Cosmic Utopia on Earth

At midnight all people of our country make a switch, someone who yesterday was a gardener, today becomes an engineer, yesterday’s building contractor becomes a judge, sovereign becomes a teacher, and so on. What remains unchanged is the society as a whole.

In every society of the old type most citizens perform their occupational functions poorly, and still the society does not seize to go on. Someone who is a poor gardener will ruin the garden, and a poor sovereign will ruin the entire country because both have the time to cause damage, time they do not have in our type of society. Furthermore in the old type of society, apart from poor skills, there is additional negative, even destructive effect of individuals’ private wants. Jealousy, egoism, conceit, vanity, want of power, all have a negative effect on the life of the society. This negative influence does not exist in our society. In our world one cannot do things to enrich oneself, or to make longer egoistic plans, hoping to enrich oneself in the long run, because tomorrow one becomes someone else, without knowing today what it will be. Stanislaw Lem

Now, imagine that citizens are drawn at random to advise governments on issues such as the environment, the economy, domestic and international policy, etc, much as jurors are called in to decide the outcomes of judicial cases… Sounds too much like fantasy? Well, look up a concept called Citizen Jury. It already exists. Cosmic utopia landed here on Earth.

Application for sex

Am reading an interesting book: We, by Eugene Zamiatin. Written in Russian, first published in translation, in English in 1924, We is set in a Utopian society where citizens’ every action is planned to the minute detail, everyone lives in a glass apartment, eats, sleeps and works at the same time, and files an application to have sex with a citizen (Number) of choice. Freedom is an unwanted concept that leads to unhappiness.

Every morning, with six-wheeled precision, we wake up, millions of us at once. At the very same hour, millions like one, we begin our work, and millions like one, we finish it. United into a single body with a million hands, at the very same second we carry the spoons to our mouths, at the same second we go out to walk, go to the auditorium, to the hall for the exercises, and then to bed.

Not as Utopian as it might have seem almost 100 years ago, We was an inspiration for Orwell’s 1984.