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Notes -
On Self Actualization, Utopia, and the Arrow of Civilization
After going back and reading this post I started thinking about what an a person would look like if they lived in a utopian society.
In the linked post, Gaasht puts forth the argument that:
This sentiment also rings true to me on a deep level, and I want to dig a little more into the idea that many social actions that are rewarded by the current status quo are in fact morally wrong, and would not exist in a truly utopian society.
I want to briefly state that this is more of a thought experiment to understand how we can be better people, I do not believe in Whig History. To be clear I do not think that utopia is necessarily inevitable, or that on balance a society like a utopia is even desirable. However I think it's crucial for us to look through different formulations of society, as I think most posters here would agree that our current society is far from optimal.
Instead of looking at the overall social formations which most utopian theorists seem to get endlessly mired in, I want to think about what type of mindset and values that the average individual in a utopian society would have. The easiest place to start here is describing it in opposition to the current attention seeking, neurotic, victim-oriented mindset that so many people here know and hate. In a truly utopian society, adult should be resilient, emotionally tough, and generally willing to own up to their mistakes.
From here, it becomes much more difficult to determine what an individual should do or feel. I will look through a couple different formulations of a utopia to try and better understand what it means to be a perfect or self-actualized individual.
The Culture
The Culture from Iain Banks is semi frequently referenced here as a good outcome with regards to artificial intelligence and a future society. In The Culture, artificially intelligent starships called Minds rule society and make all of the important decisions. The only time humans make decisions that are actually relevant are when the society gets in contact with an alien species and needs a covert agent, or when a human rejects the culture entirely. Otherwise, humans essentially exist for pleasure and live in an incredible, beautiful paradise while their artificially intelligent babysitters make sure they don't break the rules.
While I would agree that this is by no means a doomsday scenario, and the society described is amazing compared to other potential outcomes of developing a true general artificial intelligence, something about this picture still strikes me as wrong. In any utopia that I can see, humans would be uplifted from our narrow view of the world and over all we will become more intelligent and able to make important decisions as a whole. Creating a benevolent AI nanny strikes me as defeatist and a course which will ultimately lead to stagnation for humanity.
The Edenists
In a science fiction series from Peter Hamilton, another society is proposed called the Edenists. Using advanced biotechnology, these people have engineered the ability to communicate telepathically with each other, and also have created 'biological machines,' - essentially biologically created hive minds for their settlements.
In this culture the ideal person is expected to be strong, willing to sacrifice themselves for the settlement, but they're also expected to be extremely emotionally balanced and very rarely experience anger or any sort of negative emotion. They achieve this by having their hive minds essentially act as therapists for any individual who gets emotionally unbalanced. This hivemind is more than willing to put you in a simulation and bring back dead family members or whatever it needs to do to make sure that you are emotionally strong.
As opposed to the Culture, humans are instrumental in this society as they form bonds with biotechnological starships and still form the backbone of the society's economic and military force.
While this situation is more appealing to me than Banks's nanny AI, it still seems that it has something missing. To me, in a truly utopian society all human emotions would be properly understood and utilized, we would not need to simply use therapy to completely get rid of all anger. I also think that privacy is important, and cannot imagine living in a society where I had literally zero privacy, although I am willing to admit that with trustworthy institutions and leaders this may be a better bet.
In Conclusion
I would suspect that many posters here see both of these societies as horrible, and instead see the ideal society as a reversion back to standard gender archetypes of pre modernity. I don't feel that I believe in that idea strongly enough to do it credit, but I am interested in seeing how a utopian society based on old gender rolls might function.
In general, I think that the universally unanswered question of 'How to Be a Good Man?' that philosophers have been working on for millennia has been nearly abandoned, and instead in the modern world has shifted away from this sort of thinking to focus more on what an ideal society would look like, instead of an individual.
I'm curious what others think the ideal individual would look like, not in the context of our current society but in the context of your favored utopian society?
It is my belief that utopian dreaming about a human life without conflict and struggle itself ceases to be human. Humans are built to struggle, and if there's nothing there to struggle against, they'll find something to be "traumatized" about and struggle with that. I don't think humans will ever stop fighting each other, scrabbling for status and scarce resources. We can change the resources that are scarce, but we can't change people.
We are generational beings projecting our DNA forward through time one fuck, one war, one long damned waste at a time.
We will never be without trouble, without hardship, without want and need.
We are inexhaustible and insatiable.
We are built this way.
Could we change ourselves to not need struggle and still be human?
I do not think so.
To rephrase your question, would you really be happy in a world where you were an exact copy of everyone else instead of such an existence evoking an existential horror of being part of a hive mind making you desire to act out to be visible in some way or form?
I don't think lack of struggle automatically makes everyone the same. If it does we can inject some artificial struggle once every thousand years or so.
That outcome does strike me as terrible, I'd certainly want to avoid that fate.
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