Where Do We Go From HERE?

You all know this by now: Protesters have been blocking financial centers in ever-growing numbers, in an attempt to voice their dismay about the ruthless manner in which the supercapitalist rich have been throttling the American middle class. It's a heavy-handed, so-last-century method which provides weak impetus at best, and in this wireless electronic age can a machine as entrenched as business even be stopped with a physical roadblock?

No it cannot.

But there are more violent yet effective methods as yet untried which would. Cyber-terrorism. Targeted hostage-taking. Physical destruction.

You know I'm not advocating such methodology. Anyone who has read this blog knows that. What I'm getting at is, what if the people's voice is heard? What if the powers that be relent?

What if it works?

Stop laughing. No, really!

What is our next step going to be following the halting of 'business as usual'?

You think you know my response, me being the 'Perfect World' dude and all. However, you'd be wrong, and the reason may surprise you. I won't advocate switching over to Perfect World immediately, and here's why:

I have no idea how to do that.

Okay, that's not exactly true. I do have an idea, and a good one. But it involves a great amount of trust on the public's part, and an enormously difficult releasing of the reins from the people in charge. And these are two requests that ain't gonna come easy. So rather than upsetting our economy and our long-ingrained behaviors, we're going to need to ease ourselves into it. But how do we proceed from "Let's Do This!"?

Simple. We let MARTER DC do it. And you know that's not a rapper. It's an awful, awful acronym that stands for

Moratoriums

Assessments

Redesign

Testing 

Education

Reassignment

Deletion

Completion

and they are the necessary steps, in order, to transition us into Perfect World. Is it complete? No. This is a think-out-loud session, trying to establish an ordered way to smooth the mess we've made of things. I'm sure there will be other steps, interim steps which will be required, since redesigning society is a complicated chore. Some of them will likely mess with the acronym. We can only hope.

First we have to ease the fears and doubt coming from our largest segment of society, and we do that with Moratoriums. 


Moratoriums will be monetary in nature and will cut across the entire business world-- we universally suspend all final decisions. Nobody loses their job, nobody's note becomes due, nobody gets kicked out of their home. No plants close, no work stops, no strikes happen, or sit-ins, or any form of civil disobedience. 

All homeless people apply for and receive appropriate housing (basic designs, one bedroom per person) from the current large number of vacant units, without funding. Again, the numbers are kept through bookkeeping, but there will be no payments. People who are with mental issues will be helped with treatment or medication, or safe housing in sanatoriums if necessary.

People will still go to food and clothing stores but their receipts will be unpaid and assigned to their unique human identification code, of which every person already has several (for now). All this information tracking is important for the next step of determining what basic human needs are, with respect to world supplies.

Hospitals turn away no dire emergency. Nobody who is in immediate danger of dying will be turned away. Waiting lists for nonemergency procedures will be established on an urgency basis. Cosmetic surgeries will be placed on hold for a short while so that those doctors may assist with the immediate wellness of our population.

All but violent offenders are released from prison and juvenile halls into temporary housing in unused military bases or other large vacant properties until the steps of Assessment through Reassignment can be completed on them. People in jail for the so-called victimless crimes (drugs, prostitution, white collar) will skip this step and return to their families, or to private housing.

This first step is important because it sets the tone for the new society, and the tone is

People First.

Oh speaking of people by the way, corporations lose their peoplehood immediately. They simply become large organizations utilizing many human people, as every noncorporate business does.

Political deals cease. Political action committees of all types disband. Politicians go away. There are no more 'special interests'-- we're all 'special' now.

Religious power, such as it is, stops. No mentioning of any religious icons, or exhibiting specific religious behaviors which are not also societal behaviors. Groups are special interest, and we're all one people.

With most of society's claws tucked safely away, Assessment comes next. We need to decide as a planet what our human needs are. These are already largely defined with another exceedingly annoying acronym, CHEFCHEF. Clothing. Health. Education. Food. Companionship. Housing. Enlightenment. Freedom. In addition to these a far more comprehensive list of human wants are assembled, paying particular attention to the reason for those wants. For example, we know that people want alcohol. But we'll be asking the question: why do they want it, and how will that reason change when society does? 
We also know humans want entertainment, but in a future society which values health, will all the entertainment be so passive? People want televisions, but must they all be wall-sized behemoths? Must all their meat be prime, and must they receive as much meat as they want? These questions are addressed in the Education section, where people will learn new expectations, freedoms and restrictions. 

Redesign is the step which manages all the vast information gleaned from the Assessment and creates a working model humanity will live by. By covering just a few areas here, you'll begin to see how it will unfold:

--Mining is dangerous work but with applied science and machinery, removing ore from the ground could be made largely automated, as well as ecologically designed to leave surface features intact and not adding leaching poisons to the environment. Research of new methodology will be needed. New mining processes will be developed with significant manufacturing required. Training for the new methods will be intrinsic. You can see how this one new field creates an expanding network of interactions with other concerns.

--Transportation is a huge problem, with far too many vehicles making far too many trips thanks to multiple redundancies. The vehicles themselves are still designed with last century's technology, using dirty, carbon-emitting fuels, an area we are already trying to eliminate. First we analyze the need for all that movement to minimize what we can, then find new and better ways to move the most people and resources the most efficiently. High-speed rail might be one solution, and that brings again, research, development, manufacturing and construction efforts.

Taking the place of individualized organization will be a massive, multi-leveled piece of internet software which keeps all the information flowing. Tiers of programming will detail the full complement of world needs, from international (global cleaning and health; satellite systems; space exploration), through national, state, county, city, neighborhood... all the way to individual requirements (food, clothing, decorations, housing, health, entertainment, work, intimacy and entertainment). All the information is utilized to streamline human workload, minimizing overruns and shortages and maximizing its ability to say yes most of the time, increasing personal satisfaction to unseen levels.

The software knows (for example) how much copper is needed worldwide, knows how much is in reserve, how much is being recycled and how much is being mined... and it has this information for every resource. It knows how many man-hours are required in every project, every ongoing venture and every emergency response... and knows everyone who can contribute, and their proximity to the job. It then uses those facts to streamline necessary man-hours and direct them to those people best suited to handle them. The software also reaches into the cerebral as it organizes every contribution of art, music, science, literature and makes it available for all to appreciate and use as needed.

It would be like today's Internet all rolled into one organization mega-mind, managing the world and the people in it, to the maximum benefit of all.

Testing of every human being alive, young and old, would begin. We have let the undiscovered resources of too many individual minds be wasted for too many centuries. We are each unique. We each have many potential areas of expertise and talent. For many of us, those talents may lie forever dormant, unexplored and untapped, thanks to an inefficient education system which largely cattle-runs us and our children through an identical fact base, which has the net effect of making us all look relatively smart while watching similarly tailored game shows, but little else. And that doesn't take into consideration all the students who miss out on education altogether because of unfavorable circumstances, or those that suffer huge gaps in their education from inadequate homeschooling or private, unregulated institutions.

The testing process would end that mess, by using the most advanced and comprehensive techniques to determine each human being's basic desires and innate abilities. Those would be rated and categorized so that each person may contribute, to help society in the most efficient way possible.
These tests would determine a person's root abilities, their facility with words or visual interpretations, for example. It would test each facet of human knowledge and gauge the responses using sensitive equipment. These would be earmarked for the coming education process so that each person might finally contribute the skills they were born with. This also serves to streamline the work process so that much more can be accomplished using each person for fewer hours. At last, slaving away in an ill-fitting job until you retire will be a thing of the past. What few miserable jobs that can't be automated (yet) will be shared widely among the general populace so that, when your turn came up, it might be the only time in your life you would be expected to do so. 

Education 

In this new society freedom of the individual, while important, takes a back seat to the good of the many. Understand this will not affect your freedom to move about, experience the daylight and sun, feel the wind on your face; but rather will seek to restrict any negative actions towards other equal members. In a civilization your actions yield consequences and in this new society you will be expected to follow the rules of civility, an abused segment of behavior we currently tolerate, to our detriment. Rudeness, lying, bullying, fraud, violence, insensitivity and a host of other ill behaviors seen in wide use today will become reasons for individual retraining. Humans will no longer be free to abuse other humans-- this is an important facet of the new civilization. 

In a beneficial society of course, many of those anomalous behaviors begin to disappear anyway. The closer we get to perfecting the system, the fewer acts of contrition we'll see. We have learned that they are not actions in and of themselves as much as they are responses to the actions of others. Much like the social chain where boss yells at dad and then dad yells at mom so mom yells at child and then child yells at family dog, angry feelings telegraph through society. This behavior will need to be prevented by educating each human into exhaustive awareness of social interaction. But it doesn't stop there.

We know what the world needs of us, and what we need of the world. The Redesign step made that clear. Testing each person to find their natural strengths and desires allows them to now be placed in an intensive learning environment to hone their skills. But we're not just creating lookalike cogs for society's machine. Yes we need their skills, but because they have a natural affinity for them, the person will be more likely to enjoy their training and see it through to completion, and enjoy their contribution to society. Also, since we have shifted from a competitive model to a benevolent one, all the skills needed are likely to bring feelings of well-being to your environment, rather than bitterness and desperation, which happens so often here, now.

Reassignment asks the question 'How many people are working in a job they truly hate and would give up in a heartbeat if they could?" and then seeks to match these jobs with other, more natural volunteers. Furthermore, it finds the people who are well placed and cements them to the segment of contribution they appreciate, preventing the stress of late-life relearning.

 

With all these radical changes to society, many jobs will be disappearing in the Deletion part of the plan. Where will those workers go? The testing and education segments of this plan have already answered that question with 'wherever they are most able and/or comfortable'. Because many jobs will be deemed unnecessary, redundant or inferior, the remaining jobs will end up with many more potential workers. Since a citizen no longer needs to chase a job in order to have decent accommodations and a comfortable life, multiple people will now report to the same job, cycling through its hours with the others on an easily adjustable schedule. Of course that means there will be far fewer hours any one person will need to work, causing a greater amount of time be assigned to R and R, human interest areas and self betterment.
Here's an example. Farming is hard work. People must work from sunup to sundown, tending to the various needs of the farm. But now, with so many more volunteers, each farm could have 10 times the volunteers, causing each volunteer to have a much lighter workload. Also, new ideas for further automation will always be brought up, and implemented when possible, reducing even more the need for people to do the hard work. Instead, more will shift to the factories, producing the new automated machinery  for the farms. Once the farms have been stocked, the factories will be mothballed until such time as they are needed again.

Deletion is the step where all the negative aspects of our current society are removed, like unnecessary jobs, dangerous and substandard structures, damaging environmental procedures and organizations which inspire corruption or unhealthy competition and greed. 

Politics will be completely revamped, no longer requiring representation. So parties, candidates and political structures become pointless.
Infrastructure will be attended to after careful consideration of how best to house and move the world's people. Will we prefer to build city megastructures, connected by high speed rail, housing most of the inhabitants and business, with a distant circling rings for the noisy manufacturing and busy farming concerns, or will the city follow its roots with widely spaced individual dwellings interspersed with businesses, factories and farms? Whatever the results of the studies and votes say. Now every citizen has an equal say in the planning and commission of public projects.

As the task of tallying becomes pointless so do the money trades. As all products are freely given, items pertaining to security go away. Guards, gates, alarms, locks all fade.

Individual businesses cannot fail-- there is no failure in this system. If the need for a factory's product ends, reassignment of resources and volunteers is the natural next step. The need for advertising and associated trades (agencies, billboards etc) become pointless, as there is no purchasing incentive. The desire to make poor products to undercut better ones stops as citizens realize the inferior products waste resources and they stop requesting them. Often the inferior factory could just ask for and receive help to improve their product, even from the better product's factory, since competition is no longer the method, but cooperation. 

The people in all those deleted jobs are reassigned, based again on their innate strengths and desires.

Power, itself a source of corruption, instead of being held by small groups of people or even individuals, is now spread evenly across the entire globe. Public projects are proposed, researched and voted on by the people they affect; once approved, construction materials and talent are organized. It is likely that in the beginning there will be a huge number of new projects proposed which will neeed to be culled and organized by priority-- bridges before parks, re-foresting before stadiums-- necessity taking top billing until the projects thin out.

Completion

is the goal. There is no step here. Completion is the finish line. Our cities are clean and green. Our people are healthy, happy, smarter and are contained in logical global numbers. There is no corruption, no greed, no selfishness, no worry, no fear. Will life be perfect? Of course not. There are still accidents and incurable diseases, and people will still pass away of natural causes. Feelings will change and relationships will be made and broken. But with our new enlightenment comes a maturity, a wisdom which states that these things are sad but will get better, these things are here to teach us some of the lessons we can't or don't want to or shouldn't teach ourselves, and the rest of life is a beautiful, wonderful experience... because we decided as a people that THIS is the existence we'd like to live.


This is the Perfect World for Humanity.