Two Paths to Utopia

[Cognisant]

Harsh punishments are effective for preventing crime so in theory if every punishment was sufficiently harsh there wouldn't be any criminals. Crimes would still occur but the criminals would either die or kill themselves and over the generations this selective pressure would create inherently ideal citizens.

Spoiler

Of course implementing such a system is fraught with peril given that when people have nothing left to lose you can't really threaten them anymore, not even the threat of death is enough to control someone who doesn't have enough freedom to live. But if you could find a balance between having sufficiently harsh punishments and sufficiently frequent offers of clemency (so the accused has reason to hope right up until it's too late for them to act out violently) then this could work. Of course from a libertarian perspective this is absolutely terrifying and for the first few generations it would be very unpleasant and will require strict enforcement but given time people will adapt to it (by unnatural selection if nothing else) and eventually take pride in it, in their exceptionally "civilized" society.

Alternatively we could go to the other extreme where the focus is almost entirely on reforming criminals, where instead of punishing people by sending them to jail you instead try to diagnose and resolve the cause of their misbehavior. In this system crime is a disease to be treated with either or a combination of: therapy, education, medication or if necessary by medical procedure.

Spoiler

Society as we know it is somewhere between these two extremes, it varies by the nation and I don't think it's by conscious choice but rather an unwillingness to choose. You might think we have the best of both worlds but consider that a society accustomed to either extreme would consider their way of life the most civilized, on what basis do you suggest they are merely biased to what they know and you are not?

 

[peoplesuck]

Norwegian prison systems of rehabilitation work better than the U.S punishment method. Fix the leak, and keep shoveling water out of the boat.
the problem seems to be massive amounts of human greed/evil.
when your prison is a business, well...
Ideally you would have a society where people are free, which means more than free of tyranny, but also free of toxic conditioning. I think they are equally important.
we have this idea that people develop a disposition in a vacuum.
If we want to make someone a psychopath, we know how. If we want to make someone respectful and kind, we know how. Many people are products of a broken system, its really tough to decide how to handle them, most people disagree on treatment.

Imo first step towards utopia is killing off the people calling the shots in the shadows. Given the state of the world, I would think you could almost fix the world by simply killing everyone in power. They control things, so if things are fucked...fix the leak.


The problem with brute force punishment, imo, is that people arent bad enough naturally to need it. You can program a roomba to clean, or you can program it to short out and burn the house down, people are biological machines. Do a better job at programming, or just discontinue the toxic programming.


people are fragile, it takes many years before a person is stable, and capable of really thinking for themselves. The state of the world is more tragic when you stop blaming nature, and start seeing all of the strings.

 

[sushi]

the problem with evil i and crime is that you do not know who is evil and who is not, maybe marking people who have criminal tendencies or have commited crimes can help.

it all comes to how to discourage evil, but it is like weed, it just exist wherever there is grass.

 

[gilliatt]

In man's conscious: reason, mind, values, concepts, thought, judgment, volition, purpose, memory, independence, self-esteem. All these exist, they are not illusions, myths, superstitions. These are man's inner world, that inner world, very important. In "Atlas Shrugged", there is two variants of mysticism: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, "those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of the mind, one for revelations, the other to their reflexes....the enslavement of man's body, in spirit---the destruction of his mind.
The world at present, one is looking at the results of philosophical collapse and government power, an intellectual default, have allowed the government to get a stranglehold on the field of ideas.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Criminals are not standing in way of Utopia. In sense eliminating crime would still mean you have the world you are at now minus the crime which means unless you find ways to treat inefficient systems than crime will be perpetuated in legal ways in form of inefficiency.
Not saying eliminating crime is bad idea. It is the right move in right direction it just does not lead to Utopia by it self.

 

[Cognisant]

True, I don't really have a nice concise word for a "society governed so well it is practically without crime" so I misuse "utopia" as a placeholder and rely on the reader to interpret what I meant from context.

Then again there's many terms that if taken too literally lose all meaning, nothing is "perfect", even creating a space of perfectly nothing is practically impossible under the known laws of physics.