Soliciting Your Meta Opinions

37 thoughts on Soliciting Your Meta Opinions

1. (your Maia link is missing a colon after http, so it doesn’t work) Feel free to delete this after you fix it 🙂

2. Haha! I got it. Thank you. I’ll figure out the html stuff yet!

3. My idea of a utopia? Well my goals include general equal rights amongst all people regardless of class, creed, race, sexual orientation and identification, etc, etc along with balance in all realms of life personal, political, and in the media. I mean to me I’d like to live in a world where when a child gets up in the morning their biggest worry is whether or not their going to play in the park with their friends or read a book with their family members.

   A world where our choices while reflecting our individuality but are not criticized for falling or not falling into some pre-definition of being masculine, feminine or sexual and all people have the right to find happiness with their bodies and their sexuality within the limits of informed consent.

4. I was in an interesting discussion over the weekend about collectivism in anarchist feminism, which was sparked when someone pointed out that we were all assuming a very socially-centred form of anarchism and pointed at libertarians as a counter-example. That was revealing to me because I tend to equate anarchist politics with consent (rather than simply non-coercion), and well, let’s not talk about libertarians.

   So my utopia of the day is firmly egalitarian and has (by US standards) a socialist government based on more of a spokescouncil and diffused leadership model than representative democracy. So universal health care, child care, unemployment support and so on. Also a pile of Green stuff, both social policy and the wider environmental solutions. I think some of the ways the green parties work internally are useful models for bigger society.

   I like to think we can get there from here, but like Maia my starting point is in Aotearoa which I realise is not like the US. Diffusing both ownership and power through conscious decentralisation and listening to people is a good start. What I’m missing is a good way to scale up decision making. I used to groups reaching a critical size then stalling, not so much because the processes we have cannot deal with the numbers, but because at some point the people in the group can’t keep doing the process – our ability to deal with derails, mind changing and distractions doesn’t scale. I quite like spokescouncils (which are more or less representative consensus), and some aspects of representative government – the idea of “experts at making decisions” appeals to me, but I’d like more experiments with things like citizens juries to see if we can sidestep elected representatives.

   This is very government-focused because that’s where my head is right now. I’d also like more acceptance of diversity/difference in society, but I see that as flowing from the stuff above as much as from being the change.

5. My ideal world would be a twisted hellscape ruled by the strong and fueled by the weak. Where the fires of perdition lick the barefeet of hapless captives, as eight tongued devils shriek the screams of the dying into the inked night of hell.

   Before a vast dais would stand the throne of the devil-king and on top of that throne, slicked with the blood of innocent virgins, would stand his unholy lordship. Shrouded in darkness, wrapped in mystery, bedecked in the riches of countless fallen empires both alien and terrestrial, his figure would radiate menace – his very existence an unspeakable wound in the fabric of the universe.

   In his cloven hands he would hold a guitar – no mere axe, but a slick instrument of violent death, wasting plague, and wicked licks. Behind him a banner would rise into the sulphurous skies of the netherworld. The banner would ripple in the stifling volcanic breeze, its lettering surrounded by forgotten infernal glyphs.

   It would read:

   “SUPERFUCKED!”

   On a more serious note:
   My ideal world would actually have a functioning form of karma in it.

   Also, it would probably include a lot of nonjudgemental, easygoing people.

   In an ideal world, I (and other people) would have as much time, money, and resources to experiment and develop our passions rather than having to work soulless, irrelevant jobs.

6. Thanks! I should probably say that discussion at Low End Theory of some of the limits of describing exploitation have really resonated with me, and to talk explicitly about those sorts of politics is part of my response.

   I struggle with this question though. I find utopias problematic – I believe in a much more radical form of democracy than we have at the moment. And therefore it is impossible to describe the goal – as part of the goal is that I would only be one voice in determining what that world would look like, which would have equal weighting, but only equal weighting, with everyone else. This renders individual utopias slightly meaningless.

   What I can say, and I think this implies, is that I believe that the change to bring that about has to come through collective resistance. That’s what

   If I was going to be more explicit – capitalism is not consistent with liberation. I absolutely think that workers need to control the means of production (I am pretty much as close to a Marxist as you can be when you’re too lazy to read Marx), but also that work needs to be redefined so that our idea of productive is not so narrow, and other forms of work are recognised and valued. I think different types of exploitation and oppression operate in very different ways, but they uphold each other. An injury to one is an injury to all, your struggle is my struggle, I cannot be liberated while you are in chains – and so on.

   In the spirit of making explicit differences – ‘meta’ really doesn’t resonate with me a description of the relationship between the beliefs I hold and my analysis of individual circumstances. Rather than metaphors of what is above – I would use metaphors of what is below. I would talk about the core, or the fundamental, or a place to stand. I’m also very fond of the observation that radical means going to the ‘root of’ – which again echos the importance of where we stand.

7. Which if you think about it, presupposes that there is a goal at the end of this social justice journey, a utopia we’re working towards*.

   […]

   * Someone in the blogosphere made this exact point in the last month but I can’t for the life of me remember who – someone want to help me out?

   Possibly me? I had a post on progressive versus adaptive change with bonus rambling in the comments about radical change.

   See, one of the things we’ve been debating around my house for, oh, the last decade, is what a just world would look like.

   My original thoughts on this are referenced in my post on John Rawls’ veil of ignorance (which abbyjean explains more fully in the related link there), which basically boiled down to the idea that I’m not much aiming for a utopia, but a place where things aren’t stratified and hierarchicalized – bad stuff just happens because it does and no one is getting extra rations of it because of social disparities and differential privilege.

   But I’ve always had an issue with that approach because A) highly improbable, and B) it seems to assume something rather sterile and clinical and too damned simple about the whole thing. I’m a stats buff who’s prone to reductionism sometimes, so I always want to be wary about that. I thought the veil of ignorance was an elegant solution to that (basically behave as if true randomness prevails, even if it doesn’t), but just today Flavia came out with a post on moving from social justice to social wellbeing that blew my mind a little and made me rethink the whole “justice as the balancing of the scales” approach I’ve been taking, shining a bit of light on a more holistic and realistically complex approach. I’m still digesting this paradigm shift, but it reminds me of Shoshie’s love post, other radical love posts that I’ve read in the past, and the power of my beloved Rachel Naomi Remen essay on serving versus helping and fixing (which I talked a little bit more about in yet another self-referencing link.

   (To get any more shamelessly self-promoting at this point, I’d have to take my top off.)

   It’s a great question – I’m really excited to see what other commenters think.

8. Also in that first link on progressive versus adaptive changed I outlined more of my ideas on social justice (social wellbeing?) being a process, not an end-state, because I think often even the positive changes we make can often have negative outcomes as well, or new challenges and issues can arise as the landscape changes, so it’s a worthwhile but (on a macro level) never-ending fight.

9. I’m not going to answer the meta-question, as much as I like it.

   Instead, I’m going to say that thinking about this is why feminist science fiction is important to me. If you can’t imagine it, it’s a lot harder to get there.

   Also, Kim Stanley Robinson has some very good things to say about Utopia, why it’s not boring, and why people dismiss it, in the PM Press chapbook of “The Wild Shore.” My copy is out on loan, or I would quote.

10. Ack, the Flavia link didn’t happen! It’s here at: Moving away from Social Justice towards Social Wellbeing

11. YES! I thought it was you, Jadey, but I couldn’t find the quote I was looking for. Now that you’ve supplied the link:

    Progressive change assumes that there is an ideal outcome and that the purpose of change is to, hopefully, get ever closer to that end. Conversely, adaptive change assumes that change is responsive to context, rather than directed at a specific goal, and that the state of change itself is not necessarily (or desirably) finite.

12. I think that to work on achieving social justice with an eye towards a utopia is to set yourself up for perpetual disappointment.

    I think that a perfect world or society is impossible, but one which is much better than today’s is possible; a society in which almost all of the population believes in social justice as a goal because it is embedded in the cultural fabric of the society, and while there may be significant disagreement over what social justice requires, these disagreements occur in a context where what benefits people as individuals and groups are the guiding principles, not self-interest and prejudice.

    However, I think it is extremely unlikely that we will see a society like this come to be on anything approaching a national scale in our lifetime. I think that many different major problems, both global and national (environmental issues, war, extreme poverty, non-democratic government, economic inequality, ethnic conflict, etc.), will in combination hinder the cultural transformation necessary. It could happen within the lifetime of some alive today, but it is unlikely and impossible to predict.

    Still, the work done today is likely to be necessary for society to ever get there. I believe in a quote by Martin Luther King: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

13. @Darque,

    Too funny! Now I want someone to create a new manga around the newest antihero, Superfucked…

14. I do not believe in utopia either.

    I think the best we can hope for is a society that is loosely speaking organized as western society today – a democratic, regulated market economy. It is a thing of many compromises, but is probably the best theoretical model since I do not believe that for example anarchism can work in practice.

    What I would hope will change for the better:

    1. Material security
    Technology will allow us to build a rich, environmentally sound society. No one will go hungry or know true poverty. (And universal health care for example will of course be available. That should already be the case in any decent society that can afford it).

    2. A better educated and kinder public
    Social awareness and also general education will have to improve. A representative democracy only works well when you have an informed and engaged electorate. Also, once people understand each other I believe inter group relations will improve, since most people are basically decent.

15. I was going to say something, but more often than not discussing differing political theories in our community tends to lead to divisiveness more often than not, perhaps because they make assumptions about the feminist/queer community that simply aren’t true.

16. This is a tough question for me because I feel like kind of an orphan in the world of theories and I don’t have a clear view of a Utopia that I could honestly say I didn’t know was a lie. I grew up in a socialist house, but I’d lost any respect for socialism by the time I left high school. My own experiences make me deeply distrustful of anyone who says they’re doing something for someone else’s own good and I have virtually no faith in the ability of governments to be anything other than a blunt instrument of coercive violence.

    For a long time that made me a libertarian, and a lot of libertarian ideas are still pretty dear to me, but the sad reality is that the libertarian worldview ultimately ends up replacing an ugly and abusive state with an ugly and abusive network of corporations and small tyrants. I’m pretty sure I’d do OK in a system like that (I’m white, well educated, good at reading people, physically strong, charismatic, a good shot, and can be scarily manipulative) but I’m also positive I wouldn’t want to live in a world like that.

    Because of this I’ve grappled with the question of what my worldview is and what kind of a world I’d like to see. I suppose the most honest answer is that I can’t say what would be good, only whats fucked. I think building utopias is a loser’s game because someone will always come along and throw a monkey wrench into our plans. Instead, I like to work from a few basic, nonnegotiable principles and see what world ends up happening as a result. I don’t really care what the systems look like so long as the things I value about the human experience are respected. I think a radical view of individual rights is necessary: freedom of speech, religion, association, self defense, absolute bodily sovereignty, privacy, freedom from government intrusion into private life and belongings, property rights so that people can be truly independent if they so choose. At the same time I want to see an educational system that doesn’t teach kids procedures and rote but rather instills curiosity, interest, and deep skepticism. Finally I’d like to see the government in the role of referee, working not necessarily towards control or protection but fair play, transparency, and the maintenance of public utilities and social safety nets. For me the goal should be to give people as much freedom and opportunity as possible with as little restriction as is possible to restrain the handful of people who cannot be trusted not to prey on one another.

    I’m not sure what that world would look like, but I’m pretty sure I’d be happy to live in it.

17. The only utopia I can think of is the one where all of the humans suddenly die and every other form of life breathes a sigh of relief and gets on with evolving.

18. My utopia is a world governed by love. Really simple.

    However, I don’t think you really get anywhere without getting to the messy and imperfect stuff, and you need need NEED concrete goals. I can’t begin to express how frustrated I am with the lack of concrete goals in most progressive circles. We’re so idealistic we talk ourselves out of any possible goal, because it’s not perfect. Which, of course. OF COURSE. That is how it is. Fucking get over it and start helping people!

    Anyway.

    So my super ultra long-term utopia is a world governed by love, and I try not to do anything that seems like it would make that impossible (like hating people). But my ultra long-term utopia is a social system in which power and resources are democratically distributed, and power structures are clear and agreed-upon, rather than implicit. And of course, where suffering is minimized and things that make the world richer, like art and stuff, are supported. It’s hard to get to specific about how that world would be, because we’re so far from it. So my long-term utopia is probably just to implement more of the types of structures/governance/policies that have been shown to improve quality of life–so, basically, make the world more like Norway and Sweden.

    In the real world, I usually just pick a thing that seems like it would make life better for people, and try to make that happen. What with all the unintended consequences of everything, I just focus on something really clear. That’s why anti-rape activism is the direction I focused on for so long.

19. I call myself a failbertarian. I’m distrustful of all large organizations, which means the government of course, but also corporations.

    I think as many decisions as possible should be put into the hands of the individual person involved, which is one of the reasons I support cooperatives. I support far more government regulation of corporations than currently happens, especially environmental, and strong unions for all workers, along with a stronger social safety net.

    I believe in firm protection of individual rights, especially free speech (“I despise what you say but I defend to the death your right to say it”). Bodily autonomy should be a sacred right; no one should question anything someone does with their body that doesn’t harm anyone else. I think animals have rights as well– specifically, the right not to suffer unnecessary pain and to the fulfillment of their nature as much as possible.

    Specifically from a gender point of view, I call myself a gender egalitarian, a feminist and a masculist, depending on the context. I think gender roles are coercive and stupid and the sooner people can feel free to be masculine, feminine, both or neither as suits them, the better.

20. Short version: Human societies engage in a constant struggle over the priority of social bonds or individual acheivement because of the human desires for both power and connection. Utopia isn’t possible. The best we can do is create institutions that de-emphasize power and emphasize connection. The tighter our social bonds the less likely we are to exercise the power we have – individually or collectively – against each other. Or at least that is my hope.

21. I don’t really have much faith in democracy. In a pure democracy, there’d still be slavery, getting an abortion would be punishable by death, and Christianity would be the state religion. (Note: I’m American, natch!) Maybe democracy is possible when at least half of your voting population accepts the basic humanity and dignity of all people but we’re not there yet.

    I describe myself as “socially libertarian, economically socialist” which means I’d prefer a Scandinavian-style cradle to grave welfare state but I’m also fiercely individualist and can’t deal with the sort of community building I associate with communal-style living. I believe in using technology to our benefit; there is no reason why, in the 21st century, people should have to work 40+ hour weeks doing make-work. In my utopia we would all work only a few hours a week but most work would be meaningful. Let machines run stores, answer phones, clean up after us. I believe that, assuming a better/cheaper fuel source than oil can be found, a post-scarcity economy is within our grasp in the next few centuries providing total economic equality and comfort for everyone on Earth. In this utopia where machines do most of the work and we’re all the benefit of a decent standard of living, there would hopefully be less reason to oppress others, although of course it will still happen. But with more free time on our hands, maybe we can actually take the time to learn about other people instead of being so exhausted from making ends meet that we fall into old monkey-like survival behavior, every ape for herself.

    I think we also have to learn to be content with an economy that is not growing, but static. Why is it such a bad thing to do as well as your parents, assuming their standard of living (which in this utopia, is quite good) is okay? I think that the rapid technological rise of the last two centuries have led us to believe that it’s not okay unless you’re exponentially getting richer, healthier, living longer, are more plugged-in. But what is more likely to happen is that things reach a certain plateau and then level off, and that is as it should be. It’s a lot easier to relax on a plateau than a cliff, after all.

    Also, high-speed rail everywhere.

22. Yes, Debbie, that’s just what I was thinking. One of my favorite books ever is The Dispossessed by Ursula le Guin. The book takes place in a system of two planets/moons. One of these is very similar to earth of the 60s and 70s: two countries dominate, one is capitalist, the other pseudo-Marxist. The other planet was colonized 200 years ago by anarchists from the first planet and managed to maintain an anarchist system in the environmentally hostile planet. The protagonist is a physicist from this planet who decides to visit the capitalist planet, something that has been taboo for the last two centuries.

    Anyway, even though its clear that the capitalist planet is way way worse, it also becomes clear to the reader that the anarchist planet is also imperfect: people are imperfect and fell easily into thinking that since they established this anarchist system, it needed no more improvement. One of the main points the protagonist tries to make then is that the Revolution is ongoing:

    The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.

    So yeah, I really like the view that 1. We should view the revolution as something that is also inside us and 2. We should think of it is as an ongoing continuously present process with an aim to improve, not just bring about an end goal.

    /geekery

23. Also, I should mention this is one of the reasons le Guin subtitled the book “An ambiguous utopia”.

24. The question reminds me of John Mortimer reflecting on the problem of evil. In his own life, it ended up being a stumbling block keeping him from religion (although he was an Atheist for Christ, at least at some point). His character Rumpole occasionally indulges in the same musing to arrive at the conclusion that a world without evil would not only be rather dull, but that it would include no employment for the constabulary, the judiciary, or even the humble Old Bailey hack. The toast Rumpole offers on multiple occasions to: The Criminals of England! is a sincere one.

    As for the question, I don’t think I let myself think that big. I’m not the Compleat Holmesian, but there is enough Sherlock in me that I question the utility of having a big world view taking up house room in my thoughts (possibly because there are so many things I ought to forget but can’t). Maybe I’ll come to one once I accomplish enough of the little goals.

25. I think we as a species are totally screwed for reasons I won’t get into at length but which can be boiled down to: we are selfish and greedy animals more then we are noble and selfless animals. I don’t buy into any One True Way or any perfect system; to me there is no utopia out there that’s not a dystopia. I try to be a decent human being because I want to feel decent about myself, and because I’d like the lives of people on Earth, alive right now to be better. Sure I’d like things to be better for future generations (adequate food, no poverty, no class warfare, renewable resources, sustainable lifestyles, social justice, civil liberties, etc) rather then doooooomed but I have a strong sense that where it all ends up is totally out of my hands. I’m a tiny cog in a huge machine soon to be pulled out of the machine. I recycle, I have a child, and I do a little activism on issues that hit particularly close to home, but that’s as far as I am poking at the future. Even thinking about fixing the world’s many, many problems feels too big for me, overwhelming and exhausting. Sorry to be defeatist. What doesn’t feel like it’s out of my hands is trying to live in a way that is kind to myself and the people whose lives I touch, in my real life and within the internets. If I have a goal, it’s humble, maybe pitifully so, but I want there to be less pain in the world, right now. I would argue that you do that by being sensitive to the pain of others and kind to your fellow humans, by giving them basic respect, freedom and choice, and personal agency (most times the first is the only one I have it in my power to offer, the others are where activism comes in). In my philosophy there’s not much more to it. Be kind and try to take a little bit of suffering out of the world every day, or if that’s too ambitious, then try whenever you have the opportunity, which once you’re looking you may find is more often then you think. It’ll still suck, and I still think we’re fucked, but the world could suck a little bit less for someone because of what you do.

26. I would just like to second what Erica, Ruthi and Sandy said. Especially Ruthi; I love the Dispossessed. 🙂

27. I don’t believe in the concept of a utopia, because a utopia would be perfect for everyone and we all know that even those of us interested in social change can’t agree on perfect, let alone the rest of the world.

    Instead I would like to see a world that is fairer and most balanced, where everyone can do what they’re skilled at and enjoy doing while making a living at it. Where we don’t have to play “who needs it more” because we can meet the needs of everyone. Where people like me aren’t constantly sidelined simply because we’re not a majority.

28. Can I just say…you guys are awesome. I love all that I’m learning here.

29. we are selfish and greedy animals more then we are noble and selfless animals.

    So are all animals. We’re run by pleasure, we are creatures of desire and vision. Some of us are monsters and some of us are saints but failing to live up to ideals is a deeply human trait. Hell, having ideals to fall short of in the first place is what makes us great, its what drives us to grow and evolve.

    The world is a terrible, ugly place filled with terrible, ugly human beings who do terrible, ugly things to one another for terrible, ugly reasons. Thats a given, thats our base state. But we get better. We’re more just than we were three generations ago, just as we were more just three generations ago than we were 20 generations before that. We put human beings on the moon until it became boring. We split the atom. We’ve nearly eradicated diseases like Polio and Smallpox. A disease like HIV was a death sentence 30 years ago, now its manageable. A lot of people cannot afford the drugs to manage it but we have created them. They are there, lack of access is a problem of logistics which is well within our power as a species to work out. We’ve pushed back horror after horror and injustice after injustice at a rate marginally faster than we’ve created new kinds of inhumanity. We’ve moved forward. We’ve done what we could. Do we do good all the time? Hell no, maybe not even most of the time, but we’re greedy and pleasure seeking and selfish and we’re never happy with the way things are because we’re capable of imagining more than we have and that sometimes makes us band together and do astonishing things.

    Sure, as a species we suck. But we have the potential to suck less. Maybe we even have the potential to be great.

30. I think that religion, by its very nature, strives for a Utopia. Or, at the very least, it dangles the prospect of Heaven/Afterlife in front of those who live unselfishly. But one must first sacrifice the ego, the self, for the sake of the whole and that’s always made some people uncomfortable.

    I used to be more critical of the behavior of people, but the older I get, the more I see people in the midst of youthful mistakes. We all have a process to go through to find ourselves and I’m less inclined to be scathingly condemnatory.

31. I have no idea what a truly just world would look like. I believe it’s unattainable, but not only that, to a certain extent, it shouldn’t be attained.

    This is a very American Christian worldview, but I believe struggle makes us better people. I believe the clash of ideals between good people is good and inevitable for both of them.

    In my Utopia, everyone *tries*. No one slacks or refuses to care or makes pithy statements about how EVERYONE is at fault for racism and we should hug and it will be okay. Everyone knows and we all work towards making our society, community, and ourselves places free of pain and bigotry.

32. The person who made these points recently (as of two weeks ago or so) was s.e. smith in a post at Tiger Beatdown.

    If I also recall correctly they put a post up yesterday on a similar topic as well.

33. (changed my usual posting name as I see that another commenter uses “Jen.” Don’t want to get us mixed up).

    I’d just like to see a world where everyone can make their own choices. That would mean that there’s no -isms (sexism, racism, ableism, etc.) to force or coerce them. Those choices would have consequences, naturally. You couldn’t go out and murder someone, no matter who it was, without going to jail for life.

    That’s what I always think when I see some kind of debate come up. I always ask myself, “Is this giving or taking away people’s right to make choices in their lives?” It’s how I “converted” from pro-life to pro-choice. I certainly don’t like abortion, but I know the limits of my understanding and know that I can’t just make a choice for millions of women–I don’t have the capacity. They do. And I would like the right to make the right choice for me, if I became pregnant unexpectedly.

    It’s scary for the high-ups in Washington to hear, but the unwashed masses are capable of making choices. And they should be allowed to.

34. Back in 2009, Amber Rhea asked rhetorically what a communist society would look like, and since I think a great deal of Marx and Engels’ work (possibly Engels more than Marx, in fact), I gave some thoughts about what might be involved and gave a description of an average day of someone living in one possible outcome. Those would probably be as close to my answer on “what would Utopia look like?” as anything else:

    Ordinary Commies

    Mark’s Day in Commieland

35. Those choices would have consequences, naturally. You couldn’t go out and murder someone, no matter who it was, without going to jail for life.

    Those consequences, however, are not natural. They’re artificial, the product of a society which makes very specific rules in order to restrict the choices of individuals in specific ways. In fact, your idea of natural consequences displays a lot of artificial values where you might find a lot of disagreement. One is that all human life has value and that the taking of a life is unjust. I’d disagree with that pretty strongly. I don’t think there would be anything particularly unjust about, say, the premeditated murder of the man who raped me when I was a child. I certainly wouldn’t have any moral qualms about putting an end to him, even after all these years.

    Another value embedded in your statement is the idea of a Prison Industrial Complex being a necessary and central activity of government designed to hold people who have committed crimes in order to punish or contain them. To use the example of killing the man who raped me, were I to kill him in your utopia I’d be quite unlikely to reoffend. Life in prison, or any time at all, then becomes about punishment for a crime against the authority of society. You’re talking about substantial State authority and a State monopoly on violence. That leads to some pretty significant restrictions on the choices available to people and opens up a lot of doors for tyranny and oppression.

    Not that having laws against murder isn’t vitally necessary to a working society. Those kinds of laws are absolutely necessary, but I think we ought to think through the values which inform such laws and the ways in which policy is likely to play out in the wild. If our ultimate goal is freedom, we have to think about how enforcing that freedom might undermine it.

36. To quote an earlier poster: “Democracy is okay only as long as people agree with me.” Oh sorry is that not what you meant? Because its logically identical to what you said.
    Also a lot of people are talking about natural things and animals fulfilling their nature. Does that mean prey animals deserve to be eaten by carnivores? Then what are animal rights? Humans deserve to eat animals then cause we are omnivores. This kind of contradiction is pretty amusing.
    Utopia is impossible. We have evolved to be competitive. There will always be discrimination and people will always want what they can’t have. Humans exist on a bell curve of capability. In a society with equality of opportunity, you will still have winners and losers. Losers will fall into poverty.
    Society implies norms and restrictions. People who claim to want to free us from cultural expectations are lying to themselves. They just want cultural expectations to follow their own desires.
    Its great that you want everyone to be happy, but if you are infusing the system you want to exist with your “personal logically inconsistent off the walls cracked in the walls and supports ideology” roughly 50% of people will not be living in utopia. No one ever wants to admit that their personal view of the world is both massively flawed, and unacceptable by a majority of other people. Not to mention that some humans are just more capable of producing goods and services that other people want. But that is just the last ditch reason, the other reasons have it covered.

37. I’ve never been a big fan of democracy. I remember high school pretty well and as a care provider I’ve been involved in discussions where human rights were put up to a vote. I don’t think the mob is especially good at working anything out other than how they’re going to slap around people who are not in the majority and, sometimes, how they’re going to slap around people who those with influence have convinced them are bad. I think a good society isn’t going to based around the sentiment of the majority but upon specific, hard, nearly absolute restrictions on the powers that government may claim.

    Take human sexuality. I’m pretty sure you could get a majority of the population to agree that the government shouldn’t regulate oral, vaginal, or anal sex between consenting adults. The problem with that, though, is that even such an agreement would end up leaving a lot of people out in the cold. If you really want to make human sexuality free you need to restrict the government from being able to regulate sexual behavior between consenting adults regardless of what reason the people or their duly elected representatives might have for restricting who/how people fuck. That covers gay, straight, and bi. It also covers monogamous couples and poly groups. It covers people who like to use their mouths, or their hands, or their anuses. It covers people who are into kinks that most people don’t enjoy or that some people find dangerous. It also covers people who don’t want to have sex by making consent a prerequisite, thus allowing the government to prosecute rape. You have to assume that, whatever the system, the State is likely to interfere anywhere it isn’t prohibited from interfering because the State is made up of people and people are, as a rule, nosey and obnoxious.

    Of course its all going to come down to my values. Of course I want a society that reflects my values. That what we all want, its all anyone can want. One of my values is that I believe that cultural norms and restrictions should be few, far between, and always rooted in preventing us from preying upon one another. Thats my core. I think any good solution is going to involve a lot of people working out what their cores are and then getting together and working out how to make these different values work together towards something better. Not something perfect, but something better.

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