Eutopia

I deliberately chose the term eutopia, not utopia, as eutopia translates to “good place” in Greek while utopia translates to “no-place”. I don’t use the term in the sense of creating a “perfect” place as I think that creates the wrong image. I do use the term to take a strong stance on creating a better world, one free from unnecessary suffering, and to communicate my belief that it’s possible to create such a world. This doesn’t mean all suffering will be removed but it does mean that it will be drastically reduced. It means we will do a minimum amount of “work” that is required to satisfy at least the first two levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (Physiological, Safety). A popular depiction can be found in the Star Trek universe where man-kind has progressed to a post scarcity economy of equality and sustainability where people spend their time exploring space and, well, everything (their creativity, all that life has to offer). I think this last bit is the focus of my thinking about the world. It should be a place where everyone has the opportunity to explore what makes us unique as humans, our enourmous capacity for imagination and creativity.

As idealistic as this sounds, some people already live in a eutopia, it’s just not evenly distributed yet. As long as we manage to not kill ourselves off, we’ll get there with improvements to education, technology, and science.

Quotes

"A fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work, for creative inquiry, for free creation without the arbitrary limiting effects of coercive institutions. A decent society should maximize the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realized." - Noam Chomsky

It's a little cheeky of me to quote Chomsky and refer to Skinner's Walden Two given their history. Skinner did himself, and his field, a great diservice by not addressing Chomsky appropriately. Ironically I think Skinner was on to something in terms of one way to achieve a "decent society" that maxmizes the possibilities for human creativity in his book Walden Two (Amazon, Wikipedia).

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