Dinhternet

I’ve been read­ing this inter­est­ing series of arti­cles on Over­com­ing Bias about utopias, and how no book ever writ­ten about a utopia actu­ally has a true utopia. They are always some­how flawed. The poster sup­poses that this is because good sto­ries always need con­flict, and so a true utopia would just a very dull and bor­ing book. If some­one wrote a book where every­one was happy all the time and always will be, would you read it?

I know I wouldn’t. I’d be bored out of my mind. OB has another series of posts about “com­plex nov­elty” and the evo­lu­tion­ary impor­tance of bore­dom. It is advan­ta­geous as an indi­vid­ual and as a species for us to become bored with repet­i­tive tasks, and to explore and learn new things. Now imag­ine if a true utopian soci­ety was some­how cre­ated, and we were all happy all the time. Do you think you would get bored? If so, then it isn’t a true utopia. But if not, I feel like we would be tricked some­how. Our brains would need to be altered to no longer seek solu­tions to prob­lems that aren’t there any more.

The whole bit about how “If God is all-powerful, why is there suf­fer­ing in the world?” being because “He wants to make us better/stronger peo­ple” always seemed hokey to me, but maybe there’s some truth to it. I hon­estly don’t think we’d know what do with our­selves if all our prob­lems were solved. Prob­a­bly veg­e­tate, like in the Matrix. And I think we will always have con­flict, at the very least until the prob­lem of finite resources is solved (maybe even after that). And that is a huge hill to climb, since it would prob­a­bly require revers­ing entropy to solve. Which is another story entirely.