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I have a soft spot for utopian futurist artwork. In particular the works of Syd Mead, Jim Burns, Peter Elson, Colin Hay and Jacque Fresco. What differentiated Fresco from the rest was that he didn’t only illustrate utopia, he claimed he knew how to get us there.
If you know of Jacque Fresco, it’s likely from his role in Zeitgeist, the regrettably popular faux-documentary that’s largely nonsense. A mixture of Jesus mythicism based on (partly) erroneous comparisons to other religions, 9–11 trutherism and Fresco’s “resource based economy” claptrap, as espoused in “The Venus Project”.
What’s a resource based economy? It borrows an awful lot of language and ideas from technocracy. What’s technocracy? Socialism with extra steps. For Fresco, simply drawing, painting and modeling a future he couldn’t live in was heartbreaking. The missing piece in his art was a believable road map from the world we inhabit today, to the one he wished to inhabit.
I admire that about him. He and I both try to embody the future we want to inhabit. Or tried, past tense, as he passed away in 2017. There’s something to be said for the fact that he at least attempted to bridge the gap between our present and his ideal future with a plan of some sort.
I attract, and am attracted to, that kind of naive idealist. Two of the women I’ve dated so far were anarchists who I quickly learned not to question too deeply. When I asked one where computers would come from in an anarchist world, she said everybody would just do what they’re good at, and enjoy. So one guy would make boats. Another would make houses. Another would make tables. Then they’d each get from the others what they couldn’t make for themselves.
I pointed out those jobs all boiled down to carpentry, and were things one person could plausibly do on their own with trees and some tools. The logistics chain required to manufacture something as complex as a computer however, or even an automobile, couldn’t be done by one person. You’d need something like a corporate structure for that. So these technologies couldn’t exist in a purely voluntarist, decentralized, ungoverned society. You’d be forever stuck at a preindustrial, agrarian level.
I didn’t get my dick wet that night. If you want to endear yourself to someone, make their own ideas sound smarter than they’re able to. If you want to make enemies, push them to explore their own ideas, on their own terms, until they run into limits they didn’t foresee. Doing so will make them feel stupid in a way they can’t blame on you.
She had good intentions of course. Ideologues always do. However, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The Soviet ambition to see every family housed, fed and employed resulted in the largest scale democide in human history. There are a lot of reasons for this but principle among them was the Soviet failure to create the “new man”.
The fly in the Soviet ointment was that people fundamentally don’t want to live collectively on a national scale. Dunbar’s number, the number of people we’re able to remember the faces, names and social connections of, is around 250. That’s a good working limit to how large a communal farming settlement can be before people start grousing about busting their asses for the benefit of neighbors they largely don’t know, and may not share values with.
Taking a system of resource management suited for peasant farming communities and making it the basis for your entire country’s economy (and the economies of your vassal states) was like taking a golf cart on the highway. When the wheels started to come off, because human nature is contrary to Marxist ideals, the Soviets tried to change human nature.
The problem with this should be apparent to anybody who has ever read the ancient graffiti found in the ruins of Pompeii. Humans were just as immature, contentious and divided then as we are now. Any plan predicated on the assumption that human nature is mutable will be doomed to failure.
When the “new man” did not materialize out of the multigenerational project of Soviet indoctrination, their solution was to kill anybody who expressed dissatisfaction with the system, and to prevent anybody from escaping it. That solution crumbled along with the Berlin wall.
The German attempt to create a “new man” was somewhat more literal, selectively breeding their own people to cultivate traits they idealized and murdering everybody who was too far away from those ideals to be a part of the German vision for humanity’s future.
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1. Racism
Nazi reasoning went that a world with only one race and religion would have no reason for conflict. Everyone would be happy to toil for the sake of the rest because there would be no biological or ideological differences between individuals. This is, notably, still a very common vision for the future. It’s just imagined we’ll become a racial monoculture by way of sex, rather than death.
This is the latest incarnation of the “new man”. Mocha colored. Secular, or only nominally/culturally religious. What happens to the stubborn nay-sayers who won’t participate in the massive amount of interracial sex necessary to totally erase the visible distinctiveness of human populations?
Probably the same thing that happened to Russians who didn’t want to be communists, or left wing Germans. If your solution to human in-fighting is to blend everybody together until we’re all identical, it doesn’t work if some groups opt out. They remain distinct, so racism persists.
Besides this problem, actually achieving the rate of interracial reproduction necessary to completely erase all outwardly visible racial attributes would require nonstop train, airplane and shiploads of men (as one man can impregnate many women) to foreign lands. This would probably not happen of its own accord, so you’d need to coerce most of those involved in this program with incentives of some kind.
Bus, train or planeloads of horny foreign men arriving on your shores looking to impregnate local women probably also wouldn’t go over well with the local men, nor would loads of foreign women looking to get knocked up be popular with the local women.
You could split passengers evenly into 50% men and 50% women but the mass importation of foreigners for the explicit purpose of changing racial demographics is likely to be a deeply unpopular policy, and as such, not really feasible to implement in democracies (barring some sort of totalitarian takeover).
Making matters worse for such a plan, women today have access to abortion, germinal selection, even their choice of sperm from a catalogue of handsome, intelligent, accomplished donors. This is to say that reproductive freedom has been steadily increasing. Any policy which fundamentally requires decreasing reproductive freedom isn’t likely to get anywhere in countries where women can vote.
Consumer level CRISPR will also give parents unprecedented control over the traits their children will have. What are the odds everybody will unanimously choose to have children with the same eye, skin and hair colors? If they don’t, it’ll fatally undermine any effort to aesthetically homogenize humanity. Diversity would steeply increase, not decrease.
But then, diversity is our greatest strength. Isn’t it? Why do the same people who say this also want to eliminate diversity by making everybody look the same? If they really meant it, they shouldn’t want to homogenize humanity, instead eagerly welcoming CRISPR and other new reproductive choices.
To give well-meaning idealists the benefit of the doubt, probably they never think through their own solutions this far. In their mind, “everybody fucks until we’re all the same race” must’ve simply never occurred to anybody else and once the world hears about this brilliant plan, everybody will jump onboard. Why wouldn’t they? We all want peace, after all.
This is what I call underpants gnome utopianism, named for the gnomes in South Park who steal underpants as part of a business model they never fully worked out, certain it will turn a profit even if it’s not yet clear how. Step 1: Steal underpants. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit.
I hate to speak ill of the dead, especially when he was such a talented artist and had such beautiful ideals, but Jacque Fresco was a student of underpants gnome utopianism. Step 1: Everybody in the world embraces my ideology/ideals. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Utopia.
It seems like such a short, surmountable leap. But in fact, all of hell fits into that ???. Every doomed effort to reform human nature, every wrongheaded political scheme, every religious crusade. Unfortunately for all of us, the barriers on the road to utopia are as numerous as they are durable:
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2. Religious Discord
The underpants gnome business plan is also the essential formula of religious utopianism. It’s an unspoken assumption in many religious traditions that the way to attain world peace is to convert everybody. A global ummah is imagined by Muslims to be utopian for example, even though the handful of nations under Islamic governments today are very far from being desirable places to live (unless you’re an oil tycoon).
Religious utopianism has also been a common thread tying together many denominations of Christianity in western history. The notion being that part of preparing the Earth for Jesus to return entails converting everybody (or at least ensuring everybody alive at that time has heard the gospels), and organizing Christendom (those nations under Christian governance) according to Biblical principles.
Only, things aren’t so rosy in the few places where Christians have complete, or near complete control. The suicide rate in Mormon controlled Utah is a good example of this. Internet data harvesting bears out that porn consumption is highest in the Bible belt and that spikes in pay per view porn consumption in hotels coincides with Christian conferences and other such events. Abstinence only education increases teen pregnancy in these states rather than decreasing it, etc.
Much the same was true early in the history of this nation when many larger denominations ran their own towns according to their specific teachings. The organic collapse of these communities over time into secularism (with the notable exception of the Amish) testifies to the untenability of theocracy as a sustainable model for civilization.
Jews believe the moshiach will, among other feats, not only bring all Jews into correct observance of the 613 mitzvot, but also persuade all gentiles to abide by Noahide Law. This will reform humanity, bringing about a golden age in which the moral authority of Jews is recognized by all, with gentiles the world over striving to follow their example. Noticing a theme yet?
It would be rhetorically convenient to blame the failure of religious attempts to create the “new man” on not having 100% mindshare. In reality, they failed for the same reason the Soviet and German attempts failed: Man is not a blank slate.
Instinct is real, and no amount of indoctrination will stick if it’s contrary to our instincts. That’s not to say you can’t indoctrinate people, but that if you want it to last, you need to design around human psychology rather than in opposition to it.
To whit, even religious indoctrination doesn’t last forever. Christianity and other Abrahamic religions do an excellent job of conforming to human psychology, understanding and gratifying our emotional needs, playing upon our cognitive biases, exploiting our fears. Yet it’s declining rapidly:
Percentage of the US population self identifying as Christian by year:
1948: 91%
1960: 92%
1970: 90%
1980: 89%
1990: 85%
2001: 81.6%
2007: 78.4%
2014: 70.6%
2015: 75%
2016: 73.7%
2019: 65%
While I’d like to believe this is simply a consequence of the internet making it easier than ever before for people raised in the church to be exposed to critical arguments, polling data bears out a different truth: Human beings, and all other primates, have an instinctual grasp of what fairness looks like and react with immediate reflexive anger to unfairness.
The church has historically treated gays very unfairly. By focusing the lens of discussion onto that unfairness, gays won the PR war. This is not actually a logical reason to conclude Christianity, Mormonism, Judaism, Islam, etc. are untrue (though they are) but appeals to rationality aren’t even a tenth as effective as appeals to emotion. In this case, fairness.
This is good for social equality but a bad sign for any who hope man can be reformed by religion, if we drop it like a hot rock the minute it asks us to do something contrary to our feelings. Jesus himself admonishes us to build our house upon a rock, when the foundational claims of Christianity are built upon sand.
So it is that a system of belief designed to restrain our behavior failed at its task because it only governed us by our consent. A prison made of invisible walls which, once it no longer served us, many simply walked right out of. If man can be reformed, it would seem religion isn’t a perfectly reliable means, though it did greatly outlast both the Soviet and German alternatives.
But let’s steelman the religious utopian formula. Suppose for a moment your religion, whatever it is, actually does reliably reform members 100% of the time. In this reality the constant parade of pastors arrested on sex abuse charges doesn’t exist. There are no religious criminals here, sincere religious belief successfully innoculates us against our worst impulses in this thought experiment.
Does this give us a world without war and bigotry? Not while other religions exist. There is no easy path to peace between religions either. All currently popular religions have incompatible truth claims. Further complicating any attempt at reconciliation, some of those religions purport to complete or restore others, who do not consider themselves in need of completion or restoration.
Religious syncretism doesn’t solve this. Mormonism being true, for example, would necessarily make Islam false as they both purport to restore a corrupted Christianity. Or if Judaism is true and Christianity is not the completion of it, that would have pretty unflattering implications for what Christianity actually is, and so on. They can’t all be right, and none can accept being wrong.
Too much has already been done under the deep assumption that their founders were telling the truth. Wars have been fought. Whole kingdoms and cultures wiped from the Earth. Heretics tortured, witches burnt, etc. The sunk cost fallacy in its most extreme expression; what will it mean about all of those acts, if the belief used to justify them is untrue?
Easier by far just to double down than to come to terms with all that, much less begin apologizing or making restitution. Then triple down, heels dug in, head in the sand. That is not a position from which peace negotiations are easy to conduct.
This is less of a problem for moderates, who do not truly, deeply believe in the claims or currently unpopular teachings of their own religions. Either by denying those verses exist, changing their meaning via creative exegesis or coming at it like a buffet they can take what the like from while ignoring the rest.
Moderates are always baffled when they hear about religious misbehavior in all its forms, because they wrongly assume most of their brethren are also moderates primarily interested in making the world a better place, rather than being motivated by sincere belief in certain metaphysical claims. So every time another sex abuse coverup, or mass grave of indigenous children on church grounds, or anti-evolution lawsuit rolls around, under the rug / down the memory hole it goes.
Because in fact most believers are not moderate, and moderates are in the minority, world peace by way of reconciliation between the major religions is not realistic. They all believe they have the only truth and the only solution to the world’s problems.
More fundamentally, they’re inherently divisive in that they separate the world into the saved/unsaved, believer/unbeliever, Jew/gentile, Muslim/infidel, etc. Scripture is very clear about having no business with unbelievers, who are said to be wicked and depraved without exception. For all their disagreements, the major Abrahamic faiths seem to agree on this.
They also agree the Earth is doomed. Many believe it will be supernaturally destroyed within our lifetimes. This perspective is not particularly conducive to environmental conservation. Nor, really, any sort of project meant to improve a planet they believe will be vaporized and replaced with a perfect paradise sometime soon anyway. In short, there’s no point to creating a better future if you don’t believe there will be a future.
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3. Economic Inequality
You can’t throw a stone in a Youtube comments section on a video about income inequality without hitting a communist. More often someone who doesn’t quite realize what they’re espousing is communism, much in the way that the advocates for a racial monoculture haven’t thought through the horrors which would result from attempting to enforce such a plan.
They’re underpants gnome economists. The Jacque Frescos of money. They see a small number of extremely wealthy people and an ever swelling number living in comparative poverty, and the unfairness sirens go off in their simian hindbrain.
How do you solve this? Billionaires should just be like Santa Claus and give their money away. Surely if you feed everybody in the world once, they stay fed forever? Surely increasing everybody’s wealth by the same amount at the same time won’t cause unforeseen consequences? Like landlords jacking up rent because they know you received a stimulus check, for example.
Then come the justifications. What they’re talking about is basically looting the wealthy. To make that seem more reasonable, they need to explain why billionaires deserve to be stolen from. These are the people who tweet about eating the rich, executing billionaires via guillotine, etc. without personally knowing any.
They’re the people who hate on Elon Musk not because of anything he’s done, but because his environmental goals and constructive futurism go against their narrative about billionaires being uniformly depraved.
These are the people who argue, straight faced, that wealthy parents should not leave their fortunes to their children. That uniquely among all parents, it’s wrong for them to want to try and ensure a safe, comfortable life for their offspring.
Instead they’d like to confiscate that wealth. For billionaire parents to be forced to support strangers as if they were their children, like human brood parasitism. It’s difficult to imagine anything more pathetic than trying to force someone else’s parents to pay your bills.
But I mainly see these people on Twitter, and Twitter isn’t reality. It’s a funhouse mirror version of it which greatly magnifies some of the country’s most ridiculous (but vocal) subcultures.
They’re right when they perceive wealth inequality as a problem. This recognition is emotional in nature. They don’t have the solution, but when you pick at holes in their proposed solutions, they interpret it as an attack on the validity of their gut feeling that wealth inequality is unfair.
This is how someone emotionally motivated to reduce wealth inequality can be persuaded to charge ahead with an unworkable solution that nevertheless feels right. If it’s morally justified, how can it not work? Ask the Russians.
But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that we live in the world these people want. There aren’t any billionaires. A redistributive program heavily taxes wealthy first world countries, the money is sent to the developing world. Because the developing world is considerably larger, this means every first world worker must not only be productive enough to support him/herself, but also multiple other people around the world he/she will never meet.
This is essentially slavery, as for it to work, it must be impossible to opt out of. If it were voluntary, nobody would do it. As with stealing from billionaires, it would need to be justified somehow so the people with the gun pointed at you as you run on your treadmill can feel good about what they’re doing.
The justifications I’ve heard are mainly racial justice, and climate justice. The gist being that white people alive today who have never owned slaves indirectly owe their wealth to ancestors who did own slaves.
There are problems with this, such as slave ownership not being remotely as commonplace in the early US as these people imagine, and the fact that literally every culture in history practiced slavery. But it’s another one of those answers that only needs to hold up to shallow scrutiny.
Anybody who questions it deeper than it can withstand, in doing so, identifies himself as an enemy of the movement (and as such, someone to be fought, imprisoned or killed rather than argued with). The other justification I commonly hear is climate related.
The argument goes that since developed nations are disproportionately responsible for the pollution driving climate change, we owe compensation to the developing world as they largely rely on fishing and subsistence farming that will be disrupted by a warmer, more acidic ocean and changing seasonal weather patterns.
This one’s on firmer ground in my opinion, but pretends that the nations in question aren’t themselves scrambling to industrialize. Only, they have cleaner energy options we didn’t have when we industrialized, like solar panels, wind turbines and so on. Stuff invented by, and sourced from, developed countries.
But let’s say one or both of these justifications fly. Now you work three times as hard for a lower standard of living than you had before, so that people in equatorial countries who are unqualified for any job other than fishing or farming can have an air conditioned house, an electric car, free food and medical care.
You can never stop working and probably your job is assigned by the state to solve the problem of unequal labor supply for different vocations. Many people will have to retrain for jobs they have no interest or aptitude for. Conditions never improve unless everybody now on the dole magically becomes able to create more value than they consume.
We might hope that outcome would result from providing free education to everybody on Earth, but then this either requires educators to work for free, or that you’re taxed further to pay their salaries. Add that to your burden! Work harder, little worker bee! Millions of strangers who can’t perform math more complicated than addition and subtraction are depending on you to feed their hungry mouths.
But let’s say this works out, and everybody on Earth has the benefit of a college education. Let’s say that the process of standardizing and streamlining it for all these different languages and cultures doesn’t diminish the quality of it any. Now we have 8–10 billion college educated humans. What do we do with them?
Is there a STEM deficiency? No, there’s actually a STEM glut. Which is to say that there’s no shortage of educated professionals, even in challenging, high paying fields. There are, in fact, more than the economy can find uses for.
There’s just not a need for 7 billion doctors. Or even 1 billion. Nor engineers, nor mathematicians, nor scientists. The reason these professions command such high pay is that an individual with these skills can provide such tremendous value that we don’t need that many of them.
This is doubly true in an increasingly automated economy. Whenever the topic of technological unemployment comes up, someone chimes in to point out that replacing menial laborers with robots creates a job opening for robot maintenance. Which is true. The problem is, one guy can maintain ten robots. It is still unavoidably a steep reduction in the number of available jobs.
Does providing a free college education to everybody in the world, on your dime, make sense in light of automation? It isn’t only menial labor being automated. Many managerial tasks are now performed by AI. Very little humans do in an administrative capacity can’t be automated.
All of congress could be replaced by software and we’d be better off for it as it would be free of corruption and our representatives would finally do what their constituents voted for. Unless there’s some impenetrable ceiling beyond which further improvement to AI is impossible, there’s nothing humans do that fundamentally can’t be automated.
There are many things we’ll choose not to automate. Not because we can’t, but because we’d rather humans do them. Therapists, masseuses, dancers, musicians, artists and so on. These are to a large extent vocations one needs innate talent for, which can’t be taught. Can our economy persist if everybody’s a painter, musician, etc.?
Snarky gotchas like “how will the wealthy make money if we have none to spend” are shortsighted, because if we’re unemployed because the wealthy replaced us with robots, whatever the wealthy might wish to buy, their robots can make for them. They would have no more need of money then.
This development would shrink the economy ‘til it consists only of resource trades between a couple hundred billionaires who own all the automated infrastructure necessary for producing goods. Anybody not reading this from the deck of a yacht would be on their own.
Cast off like the booster stage of a rocket, only the wealthy elite riding in the capsule at the top actually destined for the heavens. All of us down in the depleted booster instead burning up in the atmosphere, having outlived our usefulness.
There are various commonly proposed redistributive schemes intended to account for this. Lots of talk about basic income from people who have only recently read Manna. The problem is that the political system they want to use to tax the wealthy, is controlled by the wealthy. This is why the US is such a favorable tax environment for billionaires to begin with.
I don’t think they’re going to pay us to do nothing out of the goodness of their hearts. I also don’t think violent revolution is possible in this country as even Americans living below the poverty line enjoy a quality of life better than most in developing countries.
We are too comfortable. We have too much to lose. We’re also generally too fat, dumb and soft, as a people, to overthrow the government (see: January 6th capitol riot, or the miserable failure of CHAZ/CHOP). If we receive basic income, it’ll be an amount precisely calculated so that it’s just exactly enough to prevent us from rioting, and not a penny more.
I don’t see a good solution to this problem. When I bring it up, it’s met with confused hostility by people that assume automation will be democratized only because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate. Indeed if it was democratized it would solve many of the problems on this list.
Not all of them, as human nature never changes, but the ones primarily caused by material scarcity would be diminished. The improvement to average quality of life and reduction in wars since the industrial revolution furnishes promising indications that automation might further those trends, if we all somehow benefit from it equally.
We almost certainly won’t though, and sticking our heads in the sand about it isn’t going to make this problem disappear. It’s already the case that the world economies don’t have use for everybody, and the number of people it does have use for is about to shrink drastically.
Anybody who thinks that’s not a problem, or easily overcome, ask them to explain how in detail. Probably you will get an underpants gnome style plan with a great big ??? in there somewhere. Perhaps cleverly hidden, but always present.
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4. Equality of genders / sexual preferences
This one may as well go under the religion section. Every major religion in the world today is patriarchal, prescribing a subordinate social role to women. Homosexuality, likewise, is frowned upon to say the least.
God, as described by Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. seems to have all the same likes and dislikes as religious family men at the time their scriptures were written. Which is suspicious, since that’s also who wrote said scriptures.
He wants wives to be quiet and servile, children to be obedient and respectful, thinks gays and menstruation are grody and should be kept out of sight, enjoys the smell of burning meat, women can’t be priests, etc. etc. etc.
Because you can never totally subdue human reason, the growing unpopularity of some of these policies is driving mass apostasy in the west. Basically the church said “it’s either us, or the gays” and everybody under the age of forty said “ok, gays, no question” leaving the church flabbergasted and impotently furious.
One possible solution is to empower moderates. Moderates don’t really believe in their religion. They hold humanistic ideals independently from their religion, which they project onto it, convincing themselves that’s what it said all along by way of creative exegesis.
Moderate churches often have women clergy, and welcome gays. We will almost certainly never see the end of religion, because it is so perfectly evolved to hook into human psychology, and that’s not going to change significantly any time soon.
What we can potentially do is exert sculpting forces on it, reshaping it into a form which fits better into modern society and causes less problems. This is arguably already happening to American Christianity, as it happened decades earlier to Christianity in the UK.
It’s the same strategy at the core of our efforts to integrate Muslim immigrants. The UK hasn’t had the same success the US has, but then the US has a much smaller Muslim population in general, and we still have a sizable contingent of evangelicals looking for any excuse to go on the attack. Likely that has something to do with why American Islam is less muscular and better behaved on the whole than European Islam.
Figuring out how to calm Muslims the fuck down will perhaps be the biggest challenge for gender and sexual equality in the coming century. The American left has been desperately courting Islam, perhaps reasoning “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” despite Islam being even more right wing, religious and socially conservative than American evangelicals.
Sweden, Norway, Finland et. al. are having a grand old time committing themselves to feminism and equality for gays while simultaneously mass importing homophobic misogynists. Rapidly undoing all the progress they made towards their ideals, but unable to acknowledge it because it’s contrary to the narrative.
Meanwhile in Britain, grooming gangs engaged in the sex trafficking of thousands of underaged girls have so far been uncovered in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Oxford, Banbury, Derby, Bristol, Newcastle, Halifax, Peterborough, Berkhamsted, Norwich, and Manchester. Nearly everyone arrested in connection with these gangs was a Muslim immigrant, predominantly of Pakistani origin.
Fear of appearing racist deterred authorities from investigating these gangs, though they were aware of what was going on. Despite direct quotations from investigators to that effect, apologists denied that was the reason, because it was once again contrary to the narrative. (Note the name of the author).
Will this happen in the US? Are we in for what the UK has been experiencing? Will it get worse, or settle down as the most brazen offenders are imprisoned/deported? We might take instruction from history; many waves of immigration were controversial and turbulent while they were happening, but are a non-issue in the modern day. Italians, for example, or the Irish.
There have been a great many political developments advancing the wealth and power of women, but these measures were voted into place. If the demographics of the voting public shift significantly towards religious conservatism, those measures can just as easily be voted out. We should count ourselves lucky that American Islam and American evangelicals are unwilling to cooperate towards that goal.
Challenges to progress made for women in the past century won’t only come from religious voters however. The #1 beneficiaries of affirmative action are white women. This extends to university admissions, so unsurprisingly women outnumber men among college graduates, and wives are increasingly out-earning their husbands.
This portends social unrest, because even as women grow wealthy and powerful, they still want to marry men who earn more than they do. There’s an obvious problem with that equation. Once affirmative action has evened things out, those who benefit from it naturally won’t want it abolished.
If instead you leave it chugging along, it continues doing what it was designed to: Women get preferential access to better opportunities than are available to men. What we should expect to see, and indeed what’s happened is an ongoing wealth and power transfer from male hands into the hands of women.
Not necessarily a problem in a world where gender roles have also been abolished! I’d be first in line to be a wealthy sugar mama’s house husband. But let’s say you only abolish social expectations of women, while still expecting men to be breadwinners. Before long you’re going to have a lot of broke, despairing men and wealthy but frustrated women, both very lonely.
Sometimes it’s impossible to have it all, and difficult choices need to be made. In this case, do women want easier access to high paying jobs? Or do they want to marry a man with a high paying job? In a perfect world they could all have both. As yet, we don’t live in that world. When resources are limited, for some to win, others must lose.
I see this as a potential future cause of unrest, much as the gender imbalance resulting from the one child policy has been in China, albeit for different reasons. When men can’t find wives, there stops being much in the way of motivation for them to participate in the economy.
While the solution to sexual preference inequality seems potentially straightforward (empower religious moderates) I’m not sure what to do about this one. While there are voices in the media urging women to settle for men who earn less than they do, I doubt if many will listen. The heart wants what it wants, and women are the choosers.
Even women who pride themselves on their advocacy for economic fairness favor a much more ruthless approach to the dating economy. Takeaway? In developed nations at least, impressive strides have been made by women. They’re graduating more, and being hired for quality jobs, to the extent that they’re struggling to find partners of equal or greater status.
It is better to be a woman than it ever has been in history…if you live in a developed country. There are still many places in the world where stuff like reproductive autonomy and basic personal safety remain a distant dream. Even some newly developed nations like China and India (depending upon your criteria) lag significantly behind the west in embracing gender equality.
Solution? Don’t welcome millions of religious conservatives into your country if you’ve just spent a century or more fighting hard won battles for gender equality. You’re liable to undo all of that progress in the span of a generation, making yourself less safe in the process, to say nothing of the safety of your LGBT neighbors.
Empowering progressive religious leaders from behind the scenes may accelerate reform. But then this is much the same strategy of outside interference and playing favorites which the US government made a mess of the middle east with. Insider awareness of organized meddling by outsiders can undermine its intended effect, and this approach has been known to backfire spectacularly.
Or I might be full of shit, even I don’t know when it comes to how gender and religion intersect. Those are two extremely complex topics on their own. Wherever two such tricky subjects overlap, you can’t reasonably expect simple answers. If I had a surefire solution to problems this serious, I wouldn’t be writing Medium articles, I’d be collecting a Nobel.
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5. Lack of a single overwhelming global power able to stop wars
One-world governments have long been a staple of utopian fiction such as Star Trek. It’s the simplest, most obvious solution to war. Simply concentrate all the power into one set of hands, then trust that whoever wields that power is wise, patient, tolerant and benevolent to a fault.
The first problem is that every nation and religion wants to possess that overwhelming power. The second problem is that nobody will accept being ruled over by a power they ideologically disagree with. This is the largest reason why the UN is toothless.
The third problem is that the kind of people who seek after absolute power are typically the last people who ought to possess it. Germany and Russia both aspired to this role in the 20th century and are pretty good demonstrators of this principle. Anybody who lusts after world domination would be a nightmarish ruler to live under.
Religious power plays by different rules than governments. They gain influence by conversion, and aren’t open about their desire for power. There are superficially altruistic reasons why they recruit (to save our poor, hapless souls from Hell), why it’s urgent (the always-imminent eschaton) and why competitors are illegitimate (salvation is exclusive to our religion and denomination).
This is a pretty good way of convincing people to expand your power and influence under the misapprehension that they’re performing a humanitarian service by doing so. But knowing what you know of human nature, is there any reason to expect a single all-powerful planetary government to be anything but hopelessly corrupt?
The naive answer is “yes, but only if my specific religion/political ideology is in control of the world”. This is what every organization wants members to think. That they’re in the only morally pure, perfectly well intentioned movement ever to exist. That they alone have the solution to ending poverty, war, hunger and so on.
By now I hope I’ve also made the case to your satisfaction that any such movement whose solutions rely on fundamentally changing human nature are doomed. Also that any solution requiring 100% of humanity to participate and cooperate is doomed. If your solution to people opting out is gulags or mass graves, you’re hardly alone among the pantheon of history’s bloodthirsty utopians, but we’ve already had quite enough of that by now.
Pixabay (modified)
Conclusion
Does all of this mean improvement is impossible? Hardly. As I pointed out a few times earlier, we live during a period of unprecedented prosperity. Despite covid, despite increasing income inequality. Even if it’s hard to see over the current speed bumps, we’re more or less on the right track and things are objectively better than they ever have been.
History teaches that there’s no safe, reliable way to accelerate the process of improvement that won’t get a lot of people killed, ultimately collapsing in flames and tears. Improvement must happen organically. It’s like taking a huge dump: If you try to force it to go faster, there will be blood.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor did humans come down from the trees or out of the caves overnight. While our shortcomings are disappointing and frustrating, it’s better to make peace with them, because humanity changes at a glacial pace. The same is not true of technology though.
That’s what I personally pin my hopes on. Technology doesn’t obey political trends. Disruptive innovations can come out of seemingly nowhere and totally change the game. Sometimes for the worse (nuclear weapons) but usually for the better (medicine, agriculture, printing, computers, internet, spaceflight, etc.)
It’s a big scary question mark right now whether high tech society is the right path, or if automation will lead to a dead end for everybody currently earning less than six figures. But Star Trek and Elysium aren’t the only two possible outcomes.
At the same time that robots are displacing workers, off-grid technologies are making it increasingly possible to make what you need at home for cheap or free. The cost of solar panels is plummeting. EV development is also rapidly driving down the cost of batteries that can be used for home energy storage.
3D printing is increasingly doing in the home what could only be done in factories before. Home aquaponics is well understood and there exist plentiful communities centered around it that can help you in setting it up. Even homes can be largely 3D printed now.
Perhaps automation seems to lead inexorably to peak wealth inequality because we all assume it will remain centralized. Regular people can’t own mines, power plants, farms, or factories. But we can own aquaponic gardens, 3D printers, solar panels and batteries.
As the price of these technologies continues to drop, the quantity and quality of labor needed to afford them also decreases. As these technologies improve, the possibilities they open up also increase. Imagine for example living in a remote 3D printed cabin on a mountainside somewhere.
You can travel to a nearby community via eVTOL as needed without the use of highways, rail lines or any other public infrastructure. If your eVTOL breaks down you can print replacement parts at home.
You grow all your own food, and trade excess for whatever you don’t grow yourself. You make all your own power from solar with battery for storage, heating and cooling your cabin via a high efficiency heat pump. If there’s moving water on your property, possibly much of your power comes from a micro hydro turbine.
There is little work available, all of which is performed remotely. This isn’t a problem as you don’t need to earn much to sustain your lifestyle, and satellite internet is cheap. You can’t afford much, but there’s also not much you can’t make for yourself anyway.
This is admittedly a humbler life than we might enjoy if somehow we got the whip hand over industrialists, taking collective ownership of every automated mine, farm and factory.
That would, at last, fully decouple human labor from industry. A self-replicating, self-maintaining, self-repairing robotic industrial farming, mining and manufacturing base which would serve as a sort of self-perpetuating human support substrate we could exist, and subsist, on at a standard of living scarcely imaginable now.
But then, imagine how much waste such a society would generate and what it would do to the Earth for every human to live as the wealthiest few do today. This is only to say we probably shouldn’t do this, not that we couldn’t: It may well be possible to achieve a gradual, nonviolent transition to this outcome.
For example, by a scheme of proportional taxation of automated productivity that will pay out to displaced workers. This way, as the population of robots increases and more and more humans are unemployed, the revenue generated from the tax scales along with the number of unemployed persons such that there’s always enough to support the subset of the population that doesn’t work.
This would be incredibly difficult to implement through political channels given the influence the wealthy have over politics around the world however. Many would rather instigate wars and put despots into power before they would allow such a plan to come to fruition.
It also wouldn’t stop people from being shitty and stupid, it’d only remove the material motivations for many of our worst behaviors. There would still be crimes of romantic/sexual jealousy for example. There would still be racism, sexism and religious conflict. But nobody would need to steal in order to eat, nobody would die because they can’t afford medications, and nobody would be homeless.
This is, I think, about the best we can hope to accomplish within human limitations. It’s been said that you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want. Likewise, it’s been said to “do what you can, with what you have, where you are”. What we have to work with here is humanity, barely sapient, mostly hairless upright apes.
We can’t change humans any faster than nature does it without making shameful butchers of ourselves in the attempt. We can change technology very, very quickly though. For better or worse technology has an outsized disruptive influence on society. It has sometimes been a curse, but more often it’s been a blessing.
Overall, nothing has done nearly so much as technology has to improve the average quality of life around the world. Unlike sociopolitical solutions to humanity’s problems, it doesn’t require changing human nature. It doesn’t require total participation and cooperation. It doesn’t require that everybody believe the same things.
To say that the solution to political problems isn’t more politics is the same as saying you can’t change the course of a river using only handfuls of water. The problem you’re trying to solve is also made of water, with the same frustratingly elusive, ever-changing qualities. But you can drop in a stone. You don’t control the water itself but you control the stone, and the water has no choice but to flow around it. With enough stones, you can even divert the river entirely.
What you needed was something from outside the paradigm that’s largely unaffected by it. Also, incidentally, the reason why whoever said “we must fight fire with fire” severely misunderstood how firefighting works. That’s the sort of solution that sounds superficially wise, but can only ever make the problem worse.