points, one's score will essentially be one's financial credit score as well, and anyone in the bottom quartile would have the right to starve or sleep in the snow. While a socially upstanding occultist or person in a minority political party might not be sleeping under the stars they'd be looking at significant penalties in getting jobs, getting credit, and they'd be doing so under a government that makes it their tasks to find these things out about people.

I guess that's one of my own bigger concerns for the future - the changes we make in the basis of our needs could either help us become more liberal or, also very easily, could turn us so illiberal that the slightest breach of strict conformity would mean social failure and destruction (in a much more amplified way than now). I think this is why we really need to get our understanding of morality, ethics, fundamental human challenges, etc. ironed out and trued up with the universe we live in. Any gap in proper understanding of these things risks major unexpected consequences and in turn very illiberal turns of society.