63 KiB
Less Retarded Society
Less retarded society (LRS, same acronym as less retarded software) is a model of ideal society towards which we, the LRS, want to be moving. Less retarded society is a peaceful, collaborative society based on love of all life, which aims for maximum well being of all living beings, a society without violence, money, oppression, need for work, social competition, poverty, scarcity, criminality, censorship, self-interest, government, police, laws, bullshit, slavery and many other negative phenomena. It equally values all living beings and establishes true social equality in which everyone can pursue his true desires freely -- it is a TRULY leftist society, NOT a pseudoleftist one. The society works similarly to that described by the Venus Project and various anarchist theories (especially anarcho pacifist communism), but it also takes good things from elsewhere, even various religions (without itself actually becoming a religion in traditional sense); for example parts of teaching of Jesus and Buddha. LRS isn't searching or arguing for ways to force people to behave well, it is arguing for people to behave well.
How is this different from other ideologies and "life philosophies"? Well, one principal difference is that LRS doesn't want to fight, in fact LRS adopts a pessimistic, defeatist mindset to not compromise morality by any desire to "win the game", behaving correctly is more important than achieving a goal, ends do NOT justify the means. In order to establish a truly good society a crucial realization is that harm is only ever done by those trying to force their ideas -- it is even irrelevant what the ideas are, whether it's self-interest, equality, collectivism, sharing, important is only that forcing any idea will do harm, so giving up force and violence is the absolutely essential first step we have to make. That's in stark contrast with today's mentality. Nowadays as well as in the past society has always been about conflict, playing a game against others (nowadays e.g. market competition, employment competition, media competition, ...) in which some win, some can manage and some lose. Most political parties nowadays just want to change the rules of the game or downright switch to a different kind of game, some want to make the rules "more fair", or to make it favor their represented minority (so called fascism), some just want to hack the game, some want to cheat to win the game easily, some want to play fair but still win (i.e. become "successful"). LRS simply sees any kind of such game as unnecessary, cruel, unethical and harmful in many ways not just to us, but to the whole planet. LRS therefore simply wants to stop the game, not by force but by making everyone see how bad the game is. It says that competition and conflict must seize to be the basis of society. There is no value in achieving anything by violence, such a change will soon be reverted by counter revolution, people themselves have to understand what's good and choose it voluntarily. That is one of the reasons why we are pacifists and reject all violence, only wanting to promote our ideas by education. We accept we may not achieve our goals and we most certainly won't achieve anything during our lifetime and that gives us the freedom to behave truly morally. We try to never be proud of anything, as pride leads to violence and fascism. We are also in many ways aligned with the ideals of cynicism.
Note that less retarded society is an ideal model, i.e. it can probably not be achieved 100% but it's something that gives us a direction and to which we can get very close with enough effort. We create an ideal theoretical model and then try to approximate it in reality, which is a scientific approach that is utilized almost everywhere: for example mathematics defines a perfect sphere and such a model is then useful in practice even if we cannot ever create a mathematically perfect sphere in the real physical world -- the mathematical equations of a sphere guide us so that with enough effort we are able to create physical spheres that are pretty close to an ideal sphere. The same can be done with society. This largely refutes the often given argument that "it's impossible to achieve so we shouldn't try at all" -- we should try our best and the closer to the ideal we get, the better for us.
In current society people wake up in the morning and go banging a head against a wall for the whole day, then they suffer from major headaches, sometimes acquire brain damage and their walls are red from all the blood. They try to solve this by investing into development of anti-headache medicine and researching paints that are cheap while covering the blood on the wall, some people spend centuries developing a wall material that's strong enough to hold the house but also locally soft so that it doesn't hurt that much to hit it with a head, but they created a system in which the material can only be used if some people throw enough pieces of paper that says "yes" into some kind of box and then some guy has to also draw a certain shape on a piece of paper, because otherwise it would be too easy. There are two major parties, one says you should hit the wall with your head as quickly as you can, the other one says you should hit it slowly but much stronger, then some smaller parties are something in between. Some very underground parties promote extremely progressive ideas such as leaving out the wall altogether and rather hitting yourself with a hammer because that's more efficient and the word efficiency sounds good. There are also organizations that overlook the discussion between these parties but they are corrupt so there is another organization that overlooks the previous organization. If you think it's all idiotic you're right -- the only sane group in the world is LRS that simply says: stop hitting walls with your heads you retards, it will solve everything and you'll get rid of all the bullshit around as a bonus.
Basis: Love Of All Life
When thinking about how to change society for the better, the first thing that needs to be done is defining a goal which the society should aim for -- an axiom which serves as a measure of what's objectively good and bad, which in turn helps us take the right steps towards the good. This is only logical, without a goal we aren't really trying to achieve anything and "good" and "evil" are just words without any objective meaning.
The basis of less retarded society is a universal and unconditional selfless altruistic love of all life (life at large, i.e. not just people, but also animals and other life forms and life as a concept); the kind of love a glimpse of which you catch when you for example observe an animal play and be happy of just existing as a living being that's able to feel joy and happiness. This kind of love and the strong emotion associated with it is to us possibly the greatest miracle of the universe and so we choose to support it, make it flourish, we define it as an axiom that life which experiences joy and happiness is good. Similarly we define it as bad when life feels suffering or when there is little or even no life in the universe. Here we set the goal for our society to support life, make it flourish, and make individual living beings feel happiness.
We purposefully make this goal a little bit vague, we avoid specifying our basic goal with exact mathematical metrics because defining maximization of any such measure as a goal leads to undesired results (as for example in capitalism setting the goal to maximizing capital leads to maximizing it on the detriment of all other values such as well being of people). This is known as the Goodhart's law: "when a metric becomes a goal, it stops being a good metric".
What does love of all life mean exactly? As hinted above, it does NOT necessarily mean maximizing specific measures such as abundance of life (which could lead to overpopulation and in turn to suffering), the sum of happiness of all life (which could lead to just dosing everyone with drugs or killing unhappy individuals), elimination of negative emotion such as hatred (which would likely prevent us from recognizing wrong directions of our society), it doesn't mean respect towards everyone etc. It doesn't even mean that we will never kill anyone on purpose, our society may support euthanasia without violating its principles. Love of all life mostly means that we start behaving selflessly and altruistically instead of pursuing self interest, at least as much as we practically can. It means that we start seeing the life on our whole planet (and possibly in the whole universe) as our own family, not as our enemies. This doesn't mean we will like everyone, that we'll agree with everyone's opinions, that we won't criticize anyone or that we'll be politically correct etc., it just means that we will never try to cause suffering to others, that we'll try to not exploit others, that we'll be aware of the needs of others and try to behave towards them with empathy and love. Importantly we will try to pursue these ideals even if we can't achieve perfection.
Basic Description
The following is a basic description of just some features of the ideal society, some of which are however only speculative. Keep in mind it is impossible to plan a whole society exactly -- even if some of the speculations here turn out to be somehow erroneous, it probably still doesn't present a fatal obstacle to implementing our society, things may simply just turn out differently or to be more or less challenging than we predict.
Our society is anarcho pacifist and communist, meaning it rejects capitalism, money, violence, war, states, social hierarchy etc. I.e. in our society money, market, capitalism, consumerism, private property, wage labor and trade don't exist, people are free and happy as they can pursue their true interests and potential without worrying about resource fight.
People don't have to work, basically everything is automated and extremely simplified so that the amount of work needed to be done is minimized by eliminating unnecessary bullshit jobs such as marketing, lawyers, insurance, politicians, state bureaucracy, creation of consumer entertainment and goods etc. One of the basic principles of our society is that any individual can simply live, without having to deserve this right by proving worth, usefulness, obedience etc. The little remaining human work that's necessary is done voluntarily. There is no life path ("elementary school, high school, college, marriage, work, retirement, death") lined up for anyone, no fight awaiting, only one lifetime given to the hands of every new born individual to dedicate to whatever he finds best.
As people don't have to work, very few people need to make daily travels, therefore there are very few roads and cars, making more space for nature, farming, leading to cleaner air, and almost completely eliminating noise and light pollution (and other things such as traffic accidents), furthermore also greatly reducing work needed to be done in connection to maintaining roads, sidewalks, directing traffic, manufacturing and repairing cars and so on. As no business exists anymore, there is no marketing, there are no ads, no billboards, no workplaces connected to marketing are needed anymore, further eliminating jobs, increasing space for living, for nature, mental health is increasing and so on. Disappearing industries further on eliminate other industries living off of them, such as law firms, transport companies, security agencies, cleaning firms, patent offices, state bureaucracy and so on and so forth. More people can now study medicine as opposed to investing in bitcoin or making bullshit startups, leading to greater number of doctors who can dedicate more time to patients, which together with free healthcare and the great stress relief increases health of people -- people are happier, full of life and can do anything they feel is best with full focus, without distractions and bullying. Increased mental health and abundance leading to decrease in conflicts and crime lead to eliminating police and army, more jobs and bullshit are being rid of, well being of people is skyrocketing, nature is recovering, society is flourishing.
Society is NOT based on competition, but rather on collaboration. Making people compete for basic life resources is seen as highly cruel and unethical. The natural need for competition is still satisfied with games and sports, but people know competition is kind of a poison and know they have to practice self control to not allow competitive tendencies in real life.
There is abundance of resources for everyone, poverty is non existent, artificial scarcity is no longer sustained by capitalism. There is enough food and accommodation for everyone, of course for free, as well as health care, access to information, entertainment, tools and so on. Where there used to be shopping centers, parking lots, government buildings and skyscrapers, there are now fields and food banks and people voluntarily collaborate on automating production of food on them.
Our society is NOT fair, everyone is happy whether he deserves it or not, happiness doesn't have to be deserved. Fairness is a concept valued by competitive systems, not altruistic ones, it is an attribute of the system that ensures the better one wins and worse one loses, i.e. in a fair society the talented is rewarded and the untalented suffers, the strong wins and the weak loses, fairness is about winning and losing, reward and punishment, therefore our society is unfair as there are no longer any winners or losers.
States and governments don't exist, there are no artificial borders. Society self regulates and consists of decentralized, mostly self-sufficient communities that utilize their local resources as much as they can and send abundant resources to communities that lack them. The is no law in the sense of complex written legislation, no lawyers, courts and police, society works on the principle of moral laws, education and strictly non-violent actions taken against negative phenomena (e.g. noncooperation, avoidance, ignoring, refusal of people to use money etc.). Communities aren't hugely interdependent and hyperspecialized as in capitalism so there is no danger of system collapse, but they aren't isolated or nationalist, they are altruistic, communist and help each other. Many decisions nowadays taken by politicians, such as those regarding distribution of resources, are in our ideal society made by computers based on collected data and objective scientific criteria.
Criminality doesn't exist, there is no motivation for it as everyone has abundance of everything, no one carries guns, people don't see themselves as competing with others in life and everyone is raised in an environment that nurtures their peaceful, collaborative, selfless loving side. People with "criminal genes" have become extinct thanks to natural selection by people voluntarily choosing to breed with non-violent people. Conflict between people is minimized by the elimination of self interest (and need for it) -- a lot of violence in current society comes from disagreement which comes from everyone's different goals (everyone aims to benefit oneself); in our society this is no longer the case, people rarely disagree on essential decisions because decisions are driven by pure facts collected without distortion or suspicion of self interest, i.e. there are common goals as opposed to a delicate balance between opposing forces.
Technology is simple, powerful, efficient, future proof, ecological, generally good and maximally helps people. Internet is actually nice, it provides practically all information ever digitized, for example there is a global database of all videos ever produced, including movies, educational videos and documentaries, all without ads, DRM and copyright strikes, coming with all known metadata such as tags, subtitles, annotations and translations and are accessible by many means (something akin websites, APIs, physical media, text transcripts, ...), all videos can be downloaded, mirrored and complex search queries can be performed, unlike e.g. with YouTube. Satellite images, streams from all live cameras and other sensors in the world are easily accessible in real time. Search engines are much more powerful than Google can dream of as data is organized efficiently and friendly to indexing, not hidden behind paywalls, JavaScript obscurity or registrations to websites, which means that for example all text of all e-books is indexed as well as all conversations ever had on the Internet and subtitles of videos. All source code of all programs is available for unlimited use by anyone. There are only a few models of standardized computers -- a universal public domain computer -- not thousands of slightly different competing products as nowadays. There is a tiny, energy efficient computer model, then a more powerful computer for complex computations, a simple computer designed to be extremely easy to manufacture etc. None of course have malicious features such as DRM, gay teenager aesthetics, consumerist "killer features" or planned obsolescence. All schematics are available. People possibly wear personal wrist-watch-like computers, however these are nothing like today's "smart" watches/phones -- our wrist computers are completely under the user's control, without any bullshit, spyware, ads and other malicious features, they last weeks or months on battery as they are in low energy consumption mode whenever they're not in use, they run extremely efficient software and are NOT constantly connected to the Internet and updating -- as an alternative to connecting to the Internet (which is still possible but requires activating a transmitter) the device may just choose to receive a world-wide broadcast of general information (which only requires a low power consumption receiver) if the user requests it (similarly to how teletext worked), e.g. info about time, weather or news that's broadcasted by towers and/or satellites and/or small local broadcasters. Furthermore wrist computers are very durable and water proof and may have built-in solar chargers, so one wrist computer works completely independently and for many decades. They have connectors to attach external devices like keyboards and bigger displays when the user needs to use the device comfortably at home. The computing world is NOT split by competing standards such as different programming languages, most programmers use just one programming language similar to C that's been designed to maximize quality of technology (as opposed to capitalist interests such as allowing rapid development by incompetent programmers or update culture).
Fascism doesn't exist, people no longer compete socially and don't live in fear (of immigrants, poverty, losing jobs, religious extremists etc.) that would give rise to militarist thought, society is multicultural and races highly mixed. There is no need for things such as political correctness and other censorship, people acknowledge there exist differences -- differences (e.g. in competence or performance) don't matter in a non-competitive society, discrimination doesn't exist.
Computer security is not an issue anymore, passwords and encryption practically don't exist anymore, there is nothing to "steal", no money on the Internet, no way to abuse personal data, no possibility to ruin someone's career, no celebrity accounts to hack etc.
All people speak the same language, possibly Esperanto or Lojban. Though some speak multiple languages, most of the world languages have become archaic and are studied e.g. for the sake of understanding old texts. Of course dialects and different accents of the world language appear, but all are mutually intelligible thanks to constant global communication and also people being so well educated as to willingly try to not diverge from the main form too much.
People don't wear clothes unless for practical reasons (weather, safety, ...). Fashion and shame of nudity doesn't exist and it is seen as wasteful to keep manufacturing, cleaning and recycling more clothes than necessarily needed. Of course it is NOT forbidden to wear or make clothes, people just mostly naturally don't engage in unnecessary, wasteful activity.
Anyone can have sex with anyone, without hurting anyone of course, but there are no taboo limitations like forbidden incest, sex with children, animals or dead bodies, everything is allowed and culturally acceptable as long as no one gets hurt. "Cheating" in today's sense doesn't exist, marriage doesn't exist, people regularly have sex with many other people just to satisfy the basic need. People have learned to separate sex and love. Of course many people still live in life-long partner relationships.
There are no heroes or leaders. People learn from young age that they should follow ideas, not people or groups of people, and that cults of personality are dangerous. There are known experts in different disciplines and areas of science, but no celebrities, experts aren't worshiped, their knowledge is treated the same as we nowadays e.g. treat information that we find in a database. This doesn't mean there aren't people who are good moral examples and whose behavior is admired, people are just separated from their actions, people admire behavior, not the individual -- all people are loved unconditionally, some had the opportunity to take admirable actions and took it, some were born to perform well in sports or excel in science, but that's no reason to love the individual any more or any less or to worship him as a god.
Education is not indoctrination, it is actually good, people (not only children) attend schools voluntarily (though such "schools" will be extremely different from what the word means today), there are no grades, degrees or tests that need to be passed or prescribed courses, only recommendations and guidance of other people. There is no strict division to students and teachers, teachers are students at the same time, older people teach younger. There may of course exist voluntary tests that people can take to test their knowledge and competence, but no one is forced to pass tests to continue studying etc.
People don't kill or otherwise abuse and torture animals, people just don't eat much meat and if they want to, artificial meat is widely available. Some may possibly eat meat of animal and people that died naturally, which is acceptable.
Cannibalism is acceptable as long as high hygiene is respected as it puts a dead body to good use instead of wasting food by burying it or burning it. Even though most people don't practice cannibalism, it is perfectly acceptable that some do. Many people wish to be eaten after death either by people or by animals (as for example some Buddhists do even nowadays).
People aren't individualist and egoistic, they don't have tattoos, dyed hair, piercing etc., that's simply bullshit of primitive competitive cultures. It is correctly seen as immoral to try to persuade by "good looks" -- for example by wearing a suit -- that's simply a cheap attempt at deception. Everyone is valued the same no matter his looks, people don't feel the need to change their gender or alter their look so as to appeal to anyone or to follow some kind of fashion, trend, to strategically join some minority to gain the best set of "rights" or to infiltrate specific social class. Of course cutting hair e.g. for comfort is practiced, but no one wastes his time with makeup and similar nonsense.
People live in harmony with nature, from space it is hard to tell humans live on Earth, the enormous waste of capitalism and consumerist society has been eliminated, industry isn't raping nature. Cities (or rather many villages) are greener and more integrated with nature, people live in energy-efficient underground houses (by which they create more land), there are fewer roads as people don't use cars much thanks to efficient public transport and lower need for commuting and transportation thanks to not having to go to work, utilizing mostly local resources etc. Thanks to this light pollution, noise and CO2 emissions decrease greatly. Although work is automatized, relatively few machines are required thanks to simplification and eliminating all bullshit that's connected to running our current farms and factories (which further eliminates the recursive need for factories that create machines for building and maintaining factories etc.), and thanks to decreased need of things, for example mentioned cars.
Research advances faster, people are smarter, more rational, emphatic, loving and more moral. Nowadays probably the majority of the greatest brains are wasted on bullshit activity such as studying and trying to hack the market -- even professional researchers nowadays waste time on "safe", lucrative unnecessary bullshit research in the "publish or perish" spirit, chasing grants, easy patents etc. In our ideal society smart people focus on truly relevant issues such as curing cancer, without being afraid of failure, stalling, negative results, lack of funds etc. People are well educated and practice e.g. voluntary birth control to prevent overpopulation. However people are NOT cold rational machines, on the contrary emotions are present much more than today, for example the emotion of love towards life is so strong most people are willing to die to save someone else, even a complete stranger. People express emotion through rich art and good deeds. People are also spiritual despite being highly rational -- they know rationality is but one of many tools for viewing and understanding the world. Religion still exists commonly but not in radical or hostile forms; Christianity, Islam and similar religions become more similar to e.g. Buddhism, some even merge after realizing their differences are relatively unimportant and stop competing for mass control of people, religion becomes much less organized and much more personal.
Art is rich and unrestricted (no copyright or other "IP" exists), with people being able to fully dedicate their lives to it if they wish and with the possibility to create without distraction such as having to make living or dealing with copyright. People collaborate and reuse each other's works, many free universes exist, everyone can enjoy all art without restriction and remix it however he wishes. Art is not someone's property or capital, it is a discovery made by someone for everyone's benefit.
War is impossible in this world -- states, nations and borders between countries no longer exist, people naturally avoid forming fascist groups that would compete and since everyone has abundance of everything and since things such as poverty, crime (which could be blamed on "someone else"), politicians, "jobs" to be "taken", heroes to be followed and fear culture no longer exist, there is simply no reason for people to even think about war, not even talking about a strong culture of non-violence that wouldn't allow resolving any conflict with violence even if it appeared. People don't confine themselves to their own "country", they travel freely and get to know people all around the globe, everyone shares a common language and see every other human being as part of his own family. Even if a mentally ill individual appears who wants to start a war for its own sake, it's impossible for him to do -- how can he convince thousands of people to start killing each other when these people don't have any reason for doing so, when they love each other and are happy doing what they're doing? To convince a man to go take a weapon and walk to literal hell to kill other human beings while at constant risk of dying a horrible death requires people to be extremely brainwashed, desperate, miserable and cornered into seeing no other option -- without this no one will ever want war. For this reason armies no longer exist either, people don't even know how to lead wars, war is simply a thing of the past.
People live much longer and healthier lives thanks to faster research in (actual) medicine, free healthcare, more doctors (those who nowadays do bullshit business), better food (no junk/fast food), less pollution, higher living standard, more natural life closer to nature, minimization of stress and elimination of the antivirus paradox from medicine. They also die more peacefully thanks to having lived a rich, fulfilling lives, they die in the circle of their family and are not afraid of death, they take it as natural part of life, death is culturally accepted and not feared. Euthanasia is allowed and common for those who wish to die for whatever reason.
A paradise is achieved on Earth.
FAQ
See also FAQ.
- Isn't it utopia? As explained above, the society is an ideal model that's probably not 100% achievable, but we are pretty certain we can get extremely close to the ideal in the real world implementation, there are no known obstacles to it. Even if we couldn't get very close to the ideal, it would be better to get a little closer than not, there is no logic in refusing to try. Every major invention happened for the first time one day, even when it's been called impossible; for example before Wikipedia practically everyone would tell you the principles on which it would be built (free voluntary work, allowing anyone to edit) were utopian. History is basically a constant stream of events proving our disbeliefs wrong. Things such as abolishment of death sentence, universal literacy, universal health care, women in science, abolishment of black man slavery, instant world wide communication and similar things might have once been deemed a similar utopia.
- How is this different from "communism", "socialism" and other movements/ideologies that brought so much suffering and eventually failed anyway? We are very different especially by NOT advocating revolutions, violence and forceful application of our ideas, we simply educate, show what's wrong and what the solution is. Harm has only ever been done by forcing specific ideas, no matter whether rightist or leftist ones -- the key in preventing harm is to avoid the temptation of forcing ideas. We know that only a voluntary, non-violent change based on facts and rational thinking can succeed in long term. The mistake of every failed "utopian" ideology was that it was forced, oppressive and in the end served only a few as opposed to everyone, no matter what the initial idea was. These ideologies fought other ideologies, creates cults of personalities and propaganda to manipulate masses. We do not fight anyone, we simply show the truth and offer it to people and believe that this truth can't be unseen. Once enough people see the truth and know what the logical solution is, a change will happen naturally, peacefully and inevitably, without any force.
- How do you think it is realistic to achieve abundance of resources for all? Nowadays it is easily possible to produce enough resources for everyone, i.e. food, electricity, clothing, buildings to live in etc. -- in fact this has been possible for many decades to centuries now, today all the technology for 99% automated production of most basic resources such as food and electricity is available and well tested, it is just kept in private hands for their sole profit. Nowadays our society is putting most of its effort to artificially made up "businesses" that keep the status quo, partly out of social inertia and partly by the (mostly decentralized and to a degree not even self admitted) conspiracy of the rich. Imagine people stop engaging in marketing, market speculation and investing, bureaucracy, public relations, law (copyrights, patents, property laws, taxes, ...), economics, military, meaningless technology (DRM, spyware, cryptocurrency, viruses and antiviruses, ...), artificial meaningless fashion, drug abuse business, organizing political parties, campaigns, unions, counter unions, cartels, strikes, and so on and so forth (this of course doesn't mean hobbies and art should disappear, just unnecessary industries). We will gain millions of people who can help achieve abundance, land that can be used to produce food and build houses to live in (as opposed to skyscrapers, unnecessary factories, parking lots etc.), and we will let go of the immense burden of bullshit business (millions of unnecessary workplaces having to be maintained, millions of people having to commute by car daily, communicate, organize, be watched by employers, ...). People will get healthier, more rested, cooperative and actually passionate about a common goal, as opposed to depressed (needing psychiatrists and antidepressants), lethargic and hostile to each other. Of course this can't happen over night, probably not even over a decade, but we can make the transition slowly, one step at a time and in the meanwhile use rules based e.g. on the following principle: that which is abundant is unlimited for everyone, that which is scarce is equally divided between all. The question is not whether it's possible, but whether we want to do it.
- Isn't your society unnatural? In many way yes, it's unnatural just as clothes, medicine, computers or humans living over 70 years are unnatural. Civilization by definition means resisting the cruelness of nature, however our proposed society is to live as much as possible in harmony with the nature and is much more natural than our current society which e.g. pushes sleep deprivation, high consumption of antidepressants, eating disorders, addiction to social networks and so on.
- Won't people get bored? What will motivate people? If they have everything why would they even get out of bed? Haven't you seen the mouse utopia experiments? It is a mistake to think that competition and the necessity of making living is the only or even the main driving force of human behavior and creativity (on the contrary, it is usually what makes people commit suicides, i.e. lose the will to live). Human curiosity, playfulness, the joy of collaboration, boredom, sense of altruism, socialization, seeking of life meaning and recognition and many other forces drive our behavior. Ask yourself: why do people have hobbies when no one is forcing them to it? Why don't you bore yourself to death in your spare time? Why don't rich people who literally don't have to work bore themselves to death? Why doesn't your pet dog that's not forced to hunt for food bore himself to death? Instead of the rat utopia urban legend try the cat utopia project yourself: buy a cat, give it love, home, food, toys, leisure, freedom and healthcare for free, see if it gets depressed -- many people have performed this experiment over and over and it usually turns out the animal is the happiest being under the Sun. Maslow's hierarchy of needs tells us that once people fulfill basic needs such as that for obtaining food, they naturally start to pursue higher ones such as that for socializing or doing science or art. Unlike rats in small cages people show interests in seeking satisfaction of higher needs than just food and sex, even those that aren't scientist try to do things such as sports, photography, woodwork or gardening, just for the sake of it. It's not that there would be a lack challenges in our society, just that we wouldn't force arbitrary challenges on people.
- Why are you defeatist? Don't you think it's just pointless trying to achieve something while believing you already failed? Firstly being defeated doesn't mean disappearing completely, we know we will fail but we'll leave a seed of something that can't eventually be stopped from growing: LRS is extremely ahead of its time -- not by 50 years or 100 years, but more like several thousand years, maybe millions. Monkeys aim to prevail during their life time and by getting at the top of some kind of mountain or social pyramid, by hoarding X wealth, passing some law, creating some kind of country or whatever -- that's completely worthless animal behavior, we aim to achieve something truly significant and good instead which will take longer than our lifetime and will require behaving without self interest and competition. Just like abacus was the very first step towards inventing today's computers, LRS is in this sense the very first step to inventing a truly good society. It is first by completely letting go of all bullshit, every single one, including things like "winner mentality", which is why there are almost no supporters, everyone fails by keeping to the old ways at least in some points. We aim for truth and good, not for winning -- giving up the goal of winning makes us able to take the moral decision in situations when we have to choose between winning and behaving correctly.
- Without violence, how will you prevent capitalists from continuing capitalism? As also stated e.g. in the Trash Magic manifesto, we can simply destroy the economy by refusing to participate in it -- a capitalist cannot sell a thing that's abundant, available everywhere for free, he can't sell services if those services are provided for free. Capitalism is depending on the fact that those who it abuses have nowhere to run away to, once enough of us start building such place and provide a bette place to live, suddenly more people will leave the capitalist system and even if some capitalists remain, they won't be able to do anything, economy won't work anymore.
- If you say it's possible, why wasn't it done before? Firstly big and small scale communities working on anarchist, communist and peaceful principles have existed for a long time in environments that allow it, e.g. those that have abundance of resources. Globally society couldn't reach this state because only until recently we lacked the technology to provide such an ideal environment globally or even on a scale of a whole country, i.e. only until recently we have been forced by the nature to compete for basic resources such as food and space to live. However with computers, factories, high level of automation and other technology and knowledge we posses, we now have, for the first time in history, the capability to establish an environment with abundance of resources for everyone on the planet. Nowadays only social inertia in the form of capitalism is ARTIFICIALLY keeping scarcity and social competition in place -- getting rid of this obsolete system is now needed to allow establishment of our ideal society. Part of the answer to this question may also be that reaching such an advanced state of society requires long development, technological, cultural and intellectual, just as many other things (things like abolishment of death sentence or even accepting the existence of irrational numbers all required a long time of cultural development).
- How will you make people work? We won't, in an ideal society people don't have to work, all work is done by machines -- that's the point of creating machines in the first place. In practice there may in a foreseeable future be the need for small amounts of human work such as overlooking the machines, but the amount of work can be so small that volunteers will easily handle it -- especially with people having no burden of working day jobs there should be no shortage of volunteers. Remember that by abandoning the current system 99% of "bullshit work" (marketing, lawyers, bureaucracy, fashion, ...) will disappear.
- Does elimination of bullshit jobs (and bullshit in general) mean my favorite activity will disappear?! Unless your hobby is something like killing people for fun, we don't really aim to force anyone to quit anything he likes to do, on the contrary we aim exactly to establish the freedom to do anything one desires, just without artificially pushing masses to engage in some hyped activity (as nowadays does economy, politics, fashion, propaganda, mainstreamization etc.). So if you like e.g. designing clothes, you are free to do so as a form of art, we just argue against e.g. socially forced necessity to follow fashion in clothing and making capitalist business out of it, which is what we call "bullshit", i.e. if you really love it, you can do it, there will just be many fewer people doing it as only those who truly love doing the activity for its own sake will be doing it (without economy you won't be rewarded for your activity, you will only ever get the joy of doing the activity and it potentially helping others). We believe most bullshit activities that were invented by capitalism, such as marketing, will simply naturally disappear once capitalism ends -- there is no need to force disappearance of something that dies out naturally. Yes, it is most likely you will let go of some things you perhaps enjoying today, such as e.g. collecting games in your Steam library -- simply because this won't be possible anymore (there will be no Steam, all games will be free) -- but you will replace these with much healthier activities, for example cultivating your library of physical books in your house. Just as a child lets go of playing with its toys and starts engaging in more meaningful hobbies once it matures, people will naturally (without being forced to) change their habits as they mature (or rather when they are no longer prevented by society from being able to mature).
- How will society make progress? Just as it always had: by science, curiosity, necessity, accidental discoveries, pursuit of creating art etc. It is a mistake to think we need capitalism or anything similar in order to make progress; progress cannot be stopped no matter what, it will always be here as long as humans exist.
- How do you prevent natural human selfish and violent behavior? Violent and selfish behavior is natural in us just as peaceful and altruistic behavior, we have two sides and which one shows is mostly determined by the conditions in which we live, by our upbringing and people we see as role models. Nowadays we think people are extremely selfish and violent because we live in society that highly fuels the "evil" side in us, when we're forced to fight for basic living and grow up in a highly competitive environment, it's no surprise most adapt to this and grow up to be "dicks". If we're forced to fight for food and brainwashed since birth that "life is a fight", we will be selfish and violent, just as wild wolves are violent while pet dogs whose needs are secured and who were raised peacefully are mostly completely peaceful. If we have abundance and grow up in a society that naturally rejects any violence, we will grow up to solve conflicts peacefully and think of others, just as nowadays we e.g. naturally learn to wear clothes because simply everyone does it and there is little reason not to. If we make resources abundant, there will be no need for selfishness -- do you see anyone stealing air from others out of selfishness? No, because there is no need for it, air is abundant. By changing the environment people live and grow up in we will make 99.99% of people abandon violence and selfish interests (note the remaining natural need for selfishness and competition can be satisfied e.g. with games).
- How will you prevent chaos without laws or rules for the people? We don't say there should be no rules, we are just against complicated written law that no one can even comprehend (even lawyers don't know all laws nowadays) and that has so little in common with morality. Our society works on the basis of moral rules that all stem from the common goal of well being of living beings and that are derived and taught by people themselves -- for example one moral rule that all people would learn would be that money is bad for society (along with the reasons why it is so) and even though there would be no police "enforcing" this rule, the rule would be effective by the fact that absolute majority of people would simply refuse to use money -- in a society where most people know capitalism is bad for them capitalism can't work. Note the importance of the fact that people wouldn't just be taught to memorize such rules as "facts set in stone" (as is our current law), emphasis would be put on people deriving their moral code and understanding how their behavior affects others, people would learn and teach by example.
- How will you prevent criminality such as stealing, murder and mafia organizations? In a society with abundance for all which works for the good of all criminality simply won't make sense, i.e. we will eliminate criminality by solving the root cause of it, not by curing the symptoms (building prisons etc.). People have no reason to revolt against a system that benefits them or attack other people if there is no conflict between them. Large criminal organizations also cannot exist if most population rejects them, for example there cannot arise a capitalist corporation (or a similar mafia organization) if most population is educated and refuses to engage in capitalism. In addition to this a more mature, well educated society will naturally minimize genetic predisposition to things such as aggression and self interest by natural selection as females will choose to rather have offspring with good people (unlike today), making genes associated with bad behavior go extinct. Of course, we probably won't eliminate criminality 100%, but that's not possible under any other system -- even in your current society with prisons and other punishments there still exist criminality. Of course in practice, until we achieve our ideal, we will likely need to keep some anti-criminality precautions as a necessary evil, but generally we will be able to greatly relax them (reduce police numbers, abandon death penalty, ...) as we move towards the ideal society. For example in an intermediate state of our society dangerous criminals won't be killed but only immobilized and they won't be put in prisons as a punishment but only sent to e.g. a remote island so as to be isolated, without punishing them by restricting their freedom within the island.
- How will the economy work without money? With abundance of resources there will be no money and no trade, resources will be available to anyone who needs them. Various anarchist schools already have proposals for how distribution of resources could work. The Venus Project calls this a resource based economy and proposes using computers and globally placed sensors to collect data and make decisions about where to distribute resources. Resources would be gathered and distributed more locally and cities would be more self sufficient so as to prevent waste and vulnerability of the system, we wouldn't see a huge globalization like nowadays, there is e.g. no need for transporting exotic food all over the whole world to places where there is enough local food available, however anything could be distributed to places where such resources are scarce (e.g. water to deserts). Each community could have food banks and other storage and distribution centers.
- How will you prevent discrimination and racism? Things such as racism appear when one group of people feels endangered by another group, in a society without social competition these issues will naturally disappear.
- How will you fulfill the natural need of people for competition? With sports and other games. Competition of people won't be forbidden, it just won't be mandatory and it won't be the basis of society.
- How will you prevent overpopulation? By voluntary birth control.
- How will you force people to change so radically? We won't force people to change, the change has to be voluntary, and that will be achieved by education and then, over generations, by slower but still relatively rapid evolutionary changes, like those seen in domesticated animals and those that have been selectively bred -- domesticated animals naturally became less aggressive (to the point of seeing cats, mice and dogs cuddle and coexist peacefully not being any rarity) because they started to live in abundance, with no need for aggression or figting; evolution will simply remove any unnecessary traits -- yes, very quickly if needed; evolution is nearly as quick as the change of environment. So we don't advocate revolution but rather a slower, evolutionary transition. Just as now you're learning about our ideal society, more people will. With more people on the board the word should spread more quickly and with better conditions and greater general education of people over the world more will start to see and realize this is the only way forward. With more people refusing competition and starting to live better and once we make it so that competition and aggression is no longer a prerequisite for survival and reproduction, evolution will start to take place, removing competitiveness, which will stabilize the society.
- Do you really think you can convince even diehard neonazis to accept these ideas? Not in their lifetime -- some people can't practically be convinced, it would take longer than they will be alive. But these people will die one day and there will come a new generation, a tabula rasa, which will have the opportunity for a better upbringing and not growing up to become diehard nazis.
- Without any censorship how will you prevent "hate speech" or protect people's personal data? As mentioned above, racism and issues of so called "hate speech" will simply disappear in a non-competitive society. The issues of abuse of personal information will similarly disappear without any corporations that abuse such data and without conflict between people, in the ideal society there won't even be any need for things such as passwords and encryption.
- How will you prevent psychopaths from just going and killing people? In the ideal society maximum effort will be made to prevent wrong psychological development of people which can happen due to crime, poverty, discrimination, bullying etc., so the cases of lunatics killing for no reason would be extremely rare but of course they would happen sometimes, as they do nowadays, they cannot be prevented completely (they aren't completely prevented even nowadays, a psychopath is not afraid of police). Our society would simply see such events as unfortunate disasters, just like natural disasters etc. In transition states of our society there may still exist imperfect means of solving such situations such as means for non lethal immobilization of the attacker and his isolation (but not punishment, i.e. not a prison).
- Would such society be stable? Wouldn't people revert back to "old ways" over time? We believe the society would be highly stable, much more than current society plagued by financial crises, climate changes, wars, political fights etc. The longer a good society stays, the more stable it will probably become as its principles will become more and more embedded in the culture and there will be no destabilizing forces -- no groups revolting "against the system" should appear because no one will be oppressed and therefore unhappy about the situation. Furthermore, like mentioned above, once competitiveness becomes unnecessary, evolution will slowly start removing the competitive trait of humans as it will no longer be needed, just like it removed our fur for example; humans will become less and less aggressive like domesticated animals have, and then it will be as rare to see an aggressive human as seeing a cow behave like a predator. Evolution is normally slow, but only because environmental changes are slow; with rapid change of society (for the better) a quite rapid evolution should be seen as well (this has already been observed in nature); just like humans degenerate very quickly by society getting rapidly worse (allergy, bad immunity, worse eyesight, more cancer, depression, autism and plethora of other things we see), they should start rapidly improving with fast changes for the better.
- Will you allow abortions? There is no strict YES/NO answer here, as with everything there will be no simple allowing or forbidding laws, decisions about abortions will be made in the spirit of the common goal, handled on a case-by-case basis and strong prevention of unwanted and/or risky pregnancy. There will be more people willing to adopt children, birth control means will be better and accessible to anyone for free, children will not pose any financial burden or be an "obstacle to one's career", so this issue won't be nearly as great as it is today.
- You say you want equality of all living beings -- does this mean you will force animals to not kill each other or that you will refuse to e.g. kill viruses? Ideally we would like to maximize the happiness and minimize suffering of all living beings, even primitive life forms such as bacteria, and if that cannot be achieved at the time, we will try to get as close to it as we can and do the next best thing. Sometimes there are no simple answers here but the important thing is the goal we have to keep in mind. For example provided that we want to sustain human life (i.e. we don't decide to starve to death) we have to choose what to eat: nowadays we will try to be vegan so as to spare animals of suffering but we are still aware that eating plants means killing plants which are living beings too -- we don't think the life of a plant is less worthy of an existence than that of an animal, but from what we know plants don't show signs of suffering to the degree to which e.g. mammals do, so eating plants rather than animals is the least evil we can do. Once we invent widely available artificial food, we will switch to eating that and we'll stop eating plants too.
How To Implement It
This is the hard part, however after successfully setting things in motion it may start to become much easier and eventually even inevitable that the ideal society will be closely approached. Our forefront goal is to change the culture, the mindset, the way people think -- not the laws, laws are irrelevant, they are in place to tame shitty culture (not even mentioning that by now law is just business, degenerated and corrupted so that it fails even at really providing anything to the people), once culture is fixed, laws will be eliminated. That's partly why there is no point in voting or supporting political parties, we mustn't rely on "something else" (laws) or "someone else" (political parties) to make good society for us, we must make it ourselves by simply starting to behave well as we watch the system crumble under its own weight -- for this we develop a parallel culture that's forked from the older, saner culture and developed in better direction than where it went; our less retarded culture exists alongside the toxic modern culture and is seen as "offensive" by it (just as anything from the past), nevertheless we must keep to it as much as possible -- this society relies on retards adjusting to any culture they live in (just like most people will acquire the accent of the place they live in), so we mustn't do that (we must keep our own "language" no matter what anyone around us speaks). For this we may have to isolate ourselves from the toxicity of today (political correctness, productivity cult, fear culture, privacy hysteria, pedophobia, gay fascism, woman fascism and so on) and just not behave in alignment with today's world at all.
However at the moment society seems too spoiled and change of a direction seems very unlikely, it seems more probable that society will destroy itself or enslave everyone forever -- capitalism and similar misdirections of society connected to self-interest, competition, fascism etc. pose a huge threat to our endeavor and may ruin it completely, so they need to be strictly opposed, but in a CORRECT way, i.e. not by revolutions and violence but rather by education, offering alternatives and leading examples (i.e. means aligned with our basic values). It has to be stressed that we always need to follow our basic values of nonviolence, love, true rationality etc., no compromise of these is ever possible. Resorting to easy ways of violence, forcing ideas etc. will only prolong the established cycle of suffering in the society which we are trying to end. Remember, we are not creating a revolution, we aims for a rather slow, nonviolent, voluntary evolutional change.
We already have technology and knowledge to implement our ideal society -- this may have been the most difficult part and it has already been achieved -- that's the good news.
For the next phase education is crucial, we have to spread our ideas further, first among the intellectuals, then to the masses. By this we seek to unretard society. Unfortunately this phase is still in its infancy, vast majority of intellectuals are completely uneducated in this area -- this we have to change. There are a few that support parts of our plan such as simple technology, nonviolence, not hurting animals etc., but almost no one supports them all, or see the big picture -- we need to unite these people (see also type A/B fail) to form a small but dedicated community sharing all the proposed ideas. This community will then be able to collaborate on further education, e.g. by creating materials such as books, games, vlogs, giving talks etc.
With this more of the common people should start to jump on the train and support causes such as universal basic income, free software etc., possibly leading to establishment of communities and political parties that will start restricting capitalism and implementing a more socialist society with more freedom and better education, which should further help nurture people better and accelerate the process further. From here on things should become much easier and faster, people will already see the right direction themselves.
Inspiration
Here are some of the ideas/movements/ideologies and people whose ideas inspired less retarded society. It has to be stressed we never follow people, only their ideas -- mentioning people here simply means we follow SOME of their ideas. Also keep in mind mentioning an idea here doesn't mean fully embracing it, we most likely only adopted some parts of it.
- anarcho pacifism: Rejecting force and hierarchy of one living being dominating and oppressing another.
- beatniks/hippies: We are inspired by many of their ideals such as free love, pacifism and avoidance of work.
- Buddha, Buddhism: Attaining freedom through letting go, loving others, focusing on the spiritual rather than the material, living non violently.
- communism, anarcho communism, socialism (but NOT Marxism): Sharing, equality, rejection of property and money, focus on people at large.
- Diogenes, cynicism: Rejecting conformity, wealth, work, power, fame, materialistic needs, embracing simple living, self sufficiency living in harmony with nature, choosing asceticism and difficult way of life as path towards spiritual clarity -- cynics have a great deal in common with LRS.
- Gandhi, non violence: Achieving things without the use of violence (and similar kinds of force), completely refusing to use certain unethical means for achieving goals, not abandoning one's beliefs even for the cost of one's life.
- Jesus, Christianity: Teaching love towards everyone, even those who hurt us, practicing non violence, helping, sharing and compassion, opposing materialist values, valuing the spiritual, being ready to die for one's beliefs.
- minimalism, KISS, suckless, less is more, worse is better, Unix philosophy, ...: Way towards freedom, both practical and spiritual, letting go of the unneeded, most essential design principle, beauty and elegance.
- primitivism: Related to minimalism, letting go of unnecessary and focus on what matters the most, living close to nature.
- Richard Stallman, free software, free culture: Opposition of "intellectual property", focus on ethics, freedom and technology/art serving the people.
- Sikhism: Serving free food to all people as part of Langar, example of selflessness.
- vegetarianism, veganism: Choosing to not hurt other living beings, even those that aren't of the same species, even for the cost of making having less comfortable life.
- Venus project: Project with very similar goals as ours.
- ...