this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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I sometimes wonder what the end state of social progressivism is. Is it something unimaginable, or is it just accepting everyone should be able to live their life how they like if it doesn't affect others?
If I woke up in a utopia, would I be brought to tears by the beauty of it, or would I be the bigoted asshole?
The thing that might be hard for me to accept is certain liberation attitudes around children's rights. I like the idea of children having freedom in the abstract, but I also think kids don't have the capacity to responsibly have the same freedome as adults.
I suppose the issue comes up from the contracts we have created (social and legal contracts).
For example, marriage comes with some rights and benefits. So if you exclude any group from the ability to take advantage of the benefits, you are creating a system where someone is getting screwed and can be discriminated against.
A scenario: a spouse making medical choices for you. If you’re with your partner (in whatever form) and they can’t legally make those decisions, and in some case even be allowed to be near you, then there is an injustice. Then there are taxes, property rights, etc.
The issue in this particular case comes from providing a benefit to a personal relationship. I say get rid of marriage all together.
I mean... Like you said, marriage is a contract. It's an agreement between two people
Why not expand human dignity here? If you want to give spousal rights to your best friend, why does the government get to care that you have a strictly platonic relationship? If you want to make an agreement with more people, all you should have to do is work out the details yourselves
The state shouldn't get an opinion over who we want to trust to make decisions for us or to define who our family is or how it works. They should just be informed when appropriate
In the UK, you can enter a civil partnership with your platonic best friend. There's no legal concept of "consummating" a civil partnership, so you can't annul it for there never having been sex, and it conveys almost all of the legal benefits of a marriage, it just isn't allowed to be a religious ceremony.
Technically, you can already give power of attorney to others, or live with as many people as you want. You can grant access to your bank account to as many people as the bank will let you. I think the main thing you can't reproduce is a tax benefit, basically.
Automatic pensions and inheritance rights come with marriage or civil partnership too.
Don't forget health insurance if you live in a pretend first world country
Yes, I think this a more compelling take
Agreed. Now convincing everyone else….
My personal guess is that while the stated goal of 'do whatever as long as it doesn't affect others' is good, our human biology will fail us in achieving this goal.
I already feel that humans aren't built for the world we made, that we can't handle societies as big and diffused as our current global culture. It breaks our capacity for cooperation and empathy by deliberately abusing the limits we have on caring for too many people or people far away.
Likewise, I think the end state of social progressiveness is going to butt up hard against core biological limits that will constantly try to push some of us towards bigotry due to outdated instincts that worked great when we were small tribes of monkeys, but are extremely destructive and unhelpful to modern human society.
This statement is very frequently used as justification for self-destructive tendencies without coming to the conclusion naturally (i.e. having someone tell you that you can do anything as long as you don't affect others vs figuring it out on your own). It can also lead to belligerence from stupid individuals (eh, we're surrounded by fields - who cares if I shoot my gun in the air?).
I don't disagree with anything else you've said.
Well, the same argument is being used to say what you can and can't do to your body... I'd rather have more accidents than less freedom
Life is never guaranteed. Giving up your freedom makes you feel safer, it doesn't actually make people safer
I don't disagree with you, but at that same note - you should have enough information to know what human beings have done with unchecked freedom.
Ultimately we are all free. We are free to make whatever choices we want, and free to accept the consequences (whether we accept them at the time of the choice or not). Unchecked freedom in the hands of human beings (we have fused atoms) would rip through reality like a fresh razor through paper.
I really, really disagree with that.
You know what seems like it was universal in every ancient culture? Guest rights. Helping people in need. Stewardship over the environment.
Humans default to "humanity vs the world". It's only when things get big, when there's power to be had, that the worst parts of human nature get drawn out
We didn't split the atom because we were too free - it was because people with a lot of power feared losing power. We don't wage war because of freedom... We do it for power and profit of the people at the top
you'd have a hard time adapting, i guess, but after that you'd probably like it.
I think about this from time to time. I think at some point, even if you’re born into it, you run up against some kind of hedonism wall where your human condition doesn’t know what to do with all your choices and lack of a need to do anything to survive. I’m interested in literature that tries to tackle this.
I very much see your point! I think something similar, indeed.
Humans (in general) get energized by "meaning" and "purposes" in life, and if there are none, people get depression. That is possibly a variable that will become significant enough to actually cause a population decline.
I think if you can enjoy life in the absence of pressures or necessities, the future might be wonderful for you.
http://soulism.net/
I think it should just be the latter. We're stuck here having to live a full 70/80+ years, life isn't easy, everyone should be allowed to have some fun and pursue their own happiness, as long as it's not super detrimental to others.
I fear their utopia looks different, because every single thing you do affects others. From your first fart, to your last meal of the day, they'll have an argument why you're doing it wrong and must change your behaviour for the benefit of the group.
The utopia is you're reprogrammed to only engage in activities from the allowed behaviours catalogue. If LLMs can be retrained to behave within the guardrails, why not you?
You make it sound like some authoritarian nightmare, but what you're describing is like... Try not to fart in enclosed places and don't eat on the Metro
I see the confusion. I used that figure of speech to mean "from the moment you wake up, untill you go to sleep".
But like... What you're describing is just culture.
(In most American culture) If you eat kimchi or a tuna fish sandwich for breakfast, people will call you out for being weird. You can talk to your cashier if you like, but if there's a line behind you there's an expectation that you'll wrap it up once you've finished paying. In fact, it's frowned upon to impede work in any way, and people will confront you over it. You don't have to bring back your cart, because consumption and convenience are held above the public interest
Even the way you dress... If you wear a toga, people will approach you to ask why, and will often react negatively if you don't have a reason. Or they might support your widening of cultural norms
Even challenging the culture is done within cultural norms. You can challenge food preconceptions if you acknowledge it's weird first and insist it's actually good. You can dress up as Batman and ask for money, or you can have someone recording you, or signal you're in transit to a place where it would be appropriate... If you go about your normal day as Batman in suburbia, people will respond with actual fear, because you're deviating from the culture instead of challenging it
Every moment of your life is lived in the context of your culture. Culture is the guardrails, and they've always been there. Some are explicitly taught to children, like queue etiquette and punctuality, others are unspoken and learned through interactions with others
Those things exist yes. They're the guidelines.
De guardrails is the law. Even though it's exceptional to walk as Batman, and people respond scared to it, it should be legal. In the socialist utopia that should be illegal, because it affects others.
Um... Then you're not describing a utopia, you're describing a perfect totalitarian state.
It should not be against the law to be rude or dress up as Batman. That's insane. That's the literal end goal of fascism - to give full control of every aspect of society over to the state, and then indoctrinate future generations to be perfect extensions of the state. They just also usually want it to be an ethno-state, but it can also be done through nationalism or ideological purity
In a utopia, laws should be mostly vestigial. You're supposed to fix the root causes of violence by helping people become well adjusted in a high trust post-scarcity society, not perfectly codify acceptable human behavior and crack down on it with stormtroopers
The world is inherently unequal and unfair. We're all born in different bodies with varying abilities and in different circumstances. The world we're born into is one with scarce resources that cannot ever match our infinite desires. What this means is that there is no end state to social progress. There will always be inequality in the world. A world without inequality is a utopia, and utopias will never exist because they're just fantasies.
But perhaps that's not a bad thing. One of the hallmarks that define civilization is inequality. Inequality creates hierarchies, and hierarchies create order. It is through this order that we have been able to organize and mobilize to build the world we live in today. It is because people aren't entirely equal that we have different people specializing in different things to give us our complex modern economies.
In a way, inequality could be seen as a law of nature just like death. It will be something that we can never defeat, but it will always be an issue that we try to solve, or at least avoid making worse. Our disdain for inequality could be an evolutionary trait that helps keeps our primate societies healthier and stronger. If this is the case then inequality is a never ending problem, and social progress will never cease to be. Sometime it'll advance, sometimes it'll regress, but the issue will never be resolved.
If you were to go a time machine and travel another 1000 years into the future. You won't be stepping into a utopia, instead, you'll be stepping into a much more complex and advanced society that will still be facing the same types of challenges we face now. These are also the same challenges that we have faced for thousands of years, throughout all of human history. Perhaps this struggle is just a part of human nature.
We are on track for +2.7C by the end of the century. I think society 1000 years from now will still be trying to scrape its way back up to Renaissance Europe levels of tech and complexity.
The effects of global warming will be catastrophic but it won't affect all countries equally.
You're living in a dream world.
Your nation will either be a source of mass climate refugees or a destination for them. And in the scenarios we're looking at, it's not going to be a few people showing up at borders asking nicely to be let in. Nation states do not lie down and die. It will be nuclear-armed countries such as India and Pakistan demanding habitable space for their people to settle.
We're looking at vast swaths of the planet being rendered uninhabitable to human life. We're looking at countries armed with hydrogen bombs being rendered uninhabitable. The complete annihilation of your people at the hands of lethal wet bulb temps is one of the few cases where fighting a nuclear war can actually be a rational thing. If your entire nation is being rendered unable to support human life, you have nothing to lose by launching a war, however violent, to conquer new territory for your people to survive in.
You have no idea what is coming.
I don't think any of that disproves my assertion that global warming won't affect every country equally. It's demonstably true that places like Australia and Indonesia are going to feel the effects worse.
I'm not saying some countries will be unaffected, just that the impact will initially be concentrated in certain places.
You're using a classic mott-and-bailey fallacy.
You're making a premise that is justifiable, but one that necessarily implies the real point you're trying to make.
Obviously global warming will not affect every place equally. But why would you even bother making such an obvious statement? You might as well be pointing out that the sky is blue. No, you didn't really feel the need to point out such a childishly obvious fact. You pointed out that fact to imply that global warming will be fine for plenty of regions.
You made the point that not all countries would be affected equally because you wanted to imply that some regions would be fine. You didn't state that, but that was the real point you were trying to make. Otherwise, there's no reason to bother bringing up such a trivially obvious point. Obviously nothing in the climate is uniform.
You're doing the absolutely classic mott-and-bailey tactic. You make a true, but trivial and irrelevant premise that no one can refute, but you make it in such a way to imply an argument you really can't justify. Then when it's pointed out that you can't support what your argument is implying, you retreat behind your true but trivial premise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
I wanted to imply that some places wouldn't be reduced to Renaissance levels of technological advancement. There's a middle ground between things being fine and a year zero event.
Edit: Like the examples I gave earlier of Australia and Indonesia will be literally uninhabitable by humans. I don't see how places that are still habitable lose all their progress and become like Mad Max. Or at least I don't think that necessarily follows as a logical conclusion from the fact that global warming is happening.
Edit 2: A global year zero event is one of the possible outcomes but I don't think it's the most likely one. There's always a temptation for people to want to imagine that they are "the last generation", you see it throughout history. This temptation seems to come from people having a hard time conceiving of society progressing after they have died. It's like an egotistical impulse to believe that the world can't continue after you die.