The New Utopia - Introduction

Oh what a marvel it would be to find the whole World renewed, redeemed and crisp with hope and a true Brotherhood of Man to populate it.

Is it such a distant dream to aspire to global harmony? Not at all, for all the impediment that we today struggle withal is of our own making.

Imagine, if you will, a world where a man is not the sum of his belongings, but of his accomplishments. Imagine a society where higher station is awarded to those people who serve us all out of altruism, not for personal gain. Imagine an economy that sees profit as a consequence of benefits provided to the buyer, rather than the opposite. Imagine a world that does not lie to itself saying that we have pursued the only possible course of action, and that this sole alternative will necessarily culminate in self annihilation.

These are not new dreams, but ancient ones. We chose to ignore them because we allowed ourselves to be convinced that the dream was impossible. By this assumption, we have allowed ourselves to accept the unacceptable. We have allowed ourselves to look onto our brother and let him starve. We have chosen to let ourselves be corrupted and seduced by greed, convenience and comfort at the steep price of human suffering.
We have told ourselves that the Earth is incapable of giving Mankind what it needs, but have we been honest about it? Do we all need what the rich possess? Do we all need luxury and excess? When people starve in our time, is it because the forces of Nature have dealt a lethal blow, or is it because grain and foodstuffs are valuable commodities negotiated under the ethics of profitability?

Make no mistake: The Earth is perfectly capable of sustaining Mankind, as long as each of us renounces their self-servitude and the path of hedonism. It is not our ecology and our natural resources that are at fault. It is not the size of our populations. It is indeed the fact that we want more than we need. It is the fact that there are those who want more than they deserve. I’m not talking about want, but austerity.

The inconvenient truth is that the sum of our contemporary code-of-ethics boils down to economics and financial gain. We have, as a society, decided that our finances rule us, and thereby guide our decisions and our actions. We let our hungry purses guide our conscience and we have the folly of telling ourselves it’s for our own benefit.

What’s more, under the premise of equality, we have left behind time-honoured values once believed to make nobler that which we call “human nature,” and we substituted them for the cold practicality of material wealth. We told ourselves we were freeing ourselves from moral bondage, and then we have enslaved ourselves to our finances via consumerism, hedonism and convenience.

Whether we have been induced to this error by interested parties or whether we have jointly arrived at this stage by our own choices is less relevant than the fact that we are here; though it would be an interesting social exercise to analyse this progress from an objective viewpoint.

Be that as it may, by our ethics today, an individual is worth his NET worth to society in general. The individual is thence not a complete person in the pragmatic eyes of contemporary society, but merely a piece on the great game-board of macroeconomics. Human dignity is often reduced to legal formalities or the individual’s ability to purchase it. Likewise, social relationships are very much interdependent with material wealth and society in general rewards only financial success, and mainly when this is proven through the trappings of monetary triumph.

By our contemporary principles, an individual deserves as much as others are willing to pay him for the benefits he claims to offer, where benefits can be goods or services or both. The objective becomes then to distort perception so that those others grow to be willing to pay more than the actual value of the benefit offered by the individual.
While this does bring about a sense of justified enrichment of the individual making the offer, this distortion of perception that allowed the “honest” enrichment provokes ripples in the foundation of valuation and the fabric of our morals, the instrumental consequence of which is relativism and inconsequentiality.

Technological advancement notwithstanding, global society has traded much of its progress for higher aspirations that were once our own to cherish. We pursued growth at the expense of our quality. Through distorted anthropocentric ideals, we have ceased to empower our better side to surrender to our primeval instincts. We accepted that the search for pleasure and the sating of our cravings is within our DNA. We decided to admit that our animal passions are indeed very powerful and we have surrendered much of our spirit and intellect to sate them. We chose our convenience over our accountability.

Timeless institutions, such as marriage, fidelity, monogamy and family, have been deemed mere inopportune paradigms and cast aside to make more room for hedonism and consumerism. However, in our present considerations, we, as a society, have forgotten that these institutions were not mere social conventions. They were indeed historical creations that enabled society to exist within communal parameters. They were instruments that came to exist in order that we could curb our more destructive instincts and turn them into something better; a code that allowed us to live in relative harmony within a larger community.

Like these institutions, our contemporary society has forgone the habit of promoting certain moral values and certain codes of conduct that were once at the very heart of our social identity. That we were always and remain imperfect is less important than the will to pursue higher aspirations. We forgot that, and by our lack of memory we were diminished as a society.

We are choosing instead a pragmatic approach. We are choosing a code that is measurable and quantifiable: Material wealth. Yet the ethics of material wealth are excessively malleable. They are prone to absolute pragmatism and relativistic values. After all, if only wealth is rewarded, than what is there to stop us from doing anything and everything to achieve wealth?

By our very human nature, it is, in my experience, paramount that society promotes a higher moral code to serve as a light by which the individual can guide his conduct in the valley of shadows that constitutes purely pragmatic thought. Law & legal punishment alone are insufficiently strong to promote ethical behaviour, for the unlawful expect to escape civil and penal penalties, and they are too often right in their assumption.
The impoverishment of our sense of community and the destitution of human dignity associated with valorising the sole objective of financial supremacy over every other accomplishment generates a moral manipulability that is harmful both to the individual and to society as a whole. This is our contemporary reality. Does it have to be like that? The answer is quite simply: No.

The search for something better is also in our nature. The search for the divine and the sublime is within our DNA. We can choose to feed on it. We can choose to foment it and to harbour it until it can eventually become our reality. As with most things, the ability to choose a better destiny is within our reach.