The Utopia Project

Take our 100 best people, not idealized and enlightened people but me, you, our picks for the best hearts and minds we have. Now, we a’re still us, just as we are today. But everything else is gone, gone in a hypothetical flash. We a’re a mid-Western farming community. No one else, no one in the world. No threats, man-made or other, no threats on the horizon. Now. We also have 50 kids. Newborns.
So: how far could we go? Could we create the citizens of a new utopia? Or are human genetics incompatible with the utopias we can imagine? Or, do we carry too much of the system ensconced within us, such that we'd replicate much of it without trying? I tend to be on the optimistic side. But I think there are real unknowns in both those big questions, the genes and our fallen status. And even if you think we could do it, well it wouldn'’t be a simple matter. We'’d have to really decide how. There would be questions, deep and hard questions, like competition and love and property and intelligence and skill and punishment and sex and on and on.

Society's breath

Here's one part of it: We a’re so deeply ensconced in our social roles. The options we see for ourselves seem at least in large part determined by them. This is interpellation in a way, in that society breathes us, brings us into existence to occupy a niche.

But our ability to be so interpellated is the flipside of our great intelligence, sensitivity. (Or is it? Could it be rather that it is that same part we share with lower animals? I think in the end it must be our intellect'’s attempt to deal with that baser part, some interaction between them which produces these sick and twisted realities)

We're able to create our own worlds to occupy, slowly, over generations. That'’s a pretty fucking amazing thing. We can create our own psychological reality. The best the rest of the animal kingdom can do is adjust a minor wrinkle in the physical world, damn a creek or something. We can rewrite the entire thing.

This is the same circling idea, about the myth-makers. They'’re what we need. New pressures to help shape the way our psychological reality develops. Because it always is; cultural evolution is happening. And there are, I think, many possible futures. Evolution can go in lots of directions, it can go towards beautiful and elegant, or it can go towards ironshelled and mean as fuck, scared as fuck.

This is where the battle really is. Lakoff's framing, all that, well it'’s on the right track, I mean they have the scent, but they’re way fucking behind the curve. Framing issues is all well and good but we need to frame reality, need to push it towards grace in heart.

This is also, interesting to arrive through the backdoor, but it is also the same point the Everything Bad is Good for You dude, what is it, Johnson, doesn'’t get. Of course we'’re getting smarter, in some sense or another. But it'’s what smarter. Cuz when you'’re talking evolution, you don'’t have the luxury of thinking smarter means anything like more intelligent.