The libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick writes in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) that the political philosopher should take value pluralism seriously. Value pluralism is the fact that people hold different social and political values - in other words, people hold different comprehensive doctrines.
Discussing political philosophy and how it can deal with value pluralism, Nozick introduces the concept of meta-utopia which is a high-level political environment in which societies with different ways of lives or utopias can co-exist. He writes:
Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some kinds of communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one. Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others… utopia is meta-utopia: the environment in which utopian experiments may be tried out; the environment in which people are free to do their own thing; the environment which must, to a great extent, be realized first if more particular utopian visions are to be realized stably.
Nozick believed that if we could have this meta-utopian environment, a wide variety of different social organizations would emerge.
I believe that for libertarians, it is important to try and find practical ways through which meta-utopia can exist. Fortunately, there are different options to reach meta-utopia. From a cybernetic space perspective, we can already form thousands of online communities in which we can interact and cooperate with each other based on specific shared interests. From a real-life sociological perspective, we are making such maritime technological advances that we will eventually be able to create new societies on the oceans. Such societies could take the form of many different types of social organizations. The creation of such habitable dwellings on the oceans is called Seasteading. If we can allow people to Seastead, and to move freely from one Seastead to another, we will have realized a meta-utopia.
Reference
Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
Interesting write man
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Thanks :). Am happy you like it
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Interesting idea with a meta-utopia. I never heard of it before. It does make sense though. It is much more likely that we can create a meta-utopia with many different utopias as part of it than just one utopia where everybody will be happy. We are so different that we need different utopias (or simply kill everyone that does not agree!)
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Yes... Thank you for your comment! I think the principle is quite simple. If we would extend it to our educational system, we should allow different educational systems to co-exist and let people be free to choose which one they prefer. There's not one utopian educational system that fits everyone :)
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Yes, the very foundation of such meta-utopia would be the freedom to choose. I do agree that this also could apply to the educational system. I am not in favor of completely deregulated education, but there should be a lot of freedom in what way each student reaches a basic national standard.
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The problem with utopia is that people are not created with equal abilities or opportunities. The vast majority of people on this planet are more or less physically tied to a location due to income.
I probably shouldn't say this but not everyone can earn a living blogging on Steemit. Someone is going to end up having to make the pizzas, build the cars, dig the ditches and grind the peanuts to make the peanut butter.
How do you avoid the inevitable animosity that someone with a labor intensive, dirty job is going to feel towards someone living in a floating community in the tropics?
Different social and political values are one thing, different economic classes are an entirely different (and dangerous) animal.
Although from the amount of importance some people put on weed, I guess a certain segment of the population would be happy if they could spend most of their lives stoned & eating the free pizza they bring home from work.
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Making pizzas, building cars, digging ditches, or grinding peanuts are not in any way incompatible with Nozick's "utopia". To the contrary, this sort of specialisation, division of labour, and voluntary exchange of goods and services is essential to prosperity. And as long as there are people who are willing to pay to have these things provided for them, there is a possibility for others to earn from providing them. Certainly some will find more success than others, both because of individual differences in talents and interests and because some will have more luck. Some level of envy and animosity is probably inevitable since they are part of human nature, but freedom requires not letting that envy lead to impositions on other people's lives and justly acquired possessions.
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That's the tricky part.
The whole push for a $15.00 minimum wage in Washington State has led to an actual decrease in wages for the very people it was supposed to help because, surprise, employers cut back on their hours because they couldn't afford to pay it.
It doesn't help that our culture is centered around consumption and that people are constantly assaulted by advertising that they're somehow inferior if they don't have the latest iPhone or if their car is more than a year old, etc.
And on the opposite side of that you have people making fortunes shuffling paper or even just digitally "trading" numbers who don't actually produce anything. You can see that in the people who use bots here to milk the reward pool dry without producing any valuable content.
At least there is good content being created here.
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Tricky it is, yes. And there is no easy solution. But it is not impossible either, and the key I believe is education. Like you say about the minimum wage; people push for it because they mistakenly believe that it is beneficial. With improved economic understanding, people can realise that minimum wage laws are a bad idea. Similarly, people can learn to understand that a market economy is not a zero-sum game, and they can learn to see the difference between those who acquired wealth by providing productive services for others (like entrepreneurs) and those who acquired wealth by extracting it from others by force or fraud (like politicians), and direct their natural feelings of envy and animosity only towards the latter group.
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I agree 100%.
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Interesting
Followed . upvoted
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Thank you for your comment!
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You're welcome
Can you check out my blog ?
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Nice post! Upvoted and following you.
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Thank you! I appreciate your comment and your contribution to this post's discussion. :)
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