Y2K as the catalyst for Utopia

Is there a silver lining to the Year 2000 Crisis? If so, perhaps it is the fact that this disaster may spur a new sense of purpose, similar to the moon race. What should be the goal of this new pursuit? How about:

Elimination of warfare, hunger, poverty, repression and disease. Cease spending on weapons of destruction. Concentrate on restoring the natural environment of Earth and moving human society into space.

Assume for a moment that the world had attained a sustainable peace 100 years ago. Now imagine what the world would be like today if instead of spending the trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons, super tanks, smart bombs, cruise missiles, and advanced fighting aircraft we had concentrated on the above objective. Where would we now be? The answer is: in the future. But because of human greed and stupidity, and the aggressive behavior that is created when greed and stupidity intermingle, we instead find ourselves in the present.

Although its first stages may produce more pain and suffering than in all of the 20th century, Y2K may eventually stimulate a globalism akin to what happens when a city is hit by a smaller scale disaster like a hurricane. In the aftermath of a hurricane, I have experienced a level of cooperation and camaraderie that is really quite inexplicable in normal times. People go out of their way to help other people. Traffic flows relatively freely at intersections that have no signals. There is an underlying cheerfulness. Yes, there is still looting, and fights over bags of ice. But in general, there is a collective consciousness established that is otherwise unobtainable when electric power, running water, telephones and TV are all in working order. It is possible that this behavior can be explained by the fact that folks have no job to report to for a few days so they are idle and bored. Or perhaps it is because they are just anxious to restore their city to the way it was before. Or maybe it's the Hawthorne Effect caused by the outpouring of assistance from neighboring communities (the Hawthorne Effect is the tendency of humans to improve their performance when they are aware it is being studied). But the point is, every country in the world will feel Y2K and its ensuing economic repercussions more or less simultaneously. Will we see a synergy similar to what is generated when a community is confronted with a local disaster?

Currently there are efforts underway to globalize the world's governments and financial systems. Some refer to this as the New World Order, and infer that it is a sinister plot to enslave the world's population. Of course it's possible. But it doesn't have to be our destiny. The future is plastic and is affected by each and every one of us in the decisions we make. A glance at a world history book will reveal the natural progression:

tribe > village > city-state > nation

It is only logical to think that the next stage of Life on Earth will be some form of global community. If it is not, then at the rate that new countries are establishing nuclear and biological weapons, the next stage will likely be the end of Life on Earth.

Will Y2K be the catalyst of Utopia?

-- a (y2k_utopia@hotmail.com), August 06, 1999

Answers

Jon,

You raise a good point about the difficulty of making social/cultural changes that transcend a generation. On the other hand, there's no doubt that parents who have been strongly influenced by an event like the Depression pass on some of their lessons, biases, hopes, and fears to the next generation. But I guess it would have to be a VERY major event (i.e., one in which the crisis itsels lasts for more than a single generation, like the Black Death) before we might see something of a "lasting" impa

-- Ed Yourdon (HumptyDumptyY2K@yourdon.com), August 06, 1999.

Sorry, I *highly* doubt we will ever see any kind of Utopia. There will always be makers, takers, and fakers. People are what they ARE.

Any social scheme which depends for its success on changing human nature will rarely survive the aging of its original, dedicated members. Why? Because, by and large, the next generation doesn't give a s**t what the old folks think and say.

I agree about getting off of this planet. Very much so. But, to make our species, our cultures, sustainable, we must find a way to work with people AS THEY ARE, not as we wish they could be.

Utopia? I'd settle for a system with places for the restless, the non conformist, as well as the careful ones. The ones that will "fit in and get along" in almost any culture. The "keep up with the Jones's".

Inertia applies, in its broadest meaning, to cultures and human nature as well as physics. Most people will change as little as possible to get by. This alone is a good explanation of what we call the DGI and/or DWGI phenomena. "No one else is moving. Why should I stick my neck out?".

Most people always have and always will fall into this category.

-- Jon Williamson (jwilliamson003@sprintmail.com), August 06, 1999.

Utopia is a place where everything is perfect, the laws, the morals and the politics. There never has been and never will be a Utopia on this earth. As a matter of fact, this planet is dystopia and there is no turning back. We will eventually destroy each other, and if anyone survives to start over again, the end will still be the same.

-- bardou (bardou@baloney.com), August 08, 1999.

bardou,

Is that your own personal feelings, or are you following some prophecy? The prophecies that I see say it will turn out OK, but with a much smaller population base. A millennium of peace.

-- Gordon (gpconnolly@aol.com), August 09, 1999.

Gordon: That is my own personal feeling and I don't follow prophecy. Knowing how man is today, I can't see man ever being perfect in everyway, that is to say in his morals, the law, politics, etc. As a matter of fact, there would be no free thinkers because everyone would think alike and in perfect harmony. Would you still have a free will? And what do you do with someone who steps outside of the "utopic" permimeters to excercise his free will? It is man that got us into this mess and I just don't have much faith in people. Utopia is a nice thought though, so we can dream on......

-- bardou (bardou@baloney.com), August 09, 1999.

The movement to forge Utopian societies is not new in American history. In recent history, certainly the 1960s purported to advance utopian communities. The problem, as I see it, is that one man's utopia is another's hell.

To my mind, wars have most often been fought over one group's "manifest destiny" to advance it's ideological view beyond it's current territorial lines. Can we never learn from history?

My vision is directly in opposition to that of another poster calling for centrism. I would call for more localized self-government among small diverse communities of those who hold similar ideologies and agreement on societal regulation of their behaviors. I would hearld back to the concept of the original "social compact."

My utopia would be rather libertarian, agrarian and with as few rules and regulations as possible, a sort of Jeffersonian utopia. Rugged individualism would be the norm. Communalism would not be in evidence except as a natural outgrowth of multi-generational land use. Laws would be based in the common law concept of prohibition of behaviors that pose a real and substantial injury to other human's health, peace or safety. I realize that my utopia might be "hell" for someone else.

Should y2k cause a breakdown in our social fabric, I would hope that centristic global solutions would not prevail. If faced with a choice, I would prefer that recovery from chaos be viewed as an opportunity for a variety of utopian experiments to flourish among societies of those who care to participate.

-- marsh (armstrng@sisqtel.net), August 09, 1999.

I see y2k as an evolutionary "guidance correction" action. It is meant to hone our development by teaching us several important lessons. It seems as no accident that it is occurring now at a time when the Earth is almost at the ecological point of no return.

Human society will recover from y2k, and most likely any other disaster, barring an all out nuclear war or asteroid strike, in which case a new species may emerge. But eventually, the collective intelligence of the planet will figure out how to live in harmony, live in outer space and, possibly thousands of years hence, colonize the solar system, galaxy and universe. In the end, perhaps millions of years from now, we, or our successor beings, will become "godlike". It is in our future. It is the future.

-- a (y2k_utopia@hotmail.com), August 10, 1999.

Wow! I had no idea this forum existed...until now..a very invigorating breath of fresh air!

Anyway, utopias. No, that's not possible. Any community of humans will always have its share of manipulative psychopaths, those who gravitate toward positions of authority and then become instantly corrupted by it. The dark side of human nature precludes utopia.

BUT(!!)

In spite of all that, that's no reason not to TRY to make utopias. Even though they never approach perfection, as societies experiment they evolve. Most of these experiments fail, but some pass on their "memes" to future generations quite successfully.

Thus, I suppose my idea of Utopia is to allow the freedom for people to make any kind of utopia they want. I see globalism as a worthy goal but not in any kind of forced way...not in such a way that anyone has to give up their own natural instincts. My vision for global unity is based on purely anarchic trends that will make this inevitable--not by the barell of a gun--but because we will have associates and dear friends on every continent, linked to us in realtime through cybernetic retinal and aural implants within 500 years.

Some argue that the trend from tribe to city-state to nation state to empire to global unity is a social progression. I disagree. There is something wholly unnatural about life in the nation state. Homo sapiens was subjected to 150,000+ years of mutation and natural selection for life in small, semi-nomadic groups. He hasn't yet "evolved" the proper instincts for rush hour traffic in Manhattan. He does fine enough--most of the time--but he has only about 5,000 years of evolution under his belt for life in an impersonal, fast, and dizzying agriculture/mining/trade habitat.

Thus, I see the future as a time when we will simultaneously be decentralizing the reigns of authority--but at the same time--have unprecedented access to a thriving global culture. We'll be living more similarly to our hunter-gatherer ancestors than now, but we'll be using the state of the art technologies.

-- coprolith (coprolith@rocketship.com), August 13, 1999.