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Is Utopia Possible?

^
lol I think we agree on this one.
I see harvesting couch potatoes AS utopia!!
Its just somebody has to burp them/me after feedings.
?
Good to think about Utopia but be careful of those promising it,
you might end up in dystopia eating soylent green.
 
wezface said:
I don't think so. Why? Human nature. I think communes can be stable with under about 300 people, because this is the number I feel like you can actually connect with on a personal level and you can know each person.
The problem you get when you exceed that number is that people start wondering, "Well, why should I work for someone who I don't even know?" and greed takes over.
That said, there are several communities (mostly the remaining hunter-gatherer tribes) who exists in extremely peaceful, semi-utopic way. I think it has a lot to do with their ideas surrounding ownership and privacy (we have the idea that we can own things and they are ours and nobody else's, and that the more things we own, the better off we are. This is an idea that will be really hard to beat out of our collective consciousness).
I also think that when people have their survival needs taken care of they tend to be more unhappy. Look at these hunter gatherers, subsistence farmers, etc... their existential happiness is generally greater. Their purpose, they know, is to live and continue living and they are actively working toward that. We in the developed world, however, are left to sit in our cubicles and ponder our purpose because we don't have to actively work toward the betterment of ourselves and our family or tribe.
Click to expand...

I agree with this absolutely. I feel that when we remove ourselves from our survivalist Earth creature environment, we lose something, though we also gain something. In our society today we no longer (most of us) have to worry about staying alive... we pretty easily meet our food, water and shelter requirements. We wake up every morning without worry that we might not have those things. So we start to develop new goals. The problem is that the goals put forth by society are largely abstract... for example the goal of "getting more". When does it end? The more you get, the more you worry about it. I have spent a lot of my adult years never satisfied, always with this feeling underlying that I should be doing more. This creates a large amount of stress and worry that it is very difficult to get past, and which will never be satiated.

Whenever I go camping, or even better, multi-day backpacking, I notice my mindset shift dramatically. I am easily able to be 100% satisfied with just existing. Sure, surviving is harder, but it's a challenge that is much easier for me to take because it's a concrete goal: do I have food, water and shelter? Well then, I'm 100% good and I can simply enjoy living, since my goals are met.

This has led me on many occasions to wish the infrastructure would collapse and we could go back to our original state as a species. But then, a few winters ago, I lost power for 4 days, and wasn't able to leave my house due to 16 inches of snow and a steep street/driveway. My only source of heat is kerosene, but the unit is electric. It got down to 34 degrees inside the house by the end, and I didn't have much food because I didn't expect the snow. It was dark for so many hours every day. It was really scary, and it made me realize why it is that we attempted to get where we are today.

I think a grass is greener complex is part and parcel of being human. We're always reaching for what we don't have.
 
I don't know about utopia, but you can count on chipping in for your elderly neighbors in the future if you don't want to see them on the streets. There simply aren't enough healthcare resources to handle it, and it will HAVE TO fall to communities. Perhaps this can instill the seeds of the concept of which you seek.
RIP John Lennon
Maslow is absolute truth
 
Utopia is the journey, not the destination.

I grew up in a pentecostal church and even at like 7 years old, heaven seemed like on hell (pun intended :D) of a boring place. We are not designed for a utopia, we are designed to be reaching, searching, expanding horizons and improving ourselves. Utopia has an underlying assumption we have got there.

Give me a place where everyone is guaranteed enough food, clean water, a roof over their head and good health and I reckon that's close enough. We might not be perfect but we can all go chase it down... :D
 
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