ITT we talk about "perfect" societies

[zarus tathra]

worst nations in the world

If people want to live like that, I feel they should be free to. Your life and your death is your own and no one else's. This is especially true of the wilderness.

[Plu]

I don't think anybody wants murderers and other criminals to be given land next to them and free reign to do whatever they want. In fact, I don't even think anybody wants to live in your proposed wilderness. It sounds like a horrible place to live.

[Colanth]

If people want to live like that, I feel they should be free to. Your life and your death is your own and no one else's. This is especially true of the wilderness.

The main problem with your plan is that it just won't work unless a large enough percentage of the population wants to farm.  If they don't, you have to force them, or you have to come up with a different form of society.

And most people won't want to.

[zarus tathra]

Here's the thing: human civilization is not, and has never been, and will never be, self-sufficient. It has always depended on people working in the mines, fishing at sea, or tilling the fields. None of your "non-aggression principle" or "social justice" or "muh property rights" or "consent of the governed" bullshit will ever change that.

[Plu]

Here's the other thing: that doesn't make a society that forces people to do something they don't want and possible makes them worse off than they are now "perfect" by any meaning of the word. And none of your claims will change that, either.

[La Dolce Vita]

"Society can never be perfect therefor you should overlook all the terrible stuff in my perfect society"

[Sal1981]

Any (ideal) society is tempered by experience of the preceding societies.

[Sal1981]

You could get rich selling technocracy? Then there is hope, after all.

The outline of a 2-tiered populace in the OP has nothing to do with technocracy. Technocracy is basically, in principle, going towards a technological solution to societies management and issues.

I agree with you that using -isms for expounding ones position is futile and hardly creates a discourse on the ideas behind them, something libertarians/anarchists/whatever are guilty of with all their us-vs-them mentality that serves only to obfuscate discussion away from genuine issues that can be discussed, instead of throwing labels around.

Anyways, in my ideal society, I'll try to take into account human nature and how stuff works and explain and formulate my ideas.

---

First some labels to start from and work from; a society based on a chimera of a technocratic republic.

Instead of votes, government representatives are based on competence. This doesn't necessarily mean every head-of-state and representatives would be engineers and scientists. It would mean they would have to prove their competence to even be considered for government office. Also, managing and using something isn't the same as designing it, so the representatives would most likely be well-versed in management & political theory. Although I don't see why someone that is both that and a scientist couldn't take office, they might as well manage a nation better, that have a good understanding on how it works at the seams of that management. I'm fully aware this would create a ruling intellectual elite where stupid people are left out of government ... all the better, I think.

There should be some stop-gaps for consolidation of power, to prevent centralization and oligarchy, so dividing the power up into separate entities would be necessary in the system of governance. This the republic aspect of this nation. Representatives of the people would be able to put forward legislation or changes to the who governs with a foundational claim that the ones currently in power have made a bad management decision based on evidence and argumentation, instead of just vetoing stuff they disagree with. So a representative for argumentation would be one entity. Majority rule would be another one, i.e. voting system. A council who is comprised of elected and experts (that have proven themselves via competence test) could be yet another, and so on. The idea is that there are groups of electoral representatives alongside experts in several distinct groups that have influence over one anothers decisions towards some form of maxim decision, like a peer-reviewed journal of sorts.

Instead of money, everything would be calculated into basic units of energy exerted; Joules. Everything from how much a power plant produced to how much chemical energy is produced from crop yields. All this would be dispensed according to their input to everyone through a system of energy certificates based on that overhead calculation of the energy production. Where people work and how much they produce themselves would be according to their input. Someone really productive would reap more than someone producing less than them, this is just to give incentive really, but ideally input and what energy people get to use in goods & services should be, ideally, equally distributed. But we can assume that would hardly ever be the case and I think also someone putting more effort deserves to reap more.

Secondly, trade would be entirely bartering, no centralized currency other than what valuables/goods/service/land/whatever they decide to trade, that would be between the traders. This is probably the biggest flaw in my vision for an ideal state, since hoarding of what can be considered wealth is possible. My solution is a tad socialistic; lending from again the previous paragraph energy production, energy certificates would be the basis of how much you're legally allowed to own relative to your energy input. This would take supervision and policing of who owns and produces what. This bureaucratic way of solving this might be troublesome though, better would be to automate this somehow, I'm sure some technological checks for population energy input and ownership would be possible.

Education & knowledge in such a nation, or any nation for that matter, is paramount for its operation and prosperity. Scientific pursuit and the application of the scientific method would be, well, bluntly put, glorified above all else venues of human activity. Schools, universities, libraries and free access to information are cornerstones to such a nation. Because of this teachers and professors would actually find themselves in quite a lot of influence of the shaping and indirect controlling of the upper tiers of government (because of the formalization of competency tests and evaluation). Academic at the surface, this should be left to a peer-reviewing process, a council of scientists and experts who have proven their worth in their respective field of study. I know this sounds like foxes guarding the hen house, but I can't shake my faith in the integrity of scientists despite being only human.

Ethical & value considerations; far from being just another field of study, I think values should be studied. The way I see it, there are ethics & values which are separate from scientific knowledge. It might be shown that this is hogwash and that ethics and values are reducible to properties and understood through science. I don't know. Anyways, philosophical thought regarding ethics and values should have a prominent place I think.



[continued later]

[missingnocchi]

OP's perfect society makes no sense. Who cooks? Who cleans? Who manages the city water? Who produces goods and wares? Who transports the goods and wares? Who operates the power plant? Who builds the cities? Is it all robots? If it's all robots, why do we need farm hands? Can't the robots do that? Is everyone just a scientist whose needs are attended to by robots? What motivation do they have to keep doing science? Are the robots making them do it? Sounds like the setting of a sci-fi horror film to me.

[missingnocchi]

I'm going to give an example of where OP's society will fall apart (or in my opinion, improve.)

One thing that this society will not be able to go without is mining. Natural resources are a hugely important part of any society, and there is always high demand. Individual miners will be 100% useless. Most of them won't know what it is they need to be mining. Uranium, copper, salt, iron, aluminum, zinc, lead, and many more are all pretty vital, and it's doubtful that one guy could both identify and mine them. Most modern mining operations require massive machinery and expensive equipment. Dozens of miners will be needed for any individual operation, as well as a handful of engineers to make sure nobody gets killed. Then they'll need somebody to sell their haul, and it would be a hell of a lot more profitable to hire a salesman than to try to do it themselves. They'll probably need multiple salesmen if it's a big enough operation. Then they'll need somebody to handle the money, an accountant. They'll also need somebody to be in charge in order to deal with any disputes that come up. Suddenly, we're back to roughly the same set up we have today. Now who do you suppose needs who more, the scientists in the city, or the miners who provide the raw material the scientists need just to do their jobs? And that's not even going into the factories that will be needed to process those raw materials into something useful. More accountants, more salesmen, more non-farming working class, and only a handful of scientists.

Now say one mining outfit makes enough money to start opening new operations. Should each location have its own set of accountants and salesmen, or would it be more efficient to open a corporate location, filled with the office monkeys you seem to want to rid the world of? And this corporate location, would it be in the middle of nowhere, or a place with lots of residential space and potential hires, such as a city?

Can you see yet why your idea is total bologna? Even if your idea of super skilled craftsmen works for lower maintenance industries, there are massive sectors of any basic economy that require huge companies and a massive workforce. Your cities would need to house these people, because there sure as hell aren't going to be even close to enough scientists to actually inhabit the things.

[Special B]

For each individual to have the same vision of a perfect society, we would have to be so homogeneous that we would doubtfully have the variation and adaptability to survive as a species.

We can never agree on a perfect society, so that we might have a society at all.

To me, a combination of equality under the law with the freedom of individuality is what we should strive for. Even people that agree with those words will disagree on what they really mean, and how to make it happen. After another 1,000 years of human history, I hope the people alive then will have better ideas than I do. Human culture is a process, and all ideas are improved upon or discarded. All societies eventually fail. That is progress.

...or maybe something with virtual reality machines... and slaves...