RE: Defining Utopia: Introduction

I'm so glad that you are here! A thinking person! Yay!

I think we have and can experience true utopia here and you're correct that there's always a balance. I think a good comparison would be a traditional hunter gatherer based society versus a civilized one.

I'm typed out for the day but will just touch on this. Civilized people think that the hunger/gatherers were constantly bashing each other's heads in but in reality, there was/is much less violence in their cultures overall than in any civilized cultures. The difference though is perception. In civilized cultures, infanticide is seen as murder where in hunter gatherer cultures, it's seen as a simple reset. They see a fight to the death over a stolen goat to be barbaric even though it's a great way to keep the psycho population down.

In order to avoid long term violence and suffering, the hunter gatherers may kill a deformed baby or bash a thief in the head with a rock. In civilized culture, the baby will be given drugs and crutches, hopefully allowing it to grow and breed, likely creating more like it that need civilization to survive and the psychopath will be punished, probably contributing to the psychopathy, then released back into the population. In the hunter gatherer world, as in Nature, the violence and suffering is abrupt and complete where in the civilized society, the violence and suffering drags out over years, or happens in a disassociated way, like through war. There's always going to be violence and suffering but I'd prefer mine to be easily understood and visible rather than structural and vague.

Anyway, I've been researching and experiencing different lifestyles for many years with the goal of finding the lifestyle that gives one the most freedom without causing harm to others or the environment. The conclusion I've come to, and the life I live now, is one of a modern hunter gatherer, a neomad. I use Nature and the waste of civilization to live in a way that allows me to move, think, and work freely. I gave up the crutches of civilization(except for glasses and internet and I'm healing my eyes and hoping to develop/join a decentralized meshnet someday) and am now frequently called superhuman due to the strength and adaptability that I've gained from giving up the supposed comforts of civilization that are actually crutches. I really believe that the reason ancient humans were able to survive multiple mass extinction events was that their culture evolved around a direct interaction with Nature and her rules. The further we move away from that direct interaction, the more suffering our species goes through and the closer we come to extinction.

I look forward to your future posts and your book. I'm writing one too and have thought about posting it here, not because I think it will be a popular topic here, just because I like the idea of it being preserved on the block chain.