On the Rise and Fall of an American Utopia | Hacker News Reader

On the Rise and Fall of an American Utopia

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57 pointssamclemens31 comments

From the article: "Today, thinking grandly about the future is regarded as a sin in and of itself. Calling a proposal “utopian” is among the more routine slurs on Capitol Hill."

Yes. There's a political mindset that the "free market" determines the future. This is a relatively new concept. From 1851 to 1970, there were frequent World Fairs, heavily supported by industry, showing utopian visions of the future. Expo '70 in Osaka was the last of the great fairs. World fairs continue; Expo 2015 in Milan, with a food theme, closed last October, if anybody cares. But they do not reflect national or corporate plans for a better future.

We have more productive resources than ever in the developed world, but no collective vision of what to do with them.

Sure we do. Many major tech companies provide us extremely long term utopian visions of what to expect.

Uber's vision is robotic transportation on demand, unmarred by corrupt regulators.

Amazon's vision is global centrally planned logistics, bringing goods to the consumer efficiently.

Alibaba's vision is a world where global B2B sales are easy and efficient.

This may not be promoted in a "world's fair" venue, but many corporations operating in semi-free markets have grand plans for a better future.

As for "national" (I assume you mean government) plans, we do seem to lack those. The most we ever get are grand plans to throw money around and hope for the best via the magic of multipliers.

It has nothing to do with the free market. The reason people don't trust utopians is they tend to leave big piles of bodies in their wake.

That's a little unfair to utopians.

I think that what happens is that people only listen to calls for utopia when they are discontent. This discontent is used by ambitious characters to take power, frequently in the name of utopia.

Free market proponents are frequently utopians themselves.

While you make a valid point, one of the major problems with utopian visions is they offer an infinite good, so they give cover to commit anything up to infinite evil. I think offering paradise throws our moral calculations out of whack, which is one reason they do seem to lead to large numbers of casualties.

What exactly do you mean by "the free market"?

The first thing we need to do is reject the myth of the free market. There is no free market. It's never worked. There is no existing free market in the world and no one appreciates the consequences of it.

A free market would equate to anarchy and very few want that even its proponents.

A free market doesn't mean anarchy. Like all freedoms, economic freedom is a range. In practice, the closer we are to the "free" side, the better things work.

Americans have a healthy distrust of collective utopian visions after seeing how well that worked out for Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, for China in the 1950s and 1960s, for Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, etc.

My family and I attended Expo 67 in Montreal, and although it was a good time, it did not have any salient effects on the life aspirations or political beliefs of anyone in my family.

US eugenics programs continued into the 1960s-1970s.

I'm not sure their small scale is sufficient reason to write them out of history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

It's interesting to examine A Brave New World in the context of a world where there were active programs (across the world) aimed at making better men. It seems horrifying to chemically stunt a fetus, but the book was written in a reality where compulsory sterilization was being carried out over at the asylum.

I always read that section of brave new world as being a satire of the then current society and it's social classes. Basically the poor live in deprived circumstances and so geow up stunted compared with better fed and nurtured kids from other backgrounds.

Surely it's not a coincidence that they were stunted via alcohol, rather than random scary chemical X.

Though so many other people seem to not see this interpretation, I've started to wonder if I've just invented it.

Huxley speaks his mind later on:

http://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/

It doesn't really support the idea. I think that is an interesting way to look at it (and even if he wasn't intending it to be satirical, it was a response to the times he lived in).

We didn't have to wait until the 1930s. Utopian communes in the US were pretty common after the civil war until early in the 20th century.

Good read. It certainly resonated with some of my own existential angst about modern society, and I was vaguely aware of this period in history, but I really like Jenning's take that there's so much to learn from these, like social experiments done in miniature. Another part of me believes that these experiments are probably worth doing again, this time using technology (particularly computers) to help organize things. Indeed, my own naive personal utopia would involve living in a nice place with individual apartments and a communal kitchen, day-care, and daily meditation/yoga. It would be cool if we all worked together too, perhaps as a software company.

Note that this is an excerpt from a recently published book, "Paradise Now: The store of American Utopianism! http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?keyword=Paradise+Now%3A+Th...

That does sound cool and things like that have been tried in the past.

The traditional type of problems seem to be (human nature being what it is) that the guru in charge of the yoga studio proclaims he is the second coming of Jesus Christ and everyone needs to give him all their money and the persons in charge of day care start kiddie diddling. And it's a damn shame these type of things don't seem to work out so well.

Why would you need communal kitchen?

Because the labor of cooking for 100 people isn't 100x the labor needed to cook for one. In grad school I lived in cooperative housing where one day every other week I had to help cook the evening meal for everyone else and just got to eat the other days. It was far more efficient than cooking every day for myself and far cheaper than restaurants.

And what if you like to eat healthy but the other people like to eat lots of meat and processed food? Communes are great if nobody has mutually exclusive preferences

We had a vegetarian and a meat entree choice at each meal and the meals were fairly balanced. If there was anything to complain about it was that the food tended to be not highly spiced in order to reach the common denominator. But we had hot sauces and the like so that people could spice things up if they wanted.

In practice, you tend to have people of like-mind coming together and actually syncing preferences closer over time.

It's been very efficient in any communal setting I've been in.

Sounds like you're hung up on a trivially solved problem for some reason.

What's the trivial solution?

Talk with your roommates or make your own food if you're a picky eater.

I suppose he miss explaining histories around a fire after a day of hunting in the wildness.

There are something alienating in the way we live in big cities. We miss the palaeolithic.

Oddly enough, when I lived in more rural/suburban settings, I never really encountered anything I'd consider communal or primal/"paleolithic" but when I moved to a bigger city, I found many more ways to address those desires.

Even if it's just having a corner bar where neighbors stop in for a meal or a beer in the evenings or getting together with nearby friends on various nights for board games or cookouts, I see a lot more community and shared activities. Much of it is only enabled by the proximity of urban life where the need to drive over to meet up is minimal or nonexistent. When I lived in the "boonies", any gathering had to be a lot more scheduled since you had to account for driving.

> We miss the palaeolithic.

Speak for yourself. All I see is forced interaction with people that are around you for reasons that have nothing to do with your choice to spend time with them.

Except in the paleolithic these people would be your extended family, the friends you grew up with, etc. And because of the cultural homogeneity of such societies, you would get along better with them than people get along with their families today.

In the modern context, these would be people you selected.

Google used to be like this when you were allowed to sleep there. Now only the apartment part is missing.

> my own naive personal utopia

Seriously what prevents likeminded people from doing exactly the same today?

I think there are plenty of people living in communal housing on some level or another. In my city I've met several who have shared larger townhouses with several bedrooms and shared living space (the simplest would just be looked at as having several roommates I guess) or large warehouse/loft spaces with similar arrangements.

I don't know of any full apartment buildings like this though. I guess the main issue is the one that comes up often enough with the smaller groups I've run across: stability. The more people you have, the quicker the odds of "turnover" go up with people moving in and out. Adding to this is the sense of ownership or control that tends to keep people living in any given place. If you feel like it's really your home, then you want to stick around but the more people split "ownership" of common resources, the less each individual feels it's their home.

I think on some level everyone wants to make their home the way they prefer and I guess the apartment building idea would be good for this. You have enough individual space to fulfill the desire to have your own setup but you share the parts that make sense to share.

I guess my question is where the line is between just good neighbors on a block who share some activities/resources and housemates in a big building when defining a potential community or collective.

I think there are so many degrees of community that there's not really a set point at which it becomes a collective endeavor. If you go by just living in the same structural building, then there are certainly plenty of examples right now. All you really need is a building where residents all have some level of agreement on things to be shared and contributed to.

The flip side is that the only real way to ensure it happens is to buy the actual building and only rent apartments/sell condos to people who agree to the arrangement. If you don't have a replacement for someone who is moving, can you afford the vacancy while you look for one? If residents own their own condo/unit, can you compel them to only sell to someone who would follow the "house rules"?

I can see why these things tend to be more along the lines of lucky accidents (neighbors who all choose to contribute to some degree) than more formalized arrangements.

One simple, ideal way for my utopia to really happen would be to have a wealthy patron who would be a benevolent dictator who own's the land and the building, and has ultimate responsibility for keeping the lights on, etc. The benefit to him would be the same benefit as to us all: to live simply, peacefully, among people who are striving for some level of moral perfection. Key to this would be a) sharing values, and b) having a minimum level of success with those values that your presence would not be disruptive.

Yoga and meditation tacitly imply the kinds of values I mean: morality, concentration, wisdom (actually, the 3 parts of the Noble Path of Buddhism). Part b comes from my experience: I have met many people (myself included) who believe in the path but find it difficult to stay on it. I suspect that it is far, far easier to walk the path among others with the same stated goal, and that would be the main thrust of such an experiment.

A benevolent dictator would solve the problems inherent in determining who should stay, who should go, and why. I'm less concerned about malicious people than about well-meaning people who are, through no fault of their own, disruptive because they cannot control their own behavior. Any group can survive a certain amount of this; but how much? When is the threshold reached?

Of course, benevolent dictators are hard to find - and of course, people change, so a BDFL my slowly morph into something different. One possibility is to make the BDFL a computer program, one that is revised according to certain stringent rules involving consensus. The ideal program would be extremely passive, pushing gently here and there, sometimes in quite unexpected ways, to correct patterns that it predicts will yield a terrible outcome if left unchecked. I think such a thing is possible, but may be outside of the realm of possibility as of yet, since it requires such complete modeling of personality.

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