My Ideas for a Utopia - Essay Example

My Ideas for an Utopia Humans are complex creatures. Several different competing tendencies may exist in a single human. Human are social creatures and the tendency to cooperate with one another and to share resources with one another exists within them. At the same time humans also have the tendency to compete with one another in the gathering of resources. Humans have the capacity of coming up with good solutions to their problems through mutual discussion and consultation. They also tend to become biased partisans of a particular idea despite overwhelming evidence that the idea is not in their best interest. Throughout the ages intellectuals have come up with a number of different proposals for an ideal government, each of these proposed ideas is based on a particular and limited view of humanity, some of these ideas are based on a very optimistic view of humans and present the masses of humanity as the epitome of sagacity and intelligence and fully capable of knowing their best interest and others are based on extremely pessimistic beliefs about the public and consider them to be no more than sheep to be lead by a wise ruler. In this essay I have attempted to balance these competing views of humanity and present a middle path between unwarranted optimism and pessimism regarding people. Plato and Marx envisage a society in which everything is shared. Marx desired a society in which there was no personal ownership (Marx and Engels 235) In Plato’s ideal republic, the men would even share wives and children (Plato 301). These ideas overemphasize the tendency of humans to cooperate with one another and share resources with one another, the fact that humans may also be intensely competitive with one another, liable to intense bouts of jealousy (especially sexual jealousy), may not have the same incentive to work without personal ownership of property and in any system of joint effort, some will attempt to get a free ride by doing little of the labor and reaping an equal part of the benefits, is overlooked in these social systems. In my opinion, it is necessary to allow private ownership of property and means of production in order to maximize the incentive of each person to labor. In addition the extraordinary love and affection shown to a child by its father is likely to be missing from a society where all the men are held to be equally responsible for each child. The system of having wives in common seems to be extremely exploitative of women and possibly impossible to impose without the use of coercion. While equal distribution of wealth to all members of the society is punishing toward those who work harder, I believe that society does have an obligation toward the poor. The general wellbeing of a society may be increased by taxing the wealthy at the marginal level of wealth and giving it to those at the marginal levels of poverty. This is because the benefit a person gains from a certain amount of money, decreases as we go up the income level, similarly the harm one experiences from losing a certain amount of money decrease as we go up the income level, therefore taking from the rich and giving to the poor increases the overall happiness and wellbeing of the society (Olson 96) In an ideal society, decommodification of labor should be imposed to the extent that no one should need to work in order to be clothed, fed, given shelter and medical treatment. There should be dormitories to house the homeless, feed them and allow them to bathe and wear clean clothes and learn new trades that would help them get jobs, however these people should not get all the rights that the other citizens get till they are able to support themselves, they should not, for example, be allowed to start families and have children. There are two competing tendencies among humans with regards to the physical area a government should encompass; there is the idea of empire building, having a one world government, a greater China, a united Christian or Muslim empire etc. and there is the insurrectionary tendency that demands complete sovereignty for each province, town, city and village. In order to balance these two tendencies, each regional enclave should be given limited autonomy; this autonomy can even be to the extent that each region has their own militia to put up a resistance in case of external attacks, however the main purpose of the regional government should be to impose the policies of the center. In The Social Contract Rousseau terms as invalid, all orders that are imposed upon a people against their will (Rousseau 17). In The Prince on the other hand, the will of the people is given no importance and the ruler is instructed to be completely amoral in manipulating the public (Machiavelli 64). These two theories are a product of two competing views of the public. One sees humans as inherently wise and noble and assumes that the policies which reflect their ‘collective will’ to be in their best interest and the other view assumes that people are stupid and in need of the power of the wise ruler to impose upon them a stable rule. We know that the first view is not wholly correct; the general masses are in favor of a lot of things which are not in their best interest. The rich have a monopoly on the mass media and manipulate the public into supporting policies which go against their best interests. In order to safeguard the people from their own ignorance and credulity, it is necessary to impose strictures on the democratic system, preventing the greedy, the mercenary and the amoral to gain political power. For this purpose, there should be a council composed of people who are well known for their selflessness and wisdom and dedication to the good of the public to vet all the candidates standing for elections at any level. The council members should be appointed for life and should be replaced by their disciples through apostolic succession. They should be barred from holding public offices themselves but have the power to veto the legislations proposed by the democratically elected leaders when they feel that the base principles of the nation are being violated. Young and inexperienced people are more likely to be swayed by demagogy into supporting the wrong polices of the government. In order to prevent radical changes to the structure of the Utopian government, once it has been created, it may be necessary to disenfranchise the young people by setting the minimum voting age at 40. The professionals and the working class are the backbone of any nation, therefore they should have an extra say in running the affair of the nation. This can be done through an institutionalization of the ancient concept of guilds. Each guild should have a fixed number of representatives in the upper house of the parliament, for example the guild of doctors, the guild of engineers and the guild of industrial workers etc. Any government must depend on taxpayers to finance it. The government can acknowledge the importance of the role played by tax payers by giving a number of an year’s top-most taxpayers a seat in the upper house. This might also create a competition in the wealthiest people of the nation to see who pays the most taxes, increasing the revenue of the government. In any society, it is easier for a small group of people to organize themselves than it is for a large number of people to organize themselves. It is therefore that the rich find it easy to organize themselves into special interest groups (Olson 51). These groups hijack governments and use governmental authority to perpetuate social inequality through such things as monopolies and price fixing cartels (Olson 85). In order to prevent the formation of these negative redistributive mechanisms which result in the rich getting ever richer and the poor getting ever poorer, it is necessary to have strict regulations over how businesses are conducted. There should also be clear laws forbidding banks from excessive risk taking using the public’s money. Many religions and schools of thought emphasize moderation and the “middle path”. My belief is that moderation should be imposed even in ideas that on the surface appear to be purely virtuous such as democracy and cooperation. It is necessary to place restrictions on democracy in order to prevent political power from being concentrated in the hands of certain sections of the society and to protect the people from their own apathy, ignorance or misplaced zeal. Similarly, when people feel that they have a personal stake in something, they are induced to work harder for it, for this reason it’s necessary to have private ownership of property. Works Cited Russell Price (trans.) Machiavelli: The Prince. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Gareth Stedman Jones (trans.) Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto. New York, NY: Penguin Classics, 2002. Olson, Mancur Power and prosperity: outgrowing communist and capitalist dictatorships. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000. Benjamin Jowett (trans.) Plato: The Republic. Charleston, SC: Forgotten Books, 2006. Cole, G. D. H. (trans.) Rousseau: The Social Contract. Hants, UK: Cosimo, Inc., 2008. Read More