Any plan will be good if it is successfully fulfilled. But it will be ideal when failure will bring benefits.
In this work, I will try to apply this principle to the plan for creating an ideal world.
Today, few can imagine Utopia.
Moreover, upon hearing this word, an image appears in people's heads that is the opposite of an ideal world, including violence, deception, and dictatorship.
What is the reason for this?
There are many theories about what a utopia should be.
Liberal, conservative, social, and many others, often contradictory. And therefore, the achievement of any one of them will not bring happiness to everyone. And what is the ideal world when someone in it is a priori unhappy?
But Utopia seems impossible to us not only in the future but also in the past, fictitious. Why are the Utopias described in hundreds of books collapsing like a house of cards thanks to a handful of egoists striving for “freedom”?
Interestingly, one cannot give an unambiguous answer to the question “What is freedom?”, but people agree that it is necessary for a happy life.
And therefore no one will condemn those who wish to achieve it. But utopian literature is full of examples of how people destroy an ideal world instead of living happily in it. What is a literary move? Or is human nature itself?
In his work “What is Freedom?” Arendt (2014) concludes that freedom is an action, creating something new and going beyond the usual. And therefore it is impossible to achieve Utopia since a closed system deprives a person of the opportunity to act, create, think about the future.
But what if an ideal world is not static, but dynamics?
Why are we inclined to believe that the ideal world is a paradise island in the middle of the endless ocean, and not a system that we have created that takes into account the mistakes of the past and strives for something better?
Perhaps we have already seen utopias in the past, perhaps we will achieve them more than once in the future, but keeping to this view we will not understand what we have achieved. After all, seeing the end of Utopia, people ask themselves:
“Was there Utopia at all?”
But in this work, using some philosophical and social ideas, I will show that the ideal world must include its destruction.
An ideal world is a system where everyone can be happy. And to achieve it, the following components are needed: justice, the ability of everyone to do their own thing and freedom.
What is justice? For many, this is equality.
And this means that to achieve justice it is necessary to give everyone equally and demand the same. It sounds simple, but in fact, this approach will lead more to dystopia.
In an ideal world, however, inequality exists and it is precisely its recognition that leads to justice. It sounds paradoxical, but everything will become more clear if we turn to the work of the famous economist Ha-Jung Chang “Evil Samaritans”.
The author considers this problem as an example of a free trade policy, the main idea of which is to allow all countries (developed and developing) to interact on the world market. And this seems fair if you do not take into account that developed countries have undeniable advantages.
And therefore, the same conditions do not imply equality, but rather provide inequality. It is impossible to demand from all equally if the participants are initially not equal.
Chang gives a successful metaphor, comparing this to a child because no one will send a small child to work on an equal basis with adults, even if the working conditions are equal. From this, we conclude that to achieve justice, we must first recognize that people are unequal and continue to make a distribution based on this. In other words, in Utopia, everyone is given according to his needs and required according to his possibilities.
Under such conditions, everyone will be able to realize themselves, which brings us to the next component: the ability for everyone to do their own thing.
Under his own business is meant not just what you like or not just what you get. This is what you like, it turns out and benefits society. In his work “Techno Hate”, the US-Belarusian Morozov sees one of the dangers of the current use of technology and the Internet as a narrow mind, which leads to closure of interests in his world.
This leads to degradation of the person and deprives the interaction. And all three authors agree on the importance of interaction for society and each individual. But the example of Chang shows that the more ("already") you are developed internally, the more interaction you have and the more productive they are.
In the work “Evil Samaritans” this is illustrated by the example of South Korea, which is now one of the most developed countries.
And she achieved this precisely because of internal development, which in the future contributed to more productive relations in the world market.