October 15, 2008

Utopia?

Only do that which you are willing to be open and honest about. How does this stand up as a guide for your actions?

It gives you the freedom to do anything you want. But it also means that if you do something, you have to be ok with other people knowing about it. Already, there are some things you won't do just because you would be ashamed if your friends, parents, etc knew. Furthermore, if you do decide to follow through with a course of action that isn't likely to meet social approval, you have to be willing to defend it in order to continue behaving the way you want without feeling bad.

I think this works as an individual guide within the framework of our society.

It doesn't work if everyone follows it (Kant) because then everyone would be pursuing different individual goals, potentially at the expense of others (so long as they were willing to defend why it was worth it).

I think once you start to think of things in terms of a community, you need to come together as a community and agree on shared values that you'd be willing to fight for. Really small family unit type groups seem ideal for allowing the maximum of expression by associating with like minded people.

I haven't finished thinking about this so I'm not sure it would hold up, but each little family group unit could have a representative that met with neighboring little groups and decided some common codes of conduct as well. And then a representative from that meeting could meet with the representatives from surrounding neighborhoods... etc. It seems like this would be a good form of bottom up government, that protects and negotiates between different peoples own beliefs. In my little group unit, if we saw individual expression as the ideal, we could promote that while still agreeing with the 'community harmony idealists' about a shared value of nonviolent solutions to problems. Does that work?

3 comments:

Dan said...

Congratulations, you've described a philosophy of individualist moral conservatism acting within a representative government.

Call up Pat Robertson, I'm sure he'll be excited about this new and innovative idea.

Jessi Lynch said...

i love that you never think about anything that isn't revolutionary. maybe if you offer alternatives instead of restating arguments sarcastically, we will all eventually catch up to you. ; )

joe said...

have you read Thomas Moore's Utopia Jessi? the community structure you describe has some similarities to your ideas for group representation.