What is the role of society? Well, society provides law and order and allows us human beings to live in a relatively peaceful manner. To be honest, the alternative to society would be anarchy, with lawlessness and chaos and all that. In other words, society itself is not built into the fabric of this world. Rather, it is something man-made, with a purpose. And naturally, this purpose should fall under scrutiny as well. What exactly, truly, are the things that the construct, society, seeks to attain? Let us examine this in further detail.
One standard of progress commonly measured by governments is economic growth. However, it is common knowledge that money has decreasing returns. Up to a certain point, a lack of money is crippling. Above a certain point, a surplus of money really does not hold any excess value for one’s standard of living. Thus, measuring progress by this standard, especially for already rather developed countries, would be pretty blind. Now, how about social progress? That’s something that we learn in schools, after all – think political, economic, social. Let’s say that society seeks to max out standards of living. So, over time, it will seek to bring higher living standards to an increasing percentage of its people. One thing especially relevant, we find, is fairness. Fairness is like a more realistic version of equality. We seek to level the playing field for everyone as much as possible such that they are not undermined beyond salvation by their background. Therefore, while some are undermined and some are empowered, at least they still have a chance, yo!
What I said earlier about fairness? I take that back. Equality is only an achievable goal under our current system insofar as it refers to the elimination of discrimination. Securing true equality beyond this where everyone has the same starting point simply isn’t what we wanna do. Communism tried that and it failed. According to what common sense tells us, it most likely failed because of the systemic deficiencies inherent within – what to do was fully dictated by the government, yet how could a government be smart enough to account for multiple possibilities and variables like a futuristic AI? The free market works better in that aspect because it enables the significantly important booster of innovation. Above all, this thing called technological innovation has seriously improved standards across the board for human beings. Thus, the strategy for current society seems to be this – achieve technological innovation which will, over time, come to benefit and improve the lives of everyone across the board. Of course, the more tangible standards that the governments are held against for doing their job well are still that same old socio-economic progress. One way of looking at it is as simple as this – if people don’t have jobs, the government is not doing its job.
Therefore, governments work to preserve and boost the integrity of the current prevailing system while also trying to stay in power – for otherwise, even they themselves will be out of a job. And so we will have to look to external theorising to see if society is truly properly fulfilling its role – in other words, go meta. And for that, the actual, sole effective way is to examine what human beings require from society in the modern day. In the past, when human beings were farming lifestock and stuff, we only needed the most basic stuff materially. Think water, food, basic clothing. But in a modern era, they are insufficient! In order to be contented, we also need much more – if we were without internet servers or technical equivalent, I pretty much think we would have regressed to a previous era. Next, we need stuff to do. In my opinion, boredom is THE greatest evil in an ideal society, where everything is materially provided for. When we’ve got nothing to do, all we can do is: stare blankly into space. That ain’t fun, I tell you. What we’ve currently done is tie this with jobs and money and our livelihoods. However, we can technically isolate this as an independent factor and understand how it’s so important and necessary in the modern day. This is why people prefer to continue working rather than retire – their world would otherwise turn colourless and without meaning. Yes, I hit the mark. Meaning. If advanced material stuff is the first factor needed in a modern society, the second would be meaning, which we attain presently through work. Ever heard this? The perfection of the utopia, above all, fails because of boredom. Thus, in an ideal society, fulfilment from having stuff to do!!! is something we cannot neglect!
Why is this even a problem? Well, for instance, some believe that technological unemployment will be a thing. In the future, our jobs will be made redundant because robots and AI or whatever will truly be able to do them at negligible costs. Who would want to pay us for doing this work then? Or maybe you can consider this: Some absolute limit exists as to how much innovation and technologies can improve our standards of living. Maybe some research stuff will remain relevant, like battling new diseases in the medical aspect and space exploration for the propagation aspect. However, society itself technically is at the point where we can just sit back and enjoy the fruits of our and our ancestors’ labour. What would we do then?
Thus, we must recognise work in terms of its function, which is to take up our time and occupy our faculties. If we consider this as a biological necessity unique to human beings, we realise that work which is tied together with money is but a societal construct. And pursuing the epitome of that biological necessity, we realise that in an ideal society, we would all be pursuing our passions in ever challenging our own limits! Money would cease to have become a deal-breaker as everyone would have a basic safety net… That everyone equally worse off thing from communism? With humanity having finished walking the journey of innovation, such would then no longer be applicable in any way. We are no longer in that same farming era! You see, this is theorybuilding – you examine past theories. What’s applicable and rightly valued, you prize and give it a place in your theory, and what’s inapplicable, instrumental and not possessing intrinsic worth, you rightly categorise as replaceable. Science is definitely easier to do because you can more easily experiment, maybe. It is also easier to prove. But well, accept logic for truth!!!
However, what personally worries me the most about the future is none other than resources. Now, if we consider money as mere make-believe that the world has jointly agreed to accept as intrinsically valuable, which could completely lose its value in the case of an apocalyptical scenario, we could naturally say the same when it comes to say Bitcoin as well. Yet the negative effects of the make-believe are tangible and real! A quick Google search reveals the mountainous amount of resources that’s utilised by those rich organisations in order to profit from it! And naturally, who suffers but the environment? Human beings use up a lot of resources. It says somewhere on the Internet that that annual renewable amount of resources human beings use is annually surpassed sometime in August or something – I don’t know exactly when or how true it actually is, but it wouldn’t surprise me if we’re totally ignoring a real danger. Human beings are oftentimes only able to look at profits, after all. When we finish a resource, we find an alternative – an alternative method to obtain it or something which can do that same function. So, when we finish the resource known as work, will we also be able to recognise an alternative and quickly shift over to a passion project-based iteration of society? Well, personally, I doubt it – I feel like the current prevailing system is too deeply ingrained as truth to be able to look at it objectively in the meta. And broken worldviews break minds, possibly!
It is also said that if every country were to consume like some rich countries, several Earth’s worth of resources would be required every year. What does this mean? Well, it means that it’s a zero-sum game. It would actually be to the detriment of rich countries if their poorer counterparts became rich as well. Perhaps with that money-philism, they’d idealistically think of everyone happily growing rich together. But when push comes to shove, if such a thing really happened, the most probable occurrence seems to be a World War over resources. To be honest, I don’t know much about resources at all. At most, all that I know specifically about resource scarcity, for something more recent, is that Qualcomm, standing at the forefront of 5G, is facing a shortage of chips which should take some thing to resolve. However, it seems like an honest concern – the world claims to prize equality. I guess people would normally picture this as everyone enjoying first-world standards of living together, ideally. However, it may plainly, honestly be impossible under the current system! I mean, let’s just consider the Thanos problem. Since the 20st century, the mortality rates for younger people have plunged. Our world population has been skyrocketing! It’s not like the Earth will produce even more resources in order to keep up with us. It simply stays status quo, whereas we bear endless expectations it may be unable to fulfil. Meanwhile, do we even question that it may be unable to bear everything we’ve thrown on it? Nah! We’ve put it under slavery.
For the greatest possibility of being able to sustain everyone, I guess insatiability simply doesn’t work. Rather, we need to be able to nicely implement some bare minimum that would still be able to satisfy our modern-day selves. This bare minimum would have to be sustainable with no ‘I buy this phone one month later new model come out I buy that phone’ rampant everywhere. Additionally, let’s take into account a society where that hard innovation/work limit has been reached. In truth, I find that there is a clear scenario which nicely provides for all this – the advent of advanced virtual reality technology, alongside a renewable/self-sustainable energy system. When you want to have some new material thing, a single click sees it magically produced from nothing and it’s totally as if it’s the real thing. Getting rid of it and replacing it with something new will not cause a hefty resource depletion when combined with the law of large numbers – rather, it all falls under a single resource that has to do with the computation within servers and whatever. Of course, there would have to be a measure in place preventing people from completely shutting themselves inside and activities outside that force people to get together and do stuff – be flexible, people! Don’t be bound by any overthinking about having justification to do this or that- practicality is what gets things to work (See, again, innovation is key in pursuing standards of living).
So, today, rather than talking about something individual, I decided to talk and theorybuild about society as a whole. Honestly speaking, this content isn’t all that new for me – it’s been several years already. Still, I went into it without referring to old material, so it’s fresh in that sense. I hope people can at the very least learn what societal constructs are – basically, their value is not innate, only bestowed.
Edit 20/7/2021:
Here’s a related article. Reading it earlier made me recall part of the reason I chose to study philosophy in the first place (contrary to what I thought in a later post). It all started back in high school when I questioned the goal of society, seeing that economic growth without end is totally ‘sailing blindfolded’. I even wrote a whole utopian novel prior to entering university!
PS: I have full respect towards those who have striven and struggled in your work and do not intend to deny your efforts not one bit. Just to be clear. Still, consider this. Work is really not inbuilt into the fabric of society. It’s but a feature of modern society and the fulfilment it provides is as real and valid as any human being living and endeavouring towards ideals.