define your perfect society....

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preyer

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even if it's science or magick based, what constitutes an ideal, but realistic, society in your stories?

is nudity common to where if a woman wanted to mow the grass without a shirt on people wouldn't even look twice at her?

do people own guns?

what's the crime rate like? is there crime? what type of penal system, if any (remember, be realistic), is there?

is there capital punishment? what's the consequences for a convicted rapist? is there a jury or a panel of judges or something else?

do people smoke? do drugs?

is a sexual orgy considered vulgar, illegal, acceptable?

are there public executions?

do people eat meat or have their entire daily nutritional intake done some other way, like a pill or spell?

how many social classes/castes are there? is there even a poor class in the perfect world?

does marriage still survive? still allowed only one spouse? (particularly in fantasy.)

what kind of gov't exists? democracy, monarchy, theocracy? socialized or capitalistic?

what the necessity of maintaining a military? do they use it?

how are radically dissenting views handled?

do they drink alcohol?

in a perfect society where murder happens once every ten years, how likely is the police force liable to find the killer? is there a police force?

are people ideally suited in your perfect world more towards an urban, rural, or mixed setting?

does it take a village to raise a child or just two caring parents?

how racially diverse is the perfect world? everyone about even, or so intermingled there's only one blended race?

is there religion in the perfect world? (particularly sci-fi.)

just curious as to what a 'perfect' sci-fi/fantasy world is realistically composed of.
 

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Well shoot, if I tell you then why would you buy the book? :poke:
 

Zane Curtis

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Let's see...

preyer said:
is nudity common to where if a woman wanted to mow the grass without a shirt on people wouldn't even look twice at her?

Hmm. I've always thought there is something truly bizarre about our society's urge to legislate what people wear (or not, as the case may be). Why is there such a law as indecent exposure? And why do people get so worked up about women who breastfeed in public? Bizarre. But there are three good reasons I can think of why people should wear clothes most of the time: (1) climate -- if frostbite won't get you, then melanomas will; (2) hygiene -- if everyone went nude, I dont think I'd ever want to sit on a seat on public transport ever again; (3) consideration for others -- most of the time you just don't want to have to deal with people's dangly bits all over the place, and some people you don't want to see naked ever.

do people own guns?

By and large, no. People in rural areas, and people who shoot targets for sport may have a legitimate reason to have guns, but most people don't. Personal protection is a load of hogwash. Packing a gun doesn't make you one tiny bit safer; it's just a feel-good substititute for the lack of any substantial effort to make communities safer.

what's the crime rate like? is there crime? what type of penal system, if any (remember, be realistic), is there?

Prison populations would be minimal. Sentencing people to prison would be an absolute last resort, in cases where it's clear that the only effective thing to do is remove an offender from society altogether. The whole notion of prisons as "punishment centers" would be done away with. Vengeance is not a proper goal for the judiciary of a civilized country. The money saved from doing away with all those prison places would go to preventive programs: better social services, better mental health care, and a good social safety net. The only way to truly lower the crime rate is to get people out of the cycle of poverty that breeds cynicism and criminality.

is there capital punishment?

Absolutely not. A civilized society does not sanction violence against its own citizens.

do people smoke? do drugs?

No, they don't. It's not because there is any possibility of them being thrown in jail for doing so, but because they are well educated about matters of public health (and everything else -- why didn't you include education in this little survey?). Public health programs would offer incentives for people to quit smoking. And by the way, the healthcare system would be well within its rights to do so, because it would be funded by the taxpayers, and preventable illnesses would be considered an unacceptable burden on the public purse.

is a sexual orgy considered vulgar, illegal, acceptable?

What consenting adults do behind closed doors would be nobody else's business. But in general, it would probably be considered irresponsible, given that its a high-risk behaviour (both emotionally and in terms of public health).

are there public executions?

See above. No civilized society sanctions violence against its own citizens.

do people eat meat or have their entire daily nutritional intake done some other way, like a pill or spell?

People would eat meat. As with any other business in this ideal society, abattoirs would be sensibly regulated and frequently inspected, so that every citizen can sit down to his steak and chips secure in the knowledge that the animal did not unduly suffer, and the pasturelands were not overgrazed to the point of causing environmental damage.

how many social classes/castes are there? is there even a poor class in the perfect world?

It's inevitable that some people in a society will be incapable of looking after themselves. It's the duty of a society to care for these people, so that they don't become an even greater burden. It's cheaper to provide basic subsistence to people in the community than it is to keep them in prison. It's cheaper to put people through school than through the legal system.

does marriage still survive? still allowed only one spouse? (particularly in fantasy.)

Marraige will still survive as the formal expression of commitment between two people. Otherwise, the details are unimportant.

what kind of gov't exists? democracy, monarchy, theocracy? socialized or capitalistic?

The government would be a socialised democracy -- one where the country is fairly evenly split between the public and private sector. The private sector would be subject to sensible regulation and couldn't rely on much government handouts and gladhanding (like so many big corporations do these days). The public sector would run on a non-profit basis (or subsidised by the taxpayer, where necessary), and would concentrate on providing essential services and infrastructure. It would do this either at cost, or in the case of healthcare and education, for free (i.e. fully subsidized from public funds).

Politics would become a profession in its own right, requiring its own degrees, internships, professional standards, and so on. No longer would it be what rich and influential people do when they want to get richer and more influential. It would be related more to the civil service than private business, so there would be no conflict of interest for politicians in their capacity as regulators. Voting would be compulsory (it's a duty, not a right), and based on a preferential voting system. Ballots would be pieces of paper with pencil marks on them. Recounts in closely fought contests would be automatic. The legal system would be common law based rather than constitutionally based, and there would be a strict seperation between politics and the judiciary (because it's the federal court's job to hold politicians to account).

what the necessity of maintaining a military? do they use it?

The necessity lies in border protection, fulfilling a countries obligations to UN missions, and so forth. Defence R&D, such as it is, would be focussed mostly on improving the efficiency of the military; e.g. effective and robust lo-tech gear would be favoured over hi-tech gadgetry. On current showing, it would not be based much on American methodology.

how are radically dissenting views handled?

People would shout the idiots down, if they had any sense at all. A good democracy relies on a well-informed public and a robust public debate -- not on pandering to extremists.

do they drink alcohol?

I already answered this.

in a perfect society where murder happens once every ten years, how likely is the police force liable to find the killer? is there a police force?

I find it impossible to speculate here -- I don't have the hard data.

are people ideally suited in your perfect world more towards an urban, rural, or mixed setting?

A viable society will have a good mix of both. In a way, the provision of services to rural communities is why you need a strong public sector. Private enterprise won't do it.

does it take a village to raise a child or just two caring parents?

Children are members of their society, the same as anyone else, and they should be socialised accordingly. In practice, this is going to mean that school carricula may have subjects that parents of certain persuasions won't agree with. Tough luck. Children are not personal possessions that you can treat as you choose.

how racially diverse is the perfect world?

I'd say not much, because there would be no barriers to interracial relationships. Any racial diversity that existed would fade within a few generations.

is there religion in the perfect world? (particularly sci-fi.)

No. It has been replaced by the striving after community, art, meaning, and what Socrates would have called "the examined life".

just curious as to what a 'perfect' sci-fi/fantasy world is realistically composed of.

You don't want a perfect world in a work of fiction, only the potential for a perfect world that your characters can strive after -- always desiring, never quite achieving. That's the nature of the human condition.
 

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The perfect world is the one I'm living in at the moment. It could be all of those things listed above or it could be almost none of them. It changes according to the story that is being told to me by my characters which happens to be the world I'm living in at the moment. That's about as close as I can come to describing my perfect world, sorry.
 

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Why clothes? Why prisons?

Actually, it's a matter of economics. The economic systems that are doing best are those that provide the most jobs. People, particularly merchants and those individuals who see an economic opportunity, will opt for those things that create jobs.

A system that permits a wide range of clothing, but requires it under most circumstances, will employ more people than one that must only provide a single style for men and another for women and certainly even more than a society that doesn't require any clothing since most people will then treat the money they would have spent for clothing and its maintenance as discretionary funds.

Similarly, a society will see advantages in giving out numerous sentences to those who break the laws so that more jobs will be created while simultaneously creating an underclass that can be put to work doing menial tasks. The more people convicted, the more prisons that are needed. That means more staffing.

If there are no more wars, countries will cling to the need for military forces because those can be used in emergencies caused by natural disasters while giving employment to a sizable segment of the population. Even unemployment creates employment for others to administer the various programs. Similarly, there are no real incentives for health agencies to ever fully eradicate diseases and such since those would put them completely out of business.

So, evaluate most of those ideas and ideals with economics and sometimes a different answer will appear.
 

Julian Black

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preyer said:
even if it's science or magick based, what constitutes an ideal, but realistic, society in your stories?

...just curious as to what a 'perfect' sci-fi/fantasy world is realistically composed of.

For the sake of a story, an "ideal, realistic" society is the one that will let that story be told convincingly, and I think this goes for all kinds of fiction, not just fantasy and SF.

That story may best be set in a pre-industrial village society that bases its livelihood on subsistence fishing, has a gender-based division of labor, and is organized into clans where class status and descent is traced through the mother.

Or it could be set on a luxury space colony orbiting above a nearly-uninhabitable Earth, where technology has eliminated the need for human servants and the shades of status among the idle-rich residents are narrower and more exacting.

There are certain themes you could explore in both settings--abuses of power, mutual obligation, vice vs. virtue, humans' effects on the natural environment. You could even tell the same types of stories--love stories, coming-of-age tales, even mysteries--but you couldn't tell the same stories.

The elite caste in the fishing village still has to perform intensive manual labor to survive, it still has to cooperate with those of lower castes, and as part of its high status it must periodically redistribute wealth to those of the lower castes in order to maintain social harmony. The isolated elites in the space colony, however, are freed from work by technology. There is no underclass that needs appeasing. The residents are isolated from both nature and society beyond their own elite circle.

Both societies have completely different sets of assumptions, based on their environment and the technology available to them to deal with that environment. Individuals may fight against some of those assumptions, but how they do so will still be rooted in other aspects of their respective cultures.

My inner anthropologist is starting to run wild, here, so I'll leave off. But my short answer is still that the "perfect" SF/fantasy world is the one in which your story is most plausible.
 

preyer

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hey, let your anthropologic tendacies run amok. :) it's really a thing that behooves us to be interested in. a writer who's not interested in people, well, hm, ah... lol. what can you say about that?

some of the perfect society methods i agree with, some i don't. it's interesting to me to get other perspectives. of course, i encourage adding to that list that i came up with rather on the fly.

it's good to point out economic realities. does your perfect society really on money? barter? both, neither, some third option?

part of what things boil down to is a society's rights/free will versus what the gov't/society imposes on them. compulsory voting, to me, is about as far removed from a 'perfect' society's machinations as is mandatory military service. but that's *my* version of a perfect society, where the least amount of requirements is forced on people.

what about pornography? allowed?

abortion? since this ties in so closely to religion, if your society didn't have religion, wouldn't it follow that abortion would be available? if so, is that a healthcare issue that taxpayers are forced to pay for? there's that economics thing again, heh heh.

i wish it were easy to shout down idiots. if you're like me, though, you feel the opinion of the masses tends to be less than accurate, to put it mildly. you run the risk of being wrong because a lot of other people are wrong, too. it creates a 'might makes right' kind of situation, no?

what about violent sports like football and boxing? banned? i mean, it's pretty unlikely that people will ever eshew action and heroes, especially in a fantasy setting. i mean, you can't your 'real' society sitting around and reading philosophy all day.

and what about education? should it be the three 'R's, or should your teacher teach the children that homosexuality is a-okay? this is clearly more a sci-fi question, as schools in fantasy are rarely addressed, aside from that harry potter thing.

is it just me, or does anyone else find 'perfect' societies to be roundly soulless and devoid of freedom to such a degree that basic human nature is hard to find?
 

Zane Curtis

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Ah, you see, now I feel inclined to argue my case.

I live in a country with compulsory voting, and it's not at all like mandatory military service. Popping into my local school for five minutes one Saturday every four years is not that huge a burden, you know. And if you don't do it, you can just pay the $100 fine and have done with it. It's kind of like asking someone how they can bare to live in a country that allows the horrible, oppressive regime of parking restrictions. I support compulsory voting, because the people who are least inclined to vote are the ones you need to vote most of all: people who are disinterested, people who don't have any particular axe to grind. The alternative is to abandon the ballot box to special interest groups, and you wind up living in a society that's not terribly democratic.

Now, prisons. It may be true that large prison populations produce employment (for prison support staff), but it's a terribly inefficient way to do so. A prison is basically a school -- it takes in a society's aimless drifters and turns them into hardened criminals. In effect, each and every one of us (as taxpayers) is paying our government to train the thugs, pimps, house-breakers, and drug addicts that make our lives miserable, cause billions of dollars worth of losses every year, and undermine the confidence and happiness of our society. If you took all that money out of prisons and invested it in mental health care, social services, and good education programs that provide real opportunities, you could employ just as many people for less money, and do more to reduce the crime rate (with all the associated costs) than prisons ever have.

I'm not just saying any of this for the heck of it. My WIP is actually about western civilization (from a far future point of view), and what is good and bad about western civilization. What, in our society, is truly worth preserving? What is there simply out of inertia and historical precedent? These are the sort of questions that interest me, and that will occupy the subtext of my story.
 

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Zane Curtis said:
But there are three good reasons I can think of why people should wear clothes most of the time: (1) climate -- if frostbite won't get you, then melanomas will; (2) hygiene -- if everyone went nude, I dont think I'd ever want to sit on a seat on public transport ever again; (3) consideration for others -- most of the time you just don't want to have to deal with people's dangly bits all over the place, and some people you don't want to see naked ever.
(4) midges
(5) if you are female, and somewhate generously proportioned in the chest department, and you don't wear a bra, eventually your bust will be shaking hands with your kneecaps
(6) as some famous choreographer said, the trouble with nude ballet is that not everything stops when the music stops

Zane Curtis said:
Prison populations would be minimal. Sentencing people to prison would be an absolute last resort, in cases where it's clear that the only effective thing to do is remove an offender from society altogether. The whole notion of prisons as "punishment centers" would be done away with. Vengeance is not a proper goal for the judiciary of a civilized country.
Well said. For me an ideal society would teach basic child-care, pet-care, communication skills and civic responsibility (make it fun - get 'em all playing Sim City) at school. Studies suggest that a very high proportion of the people who become criminals, especially sex-offenders, are ones with very low communication skills who don't know how to speak to the opposite sex or how to express their feelings, and become hysterical as a result. IMO most of the ills of society could be cured at a stroke if we actually taught things like "How to get a date," "How to be pleasant company," "How to come across well in a job interview" and so on.

There are always going to be incompetent parents, even with training, but instead of either leaving them to muddle through on their own or taking the child away altogether, there would be sheltered housing, equivalent to sheltered housing for the elderly, where parents who were ill or of low IQ or whatever could stay and have some help with child-rearing, without stigma.

In London there is an organization called Kids' Company which basically provides parenting for children whose own families don't, and this seems worth reproducing.

There would in general be some sort of pastoral support, without stigma, for those people who are obviously slightly mentally ill, without being so obviously ill as to need treatment. [The sort of people who otherwise often end up homeless and babbling.]

An SF comic called Albedo proposed a very good child-care system which I think would work well in practice. Parents of both sexes were allowed one extra day off work a week or a fortnight, or possibly they just staggered their days off rather than always having them at the weekend. Groups of families would get together and form a sort of creche-club, and each day all the children in that group would stay at the house of whichever set of parents were off work that day.

Personally I'd allow alcohol and other drugs in moderation, but the sort of yob culture which leads people to think it's cool to get horribly drunk and sick up in the gutter would be laughed out of existence.

Apart from anything else, numerous scientific studies have shown that moderate consumption of alcohol is good for your health. And it's human nature to want to have some vices, and if you ban the existing ones they'll invent new ones which will probably be worse.

Archaeology shows that agriculture, and from it the whole of organized human society, grew out of the need to grow extra grain in order to brew beer. It goes very deep in human nature - and alcohol is a major sacrament in many religions. If you wanted to ban alcohol, for example, you'd also have to ban Judaism.

I don't think we should aim for sanitized perfection - otherwise people will get bored and become either depressed or destructive.

Zane Curtis said:
Marraige will still survive as the formal expression of commitment between two people. Otherwise, the details are unimportant.
Personally I'd allow polygamy and polyandry provided it was certain that all the participants were willing.

Zane Curtis said:
Politics would become a profession in its own right, requiring its own degrees, internships, professional standards, and so on. No longer would it be what rich and influential people do when they want to get richer and more influential.
Not sure about this. On the one hand it sounds like a good idea - on the other it might end up with politicians as jsut a branch of the civil service, as smugly entrenched and resistant to change. And you could equally well say "No longer would it be what impassioned amateurs do when they really want to change the world for the better" [see under "Green Party"].

Zane Curtis said:
Voting would be compulsory (it's a duty, not a right),
That sounds a bit control-freaky - people have a right not to care, I think, and $100 fine is colossally punitive and would mean the poor were punished for doing what the rich could easily afford. To me e.g. that would be a week's wages at this time of year.

Zane Curtis said:
Ballots would be pieces of paper with pencil marks on them. Recounts in closely fought contests would be automatic. The legal system would be common law based rather than constitutionally based, and there would be a strict seperation between politics and the judiciary (because it's the federal court's job to hold politicians to account).
I.e. it would be the UK :)

Zane Curtis said:
I'd say not much, because there would be no barriers to interracial relationships. Any racial diversity that existed would fade within a few generations.
Hmm. Some studies indicate that humans tend in general to imprint on their parents and select people who look a bit like their own family, which would tend to maintain separate races for a long time even in a fully integrated society.

I don't myself think a world without any separate races would be desirable. First off it would be visually boring - like a world in which all the dogs were alsations and all the cars were Audis.

More importantly, different human races are adapted to slightly different conditions and we don't know when a sudden climate change might make that desperately important. Picture it - the whole world has ended up a darkish brown (because dark genes are usually dominant), the Yellowstone Caldera blows, we have several years of dark skies and artificial winters and any families that can't get or afford vitamin D tablets and UV lamps end up raising kids with rickets. Or we all end up fairly pale (which is less likely), a nearby sun goes nova and we all die horribly of melanoma, because only those almost-coal-black people from equatorial Africa were sufficiently UV-resistant and there aren't any of them left.

Australian aborigines, for example, tend to have eidetic memory. If we were all cross-bred to the point where there were no races left at all, that would presumably be diluted out and lost in the general population - and who can tell on what alien world, in what strange job description we haven't even imagined yet, that ability might have been crucial?

Zane Curtis said:
(re question about religion)No. It has been replaced by the striving after community, art, meaning, and what Socrates would have called "the examined life".
Then I think you would have to re-invent some perfect humans to fit into your perfect world. I don't think there's ever been a human society without religion of some sort - and if you tried to eliminate beliefs you didn't like you would end up with correction-camps before you could say "Joe Stalin."
 

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whitehound said:
(4) midges
(5) if you are female, and somewhate generously proportioned in the chest department, and you don't wear a bra, eventually your bust will be shaking hands with your kneecaps
(6) as some famous choreographer said, the trouble with nude ballet is that not everything stops when the music stops

Wow. You actually read my huge long post. I'm impressed. :)

Not sure about this. On the one hand it sounds like a good idea - on the other it might end up with politicians as jsut a branch of the civil service, as smugly entrenched and resistant to change. And you could equally well say "No longer would it be what impassioned amateurs do when they really want to change the world for the better" [see under "Green Party"].

This is probably my most out-there suggestion. My instinct is to try and isolate the practice of politics from undue influence by big business and powerful people -- hence, politics as a profession. They would still be politicians; that is, they would still be answerable to the electorate. The difference is, as a separate professional body (similar to the judiciary), they would not be so easily corrupted away from that primary duty. You wouldn't haVe the kind of situation that exists today, where Rupert Murdoch has become the leader of the western world by proxy.

That sounds a bit control-freaky - people have a right not to care, I think, and $100 fine is colossally punitive and would mean the poor were punished for doing what the rich could easily afford. To me e.g. that would be a week's wages at this time of year.

Sigh. It's almost impossible to show people who don't have compulsory voting how well it works in practice. In practice, the great majority of the burden falls upon the electoral commission. Since voting is compulsory, the electoral commission has to go out of its way to ensure that every Australian has the opportunity to vote. When that means, for example, flying ballot boxes and staff out to remote Aboriginal communities then this will be done -- without question. There's none of this business you see in America, where certain types of people in certain places are discouraged from voting in hundreds of little ways, short of actually banning them. Among other things, this means that a ballot box on polling day is the easiest thing in the world to find.

In Australia, $100 is about a third of a week's pay, at the basic award rate (to the extent that award rates still exist). That's for federal elections. Lower down the political foodchain, the fines are considerably less. If you don't want to vote for any of the mongrels, you can always vote informally. F___ Y__ scrawled across the ballot paper seems to be the favourite method.

I would seriously not like to see this system changed. I think it would seriously undermine the stability and perceived legitimacy of our government.

Australian aborigines, for example, tend to have eidetic memory. If we were all cross-bred to the point where there were no races left at all, that would presumably be diluted out and lost in the general population - and who can tell on what alien world, in what strange job description we haven't even imagined yet, that ability might have been crucial?

Yes, I don't think I would argue against diversity per se. Essentially, my ideal society would be fairly small (not a single world goverment kind of set-up). I tend to think there are some limits to effective democracy. Beyond a certain population size, a democracy ceases to be representative. In fact, I would argue that beyond a certain population size, countries become increasingly more ungovernable by any method. I understand that Europe, at the moment, is getting a first hand taste of big government inefficiency via the EU.

Then I think you would have to re-invent some perfect humans to fit into your perfect world. I don't think there's ever been a human society without religion of some sort - and if you tried to eliminate beliefs you didn't like you would end up with correction-camps before you could say "Joe Stalin."

In a sense, though, all the things I listed have their religious/spiritual aspect. In my ideal society, I wouldn't want to abolish religious feeling, but religion itself would evolve beyond its current narrow-minded focus on authoritarianism and fictitious cosmology.
 

preyer

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'IMO most of the ills of society could be cured at a stroke if we actually taught things like "How to get a date,"' ~ could you argue, then, that if you provided would-be criminals with unlimited free sex, their criminal capacity diminishes to nothing?

'where parents who were ill or of low IQ or whatever could stay and have some help with child-rearing' ~ we have a couple of reality shows, one is called, 'nanny 911,' where english nannies step into an american household that's a complete mess. anyway, i hope you're not suggesting a higher IQ automatically makes for better parents, as those shows certainly seem to disprove that theory outright, lol. they just have poor parenting skillz, like you mentioned should be taught in school. indeed, there aren't a shortage of intelligent criminals, either, just educated ones.

the problem i have with putting criminals back onto the streets after putting them through a series of lessons that's supposed to make them good citizens is it often doesn't work. criminals aren't stupid, they know how to beat the system. recently, a released sex-offenders moved into my neighbourhood (it's a law the neighbours have to be informed of this, though to what extent it gets done is rather here nor there). well, he's back in jail because of attempted rape. 'a clockwork orange' examined the whole thing brilliantly, of course. my thing there with a system that puts back criminals after 're-education' is that it would have to be a wonderful system for it to sound plausible.

good responses all around. :)

i still find mandatory voting an unfree practice, though. like the song goes, 'if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.' but, in a perfect society, i suppose there's a better way of trudging down to the ballot booth, waiting in line, etc.. five minutes? wow! it take me five minutes to get dressed to just go to the voting place, lol. i don't know, this sounds very much like fining people for not saying the pledge of allegiance or putting up a flag on the fourth of july. you just really have to be careful when you force people to do something like this, i think, even fictionally. in an american market, that aspect might be a tough sell no matter you justify it. that probably depends on whether or not the editor agrees with it, no?
 

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An interesting question which I feel forced to answer with a question: why would you want to a perfect society in your novel? Utopias are rather ow on conflict.
 

preyer

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utopias are good to show how the human spirit rebels against being in a cage, for example. people in a perfect society tend to be happy drones, no? the point is, the perfect society has its uses in fiction, particularly SF, i think. and the perfect society is never as perfect as it's made out to be. clearly, one person's ideal isn't another's, so wouldn't it be interesting if you could impose your ideals on an entire society and see what the results would be?

i agree, they are low in conflict, at least physical conflict. i think these utopias lend themselves definitely towards an examination of the human spirit, psychology, whatever, basically a much more introverted kind of story. 'thx-1138' is a good movie based around a 'perfect' society, though that's rather one forced upon people. it's interesting to me that most traditional sci-fi utopias pretty much had little individualism, at least on the surface. seems that it's now all about individualism-- as long as everyone shares the exact same ideals.

i think in a 'perfect society' the average person has been brainwashed to the extent they might as well be clones and there's actually very little freedom involved, as opposed to being completely free to decide everything about your life and having choices not dictated to you by authority. here's an example off the top of my head:

'i don't want to wear a seatbelt.'

'but it's the law. you have to wear one. besides, it's the smart thing to do more often than not.'

'yeah, so what? what part of 'i don't want to do it' did you not understand, chief? i choose not to wear one. if it kills me, oh well, i'll take that chance.'

'that's not wise.'

'didn't say it was. but, it's *my* decision not to wear one.'

'then you had better hope you never get into a serious accident.'

'i do hope that, but like i said, it's my decision not to wear one.'

'what if you get hurt and the gov't has to pay for your medical care?'

'i've got insurance. besides, i pay my taxes.'

'you are irrespondible and simple-minded. you are a fool.'

'great, thanks for your opinion. now, if you'll excuse me, i'm going to smoke a cigarette while i still have the option and drive really fast down the road.'

'enjoy it while it lasts, because we're trying to ban tobacco and get cars to where the maximum speed limit is 70 miles per hour. if you refuse to take care of yourself, we'll force it upon you.'

'hey, while you're at it, why not get fast food restuarants to serve food that doesn't kill people?'

'we are, trust me. before we are done, you will not be able to set foot outside without a suit of armour. it's for your protection, after all.'

does that make sense? on the surface, a perfect society has unlimited freedoms, doesn't it? i mean, it's hard to equate 'perfect' with 'highly repressed,' no? but freedom means you suffer fools. to lessen a fool's impact, you try to basically brainwash them from birth in your schools, but then you're not giving people freedom, you're giving them a programme to live their lives by which might not necessarily be their nature.

some people would rebel against perfection, anyway. that's pretty interesting to me. in fact, a revolt against eden (a good title: 'revolution against eden'?) could be quite adventurous.
 

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The beast does not exist.

It's the flaws in society that make for great stories. A perfect society would likely be the dullest tale. Should a murder or petty theft be involved then how can the society be perfect.

The striving for utopia and the rocks in the road getting there is the story you want to read.

I for one would prefer to live in the world where all the disrespectful people have been euthanized. But that's my opinion.
 

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Zane Curtis said:
In a sense, though, all the things I listed have their religious/spiritual aspect. In my ideal society, I wouldn't want to abolish religious feeling, but religion itself would evolve beyond its current narrow-minded focus on authoritarianism and fictitious cosmology.
Mmm - but who decides what's fictitious, what's true, and what's an evocative metaphor which helps people to live well?

20 years ago, science was convinced that belief in "the ether" was a quasi-religious myth. Now it's the up and coming thing, though we sometimes call it space-time.

I would hope religions could get away from overly rigid and literal interpretaions of mythologiocal cosmology. E.g. a high proportion of American Christians seem to be hung up on an absoluitely literal interpretation of Genesis (despite the fact that it's impossible to translate Hebrew with total accuracy) - but Jews just say, hey, the palaeontological record shows that different classes of living things evolved in roughly the same order as described in Genesis, so obviously when it says "a day" it just means "a period of time."

I used to have on sale in my shop a very interesting book called something like Blackfoot cosmology, which was all about how many Native American religious cosmologies actually tie in quite nicely with modern physics. Are you going to go to those people and say "It must be fiction because it's religion - I don't care if quantum theory says the same thing, that just means physics must be fiction too"?
 

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preyer said:
'IMO most of the ills of society could be cured at a stroke if we actually taught things like "How to get a date,"' ~ could you argue, then, that if you provided would-be criminals with unlimited free sex, their criminal capacity diminishes to nothing?
You're missing the point. Except in very rare cases (such as one I can think of where the guy had a hormone imbalance) sex offenders don't comit offences because they want sex per se. Rapists want to attack and dominate the victim, and often they do so because they are boiling with rage against women in general, and often that is because they want to talk to women and don't know how to and so whenever they are with women they experience intense frustration and feelings of inadequacy. Teaching them how to talk to women would get rid of all that baggage.

And sex offenders against children are, almost without exception, people who don't know how to relate to (talk to, form emotional connections with) other adults, especially with adult women.

preyer said:
'where parents who were ill or of low IQ or whatever could stay and have some help with child-rearing' ~ we have a couple of reality shows, one is called, 'nanny 911,' where english nannies step into an american household that's a complete mess. anyway, i hope you're not suggesting a higher IQ automatically makes for better parents, as those shows certainly seem to disprove that theory outright, lol.
No, but it's an exacerbating factor, and somebody with a seriously low IQ - or who is blind or otherwise physically disabled - will generally benefit from some extra help.

I was thinking of the Jasmine Beckford case, where a little black British girl was taken away from white foster parents (who were deemed unsuitable on racial grounds, although she had been very happy with them) and returned to the care of her parents both of whom were educationally subnormal, both of whom had histories of violence, one of whom had himself been seriously abused as a child - and both of whom proceeded to beat and starve her to death. It should have been obvious from their histories that they were people who for a variety of reasons could not cope, and should not be allowed to care for a child without regular supervision and support.

preyer said:
they just have poor parenting skillz, like you mentioned should be taught in school. indeed, there aren't a shortage of intelligent criminals, either, just educated ones.
There's no shortage of educated criminals - where do you think bank frauds come from?

preyer said:
the problem i have with putting criminals back onto the streets after putting them through a series of lessons that's supposed to make them good citizens is it often doesn't work.
Which is why I think an ideal society would teach them to be good citizens at school, *before* they become criminals. Of course it wouldn't work for everybody - but it would work for a lot and that's all you can hope for.
 

preyer

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the destruction of the perfect society isn't interesting, CH? well, to each their own, of course, but i find the fall of a civilization often more entertaining than its rise. the king arthur legend would be pointless without the fall of camelot, eh? LOTR depicts the shire as a veritable eden, and the threat of its fall spurs frodo into action. fantasy is rife with idyllic living conditions, whether or not those conditions are expounded on is something else, but the idea of the 'perfect society' abound, maybe more in more traditional works, but still written about nonetheless.

so, nah, i tend to want the fall, or at least near fall, of a society. to be honest, i've not read a lot of books where the civilization was being built as opposed to already starting off at its near peak, or at least fully formed. i've a few, and they were okay books, just not usually my thing. i'm really not into post-apocalyptic tales, either, which is where i've found a lot of society building stories. 'the stand' was entirely a disappointment to me considering its unabridged length. i didn't hate it, but i cringed when the hand of God came into it. oh, man, i don't even want to admit to watching the mini-series.

'There's no shortage of educated criminals - where do you think bank frauds come from?' ~ i meant that as a statistical inference. there are more blue collar criminals by far than white collar, no? and even among white collar crime, there's a relative low percentage of criminals as opposed to regular white collar workers, wouldn't you say?

'You're missing the point. Except in very rare cases (such as one I can think of where the guy had a hormone imbalance) sex offenders don't comit offences because they want sex per se. Rapists want to attack and dominate the victim, and often they do so because they are boiling with rage against women in general, and often that is because they want to talk to women and don't know how to and so whenever they are with women they experience intense frustration and feelings of inadequacy. Teaching them how to talk to women would get rid of all that baggage.' ~ am i missing the point? wouldn't my ridiculous assertion necessarily invigourate one of these people with confidence? i'm not sure i mentioned anything about rapists, anyway, did i? :) would 'free sex' be a factor in defusing *any* criminal intent? i think that's my point that you missed.

are people born criminals, leaders, homosexuals, or is it a matter of societal/cultural/educational/etc. influences? i mean, if you're really going to get in-depth with a perfect society (admittedly, pretty far in-depth) isn't this question going to be at the core of a lot of answers?
 

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whitehound said:
Mmm - but who decides what's fictitious, what's true, and what's an evocative metaphor which helps people to live well?

Do you want the hundred page argument, or the full unabridged one?
 

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Endless free sex might distract some criminals but how would you organize it? *Who* would have sex with them? And if it didn't come with proper communication it would be just a drug and it wouldn't satisfy, because what most people want is really intimacy, which you can't get without communication. [A high-class prostitute in the UK recently published her diaries which say, among other things, that many of her clients don't even want sex - they pay her for a cuddle and a pleasant evening watching TV together.]

Current research indicates that violent criminal behaviour results from a combination of environment with genetics. There are some people who will never turn violent whatever is done to them, and very few people will grow up to be violent if they were raised in a calm environment - but most people who become violent criminals have a combination of a violent upbringing with a particular genetic makeup. Take away either the gene or the environment and they are upright citizens - put them together and you get a thug.

I've been thinking about the compulsory voting issue. If we consider the case of someone who really, truly isn't interested in politics, can't tell one politician from another, doesn't know what their policies are etc etc and you force that person to vote, which of these is more likely: a) that they will make the effort to research the candidates and vote for one they actually prefer in some way or b) that they will vote for one they happen to remember noticing because he/she has an odd name or a funny nose? Will this system not lead to a disproportionate number of votes being given to candidates who are memorable for some reason quite detached from their policies? [You could write a story about somebody playing this system by dying their hair a funny colour and cultivating a nasal voice or whatever.]
 
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Society

There's only one way to cure most of society's ills, and that's to get rid of people. I don't like this option.

There is no perfect society, and never will be. And who in their right mind would want to live in one if it did exist?
 

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Indeed, we have to work around human imperfections: the basic monkey-programme isn't going to go away, and you will always have to struggle to find non-destructive ways of channeling fear, rage, greed, ambition etc.. You can only achieve a really perfect society by pre-selecting the inhabitants! [As seen in Buddhist monasteries, kibbutzim and so on.] Otherwise, there's no system so perfect that some bastard won't find a way to mess it up.

But there are ways of minimizing the damage. At present we are a species which evolved to live in troupes of about thirty individuals, trying to live in communities of several million at a time - and that's bound to cause trouble. There *are* social tools which can help - otherwise there wouldn't be such a wide variance in crime-rates between different societies.

This holds true even between different towns - I was amazed to visit Falkirk, a small town about 40 miles west of Edinburgh, and discover that it had underpasses which *weren't* full of broken bottles, urine and graffiti, and you could walk away from your stall for five minutes and come back and the stock would still be there... and I know that the main reason Edinburgh is crawling with thieves and vandals is because it has a long-term drug-problem which means an entire generation has grown up without any parental guidance, because their parents were too drugged-up to care. If we can't eliminate hard drugs - and we probably can't - then we can at least minimize the damage by providing parental substitutes.
 

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Wouldn't a perfect society take into account the curiosity and creativity of human beings? Wouldn't it cater to its members' desire to be stimulated, to do useful work, to strive and to advance?

In this sense, a perfect society wouldn't be a static society, where science and art have been exhausted of their possibilities, and where there is nothing for anyone to do. Rather, a perfect society would simply be free of the petty injustice, the mean-spirited perversity, and the uneven distribution of resources that prevents people from being all they could be. A perfect society would allow people to pursue the work for which they have the greatest aptitude, and which provides them with the greatest satisfaction. It would be a dynamic society, always travelling, but never reaching an ultimate destination, because that's the way human beings are.
 

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that's not how the 'perfect society' is often represented in sci-fi, where people walk around in the same basic style of clothes while hover cars zip by in the background. a lot of the times, the perfect society has one major flaw, like they kill people once they reach 35 or trampling some flowers is cause for execution.

another thing with a sci-fi PS (perfect society) is most manural labour has been replaced with machines. fact is, being a factory worker is what some people do best. *that's* their aptitude in life, and when you introduce that as an ideal, you're taking on a communist tenet, which is neither right or wrong, per se, just that that's what it is, lol.

'Endless free sex might distract some criminals but how would you organize it? *Who* would have sex with them? And if it didn't come with proper communication it would be just a drug and it wouldn't satisfy, because what most people want is really intimacy, which you can't get without communication. [A high-class prostitute in the UK recently published her diaries which say, among other things, that many of her clients don't even want sex - they pay her for a cuddle and a pleasant evening watching TV together.]' ~ well, it would have to a gov't agency making sure people's health cards are valid and up to date. who would have sex with a criminal? lol! gee, that would be, uhm, most women? now, i have no doubt that that one prostitute's experience was just as she described (though i warn that one person's experiences hardly constitute the norm), but by and far most hookers who are hired for sex actually perform sex. otherwise you're not getting a hooker, you're getting an 'escort,' and there's some gray area there. drive down the street and some skank yells at you, 'hey, baby, want a date?' and there's no cuddling going on. i'm sure there's a few who really want that. nevertheless, the clients who wanted intimacy were getting an expensive hooker, which implies these guys had money to spend, which further suggests that these weren't criminals. and if it's one thing that blows my mind is how jerks have not one bit of trouble attracting women. if there's a lack of intimacy going on, it's because that's the way these guys have it, it's not because women aren't willing to give it. that is, it's there for the taking.

studies suggest there's a gene that makes people violent? is there a link to that for my own curiosity? i often don't trust studies just because they were made. i've seen too many based on a far too small a sample size to really be taken seriously. then i have to know who actually made the study. for example, i can already tell you what a NRA or anti-smoking study will 'reveal,' know what i mean? 'studies suggest...' is a term i don't place a tremendous amount of stock in. i give 'em their due, but i also take it with a grain of salt because i don't believe everything i read any more than i believe what a politician or salesman says.

is there a violent gene? i don't know. i don't know if there's a homosexual gene, either. might as well say there's a smoking gene or a slut gene while we're at it. all i know is no mass-murderer has ever felt so compelled to kill someone that they did so in the presense of a uniformed cop, lol.
 

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Perfect society

I guess it's the writer in me, but if you were to live in a perfect society, what in the world would you write about?
 

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preyer said:
that's not how the 'perfect society' is often represented in sci-fi, where people walk around in the same basic style of clothes while hover cars zip by in the background. a lot of the times, the perfect society has one major flaw, like they kill people once they reach 35 or trampling some flowers is cause for execution.

I don't think I'll be stealing plots from Star Trek episodes any time soon.
 
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