Your Ideal Society/Utopia

HughFreakingDillon

Been thinking for some time that the Europeans, specifically the Nords, get it right. This sound like a utopia to me. 

https://www.cnn.com/travel/pagan-traditions-sweden-midsummer-festival/index.html

What is your idea of a utopia?

Spunkie

Plato's Republic,
Sir Thomas More, Utopia

brianlux

HughFreakingDillon said:

Been thinking for some time that the Europeans, specifically the Nords, get it right. This sound like a utopia to me. 

https://www.cnn.com/travel/pagan-traditions-sweden-midsummer-festival/index.html

What is your idea of a utopia?

Great thread idea and interesting article, thanks!

I wouldn't be able to adapt easily if at all to what I see as the ultimate utopia (and who today would?), but I would say the closest thing to a utopia on earth that includes humans happened a long, long time ago:  Pre-agricultural times.  Most strife in human societies, especially war, which is centered around competition for resources as well as religious conflicts, evolved right along with agriculture.  

Read, for example, Malcolm Margolin's The Ohlone Way.  There was no written history among these peoples before Europeans arrived, but some of the earliest Spanish settlers to California recorded enough of what they saw early on such that some 300 later Margolin was able to piece together a pretty good picture of what life was like for these hunter-gatherer people.  They lived a very much mostly peaceful hunter-gatherer existence and got along just fine with other visiting tribes.  From other things I've read, I get the impression the same was true for other hunter-gather people around the world.

Humans giving up their hunter-gatherer way of life led to the evolution of slave and master, war, bureaucracy, nationalism, true-believer religions, and strife, which became quite the norm rather than the rare event.

Going back to those roots is highly unlikely, even after the collapse of current civilization.  In terms of a more feasible utopian society, I think we would need to end the notions of nation and state, re-group in small numbers of people whose homes are based on geographic bioregions rather than artificial lines on a map.  Truly civilized humans would evolve as smaller clusters of people who live with the attributes early anarchist thinkers envisioned in which they suggested bands of localized people characterized who share their cultures and good with neighboring bands of people who live a similar life style.  These people would be characterized by what Edward Abbey described as "a form of human society in which the primary values are openness, diversity, tolerance, personal liberty, reason"*,

*Edward Abbey, One Life at a Time, Please, p 179 
Abbey wrote a lot about his concept of anarchy which was based closely on the writing and thinking of early anarchists, especially William Godwin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

Spunkie

Excellent response, Bri !

brianlux

Spunkie said:

Excellent response, Bri !

Thanks!  You can be in my tribe, lol!