Civilization

What would be some hallmarks of a Utopian civilization?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “If you lived in an advanced-utopian civilization, what would likely be some of the hallmarks of said thriving and freedom loving society?”

On my way to where I am now to undergo a first-time experience that I’m not looking forward to, I had the opportunity to observe a passenger on the bus who prompted me to think about the environment I grew up in.

This person, who appeared somewhat masculine in his maleness, was adorned with a few piercings that were never seen in the backwoods troglodyte village of toxic masculinity I grew up in, but that was not what caught my eye. I’ve seen enough piercings, tattoos and a variety of body decorations now that most of it goes unnoticed.

In this case, his nails first caught my attention, and the colour he had painted on them appeared an aesthetically pleasing burgundy. That’s what prompted me to notice the rest of his presentation.

My cultivated biases assumed unimportant superficial characteristics about this person. Still, upon further glances, I felt them melt away because, beyond the decorations, he appeared like a typical CIS male to me.

I wondered how much of that approach to aesthetics I would have adopted had I been raised in a “more modern” setting.

I never experienced more than passing thoughts about getting an ear pierced or getting some tattoos that I never found the courage to do. Still, I would have if it were not for the rather conservative upbringing I experienced in a low education and highly biased environment that has left me with a lingering self-consciousness of doing so.

Then I arrived at my destination, and while patiently waiting for an appointment (that would consume most of my day but won’t begin for another hour, even though I was expected to arrive two hours before admission), I encountered this question on my notifications feed.

My first thought went to the person I observed and how social expectations would be far less regimented and myopic in a Utopian environment.

Another characteristic I would expect is that my waiting experience to perform a standard procedure would be done at home with far less discomforting advanced prep and greater expediency.

I also read, on my bus trip here, that the UK has been making “anti-cancer injections” available to the public for addressing about fifteen common varieties of cancer. It’s a treatment that appears to function like a vaccine by boosting a body’s immune system and training it to recognize cancer cells, to remove them naturally in their early stages. The article was, however, rather skimpy on detail, so I will research it further in depth when I get home.

(Here we go — my appointment was far shorter than I feared.):

Cancer patients in England to be first in Europe to be offered immunotherapy jab

NHS England » NHS Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad

I think simple remedies for complex medical challenges that we struggle with today would also be another feature of a utopian environment.

Other features of an advanced society to me would include, along with many technological advances for assisting with biological issues, transportation, and the provisioning of various resources like education and access to community administration processes for public engagement, would include access to resources permitting one’s development of a meaningful vocation without being distracted by meeting basic survival challenges.

Whatever interests a person might have would be easy for them to explore without encountering numerous barriers preventing them from developing their interests in ways that engage and benefit the public.

For example, I read about an eleven-year-old girl developing a means of testing for lead contamination in water.

While we can celebrate the innovation and ingenuity demonstrated by a remarkable youngster, we often overlook how such a child would have required access to supports not common to most to have been privileged enough to pursue an interest to such a degree that their idea can save lives.

One of the most destructive limitations we place on human potential is the misanthropic attitude many people display, cultivated by an economic system distorted by toxic competitiveness.

A utopic society would have cleansed our collective psychologies of the many mental health maladies that we’ve inherited from centuries of generational CPTSD. The most potent form of utopic boost to our potential as a species is our ability to support one another while possessing the courage to address the psychological dysfunctionalities that hamper our development.

A utopia would be a humanity free from the burden of many of the toxic aspects of human psychology that are the cause of so much pain and suffering on levels that would be considered outlandish in fiction and a bloody horror show of sociopathic stupidity in real life.

This kind of shit, for example, would not exist in a Utopia because we would have matured enough to acknowledge, first and foremost that this is a treatable medical condition that should disqualify these people from operating in any position of authority. This kind of broken mentality should be considered a socially destructive mental health issue in which the effects are severe enough to warrant mandates for compulsory treatment before being allowed to participate in activities that could be harmful to others.

A Utopia would not be suffering from a mental health pandemic affecting one in five people and resulting in a whopping majority (70%-80%) of families being dysfunctional.

Until we can deal with our mental health issues, however, any form of utopia will remain a pipe dream as we allow our species to be consumed by the chaos created by our psychological dysfunctionalities.

When I witness casual examples of people breaking stereotypes, however, such as a male with burgundy nails, I think that although we may be dragging our asses into maturity as a species, at least we can see some subtle signs of progress.

How can we have infinite growth on a finite planet?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/How-can-we-have-infinite-growth-on-a-finite-planet/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

It’s not possible.

We have two options for maintaining growth, and one isn’t so much about preserving growth as it is about shifting to new growth areas through a lifecycle management strategy.

The (conceptually) simple model (but prohibitively expensive strategy) for unlimited growth is expanding to an extraterrestrial existence where we can justify an ever-expanding population and theoretical market.

This strategy, however, is not as linear as some may want to make it out to be. Sure, movies filmed on Earth will be consumed by lunar, asteroidal, and Martian colonies, theoretically supporting unlimited growth in those niches. Entirely different markets, however, will need to be created to meet the needs of off-planet living.

Massive resources will have to be shifted toward small markets, making products prohibitively expensive in ways that restrict extraterrestrial expansion.

For example, bone density loss is a dramatic medical issue for an off-planet existence. About one to two percent of bone loss occurs monthly in space, whereas that figure applies to an annual bone density loss for people of advanced age on Earth.

That’s a dramatic biological hurdle to overcome and represents a tiny issue in the vast array of issues humans would have to overcome to sustain off-planet colonies. Making matters more complicated is that colonists face different biological challenges in each environment, from asteroids to lunar to Martian to Venusian cloud colonies.

Adaptation to each environment represents significant investments in biological issues, while the simplest solution is to transition humans from biological to mechanical forms. Convert humans into cyborgs.

Suppose people struggle with tattoos and body modifications today. In that case, one can imagine the sociological implications of leaving our humanity behind to live in a desolate environment without a healing embrace of nature.

So much for option one of unlimited growth.

Option two is riding the wave of technological change and managing technology lifecycles. Unlimited market growth would be achieved by pivoting from end-of-cycle industries to emerging industries that supplant them.

It would be like planning an economy around growing an industry that creates old-style typewriters with an expected lifecycle while anticipating the advent of electronic typewriters with a finite lifecycle that anticipates computers, etc., while hopping from one end-of-cycle industry to another emerging sector.

This is problematic for two reasons, one is that it would be impossible to anticipate computers while still at the stage of an Underwood Typewriter. At that stage, anticipating IBM Selectrics might be possible because that’s a linear progression of technology.

The advent of computers, however, was an unpredictable and utterly disruptive technology.

That’s where we’re at with AI. We have no idea where it will take us, nor how its integration into other technologies like robotics will transform the marketplace.

Unpredictability is also a significant issue in the energy sector because we have many options. Many are in the early stages of implementation with evolutionary hurdles to overcome. Many are in a nascent development stage that shows promise but are still not ready for commercial applications at any scale. We also have high hopes for transformative breakthroughs like fusion energy, for which we don’t know when we will achieve viability.

All this makes planning a perpetually growing economy much like lassoing and riding a tornado like a bucking bronco.

The second and more challenging reason this is problematic is that it doesn’t involve logistics but politics. We can see how that dysfunctionality fails to work in today’s world. The fossil fuel industry is well aware of the environmental damage it does, and how much of a threat it is to biological life on this planet. Yet, no significant energy organizations are spearheading incubation efforts to fund alternative energy initiatives.

They all maximize profits with existing (and predictable) methods while offloading risk to smaller operations they can assess for leveraging a predatory appropriation strategy.

They won’t invest in breakthrough technologies until someone else can achieve market success on their initiative.

Taking this risk put Elon Musk on the global radar of being perceived as a real-life Tony Stark with Tesla Motors.

The reality of today’s world is somewhat predictable on a macro scale in that society is undergoing a massive transformation on fundamental levels.

Dark factories are already springing up where all the production work is automated. On-site work like construction is well on its way to being performed by humanoid and other specialized function robots.

Transportation and delivery industries will also be shedding human labour. Stores and shopping malls may continue existing, but fewer humans will be available for assistance while technological solutions replace humans, even at the cashier level. Shoppers will be able to walk into a store because they’re bored and feel like going for a walk to pick up some coffee and snacks from shelves and walk straight out the door with their products in hand as the store sensors record product information and deduct the cost of the products automatically from one’s account.

All necessary physical services will be performed through automation solutions.

This will radically transform the economy in ways where people will create trade relationships for customized products and services on a more minor scale that focus on developing interpersonal relationships rather than supplying generic consumables.

This will become an era of transformative creativity. People will choose to purchase highly unique rather than mass-produced products for market niches that can be addressed through small-scale production processes.

We will transform from a market economy relying on endless growth into one that balances high-volume generic production and customized artisanal products.

We will have more time to focus on social interaction and community development initiatives (which will positively affect our self-governance efforts). Because survival will no longer depend on a servant relationship with an employer, we will see a more egalitarian society based on a much more valid basis of merit than the subjective favouritism characterizing today’s corrupt autocratic corporate culture.

The notion of infinite growth will naturally recede from priority status to an antiquated model of unsustainable development corroding our social fabric.

Infinite growth will eventually become irrelevant, while sustainability and balance will become priority values.

What do you think of Luigi Mangione?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://luigimangione.quora.com/What-do-you-think-of-Luigi-Mangione-1“

This question cannot separate the person from the act that introduced the person to the world. The person and the act are now inseparable. No one can answer this question independently from knowing why he is known.

What people think of Luigi Mangione will forever be the act superimposed upon a subjectively constructed image of him.

The only means by which one can now render an objective description of him is by offering up statistical data and facts about his life. Who he is as a person is now beyond anyone’s comprehension. No one can know what motivates his existence or what comprises the subjective state of Luigi Mangione beyond surmising a person who has experienced a breaking point in their life in which it was better, in his mind, to do the unthinkable for most of the rest of us than to continue an invisible march into a nightmare he could no longer endure.

No one can know what that feels like unless they’ve been forced to walk in similar shoes.

One conclusion that can be drawn about his personhood is that he demonstrated an ability to sacrifice himself to act on behalf of thousands of faceless victims forgotten in the march of greed.

Along with losing the ability to think of Luigi Mangione as a being separate from his act, neither can we separate the notion of the tens of thousands of victims lost to us every year in service to the God of profit. We can no longer forget how easy it is for many among us to justify murder if it means pocketing riches and obtaining a life of material wealth for oneself.

None of us can separate Brian Thompson’s callous extinguishing of lives from an algorithm to be rewarded for it in service to the monsters who refuse to honour the social contract and a local thug who robs a convenience store for a drug fix without admitting to being a sociopathic monster.

The reality between the two scenarios is that the local thug is less of a monster than the billionaires who think nothing of the lives they extinguish while offering up the lie that there is nothing they can do about it.

None possess the courage or the integrity to distinguish between ability and desire.

Every insurance billionaire can choose otherwise, but they don’t and hide behind the lie that the protocol they devised to protect their material luxuries is immutable and outside their control.

What I think about Luigi Mangioni for sacrificing his life to show us all our ugliness in a black mirror of a broken society is that he should not have been forced to put all the rest of us to such severe shame, and even more so is the pity that we still can’t grasp how evil our world has become.

Is peace always possible?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Is-peace-always-possible/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

Of course, peace is always possible. The challenge is making it desirable enough for all parties to commit to making it possible.

Peace is otherwise impossible when one or more parties refuse to accept compromise as the only path toward achieving any form of peace, whether temporary or lasting.

We have to accept the reality that some people are so broken they would choose to burn the world to ashes rather than give up their power or relinquish their power designs, and so that means the only path to peace is through the destruction of those types. Sadly and ironically, the argument of an escalation of conflict as the only path to peace is validated by the entrenchment of those who endorse imposition as their means of achieving peace through subjugation.

For some people, reason as a path to peace is rejected in favour of catering to hubris. Sometimes, people are so confident in their ability to overpower those they believe entitled to victimize that they will adamantly reject compromise even upon their final breath.

Peace requires giving up at least some of one’s power, while conflict escalations are almost always about exercising, protecting, or expanding power.

It is easy to become cynical in a world filled with so much violence that there has never been a period in human history where wars have not been waged, at least somewhere on the planet. It’s easy to think humans are an irreparably self-destructive species, but that’s a perceptual choice.

The reality is that although our species has never been “war-free,” humanity has predominately existed in a state of peace. Most people are comfortable with enough personal power to live peaceful lives.

However, a small percentage of humans are unsatisfied with that level of personal security and require much more power to quell their insecurities. Their antics are far more successful at capturing public attention because conflict is like a drug that enraptures people’s imaginations, while peace is boring. With this skewed mindset, it’s easy to believe peace is impossible.

To make peace possible on a universal (or global) level, we must address the fundamental elements giving rise to conflict, which begin with addressing factors that undermine psychological health. It’s a massive task that is conceptually simple but logistically impossible today. Whether we will mature enough as a species to achieve optimal mental health sufficiently to mitigate the aggravating factors for conflict escalation is a toss-up. We are currently on a trajectory toward extreme aggravation and conflict escalation that could dramatically reshape the human landscape.

It isn’t very comforting to contemplate how we might survive our challenges over the next few decades. If we can maintain most of the trappings of modern democratic society, our experiences will encourage systems that can address our psychological issues in healthier ways.

I want to believe that once we emerge from the other end of the dark tunnel of regression we have entered, we will be much closer to reaching a new bar for global peace.