Generation Utopia

Introduction

The goal of this project is to look at what the most important ingredients are to build a better world and to put these ingredients into a sort of recipe or formula with the minimum amount of factors that lead to the maximum amount of progress. That means we need a goal (Utopia) and a direction along which we can build a plan, or a logic, that unifies our actions as much as possible.

The question is how to find such a plan that follows this most direct route and where we even want to go, i.e. what constitutes a better, or ideal, world.

The starting point (and even the end point itself) to answer these questions is what you want, what you value, and what makes you happy. Of course, not just you, but everybody, thus the sum of what we all 7.7 billion people want and value. That might sound unrealistic, but an approximation is possible. And this is the only really useful goal to have – everything else is just a sub-goal.

The main challenge here is that all of us have divergent opinions about what a better world would look like or what we want for ourselves. Therefore, we tend to pull into all different directions instead of aligning towards a strategy that would be most useful to all of us. Thus, we end up having conversations about thousands of ideas and viewpoints when we talk about improving the world or our lives, e.g. about how to grow the economy, taxation or data protection. The problem with only talking about these individual topics at a time is that they are just about 0.1% of the whole picture.

Why not have one conversation about maximizing the 100%? We could boil the countless opinions and ideas down to an essence that unites and aligns them all as well as giving us priorities.

The common denominator to get to this essence would be to minimize suffering and maximize happiness for people – the basic guiding principle for a modern humanist society – although the challenge lies in defining precisely what that actually means. I believe we can get pretty close or at least close enough.

Ask yourself what you want most in life. Maybe it’s working in that dream job or just living a secluded life in the woods. Of course, it’s many other things, too. Now let’s assume, hypothetically, that we could ask every single person on this planet and build a massive data set of what the things are we value and thus what a better, or even ideal world (Utopia), would look like.

If we did this, we would get the sum of what all of us want. It would be a long list of things, with the most important things at the top. While such an undertaking is virtually impossible I think we can get good enough estimates, because for the most part we all share relatively few key things that we value.

Many of these things are universal like living in peace and the way you want without hurting anybody else; having access to good health care; working in a job you enjoy; living in a nice house or flat; having time for your hobbies and doing what you love; a satisfying social life; and a happy family perhaps. Whether small or big, virtually everything we could think of has one thing in common: The more progress we make overall the more likely you are to get what you want, live how you want etc. Progress in turn is defined as those things that make our lives better (a).

It’s important to clarify here that more progress doesn’t mean that we pollute the planet more and the rich just get richer – this is a common misconception I often hear. It is of course part of progress to also ensure a higher level of equality, to foster sustainability, to fight pollution and extreme poverty. These things are all top priorities for most people on the planet either directly or indirectly. Therefore, they’re part of progress. So it is really rather simple and not all that complicated. We can agree for the most part what a better world is (ideally a “Utopia”) and that sets a great goal to work towards.

There are also rather obvious limits to getting everybody what they want, e.g. not everybody can have their own island.

And with every advantage comes a disadvantage, e.g. with more smart phones cyber bullying increases or with more consumption pollution goes up. We can, however, fight these disadvantages along the way (pick-up variables). In fact, we can fight them better as we make more progress. Now things get interesting.

Let’s take all these two-dimensional boxes of the things that we value or consider good and merge them into one really big, two-dimensional, surface. Imagine that’s the surface of a balloon, and it makes a powerful point.

I propose that because we have the maximization of the quality of life, or in terms of the metaphor the expansion of the surface of the balloon, as one goal we can focus on one action to reach that goal, which is how to blow more air into that balloon. That one thing is in a different dimension, in a third dimension so to speak. It’s like “killing billions of birds with one stone”.

This is why I’m calling for progress, for building a better world, and not just for solving this problem or that or a single topic. To make this balloon bigger is what we have to focus on, not on tiny areas on the surface of the balloon. Another metaphor I regularly use is that of a cake. We have to focus on making the cake bigger, not just on tiny individual pieces of the cake or how to allocate the pieces.

I think we can all agree on building a better world – without starving children, better health care, where people can fulfill their dreams, etc. And the first step in building a better world is to imagine what it would look like (Utopia). This applies even to you. You can be the very start of this process. We could take almost every single person as “the starting point” and the result will be very similar.

Even if you don’t care about anything else apart from making your own piece of the cake bigger, not even about starving children (an extreme case) or climate change, but just your own career or hobbies, etc.; then this logic still holds 100%. To make the cake bigger by the largest possible amount implies that every single person’s piece of cake gets bigger. You see? That’s why maximizing progress is the most valuable thing we can do, for anybody. Improving the world as much as possible is really just the logical extension of your own daily, constant job to make your own life as enjoyable as possible. If progress leads to pollution, we can solve it. If progress leads to inequality, we can solve it, too. Poor people won’t get a bigger piece of the cake if we keep the cake the same size and climate change is more likely to be solved in a society that is more advanced.

To talk about any individual problem in the world is not the best starting point to make the world a better place. We have to start with an approximation of the sum of what we all want and consider better lives, because the plan and actions that result from this will have the most positive effect. And thus the cycle closes, because this plan or formula, which I call the “unifying theory for the advancement of human civilization”, will actually be the most effective in making our lives better (the end/goal) if it is based on maximizing our overall quality of life (the start).

 

Footnotes:

a) After all, virtually nobody would actually want to go back on the spectrum of progress and suddenly make 10% less money for the exact same job; get 10% less advanced health care; live with a 10% higher crime rate etc.