this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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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
It's the logical conclusion to "don't do things that negatively affect others". The utopia for people who take that as an axiom, results in a totalitarian state indeed! Plenty of historical and contemporary examples of that happening.
No, that's the end goal of authoritarians. Liberal authoritarians think the perfect system of laws will maximize freedom without affecting the freedom of others, conservative authoritarians think the citizen should serve the state
Both of these are totalitarian dystopias - it dehumanizes people and enshrines the state.
The "your freedom ends where your fist meets my nose" axiom is one axiom, it doesn't describe a society. Libertarians maximize this as the full limit of state involvement, anarchists can maximize this as a guiding principle culturally with no state
As a fantasy, sure. I can see how some members of past "revolutions" might have thought that that's what they're going to do.
But then came reality, and the realisation that you can't vibe everyone into cooperation. There's so many different kinds of people with different goals, life stories and traumas.
Then comes the supression. Which they're doing only for your benefit, so they rationalize.
Yes, the feelings associated with the "let's all vibe" and "they're not vibing and everything is crumbling down" are different. But we have to be intellectually honest and realise as a leads to b, they are the same thing.
If you think you can create a utopia through revolution, you're delusional
A utopia can only be built by genuine buy-in. If it doesn't come from the people, you're just another authoritarian believing you've cracked the code
I don't even think you'd disagree with this from what you've said so far... But can you really not imagine a better world? Can you really not even picture a path where people just are better, without the need for laws or violence?
I get how you might not see a path from where we are to there, but can you not even imagine the best timeline?