8 ms·

The new utopias: Should we retain the right to feel unhappy at work?

• mvdwoord 10y ago
  I suspect that some sort of biologically driven urge to dominate the gene pool will keep humanity from ever reaching any form of utopia. As long as we are programmed to compete with each other, this will always reflect in the way society is organized. To me it seems that all of these utopian scenarios have in common that people allow others to be successful, expecting the same in return. This only works if everyone behaves this way and seems easy to abuse by people taking advantage of others. In other words, we don't need to worry about retaining unhappy feelings at work, others will make sure that you will remain unhappy at work. Or you will become someone that makes others unhappy at work. It may work on a small scale, here and there, but in general on a global scale I believe we are doomed to live in an endless cycle of evolutionary driven struggle of some sort. I do hope I am wrong, but in any case we are a long way from reaching it, socially, not so much technically. Which makes me a bit sad at times.
  • marak830 10y ago
    Along those lines of thought I remembered an article about a troop of baboons with no alpha males left. http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/11/the-baboon-troop-that-mellowed-out-after-the-alpha-males-died-the-sapolsky-and-share-study.html http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/11/the-baboon-tr...
  • collyw 10y ago
    "As long as we are programmed to compete with each other" Are we? Most of our greatest achievements seem to have come about through collaboration rather than competition.
    • adrianN 10y ago
      Are you sure, I can't think of anything where competition was not involved. Can you give some examples? edit: Big science projects like the LHC maybe?
      • catmanjan 10y ago
        I don't think there is any competition when it comes to altruism after a tragedy, like volunteers after a terror attack or a natural disaster. Actually, I'd argue that big science projects are international competitions for getting to the right answer first.
        • tim333 10y ago
          Some people are altruistic after tragedies but there are also usually politicians trying to spin them to their advantage.
    • Kurtz79 10y ago
      The moon landing was a product of the "space race" between US and URSS. The Internet has its roots on a network developed by the US department of defense. The first nuclear reactors were a byproduct of the development of the atom bomb. The first computers were developed during WWII to perform cryptanalysis and solve military problems. I'm sure opposite examples can be found (mapping the human genome ?) but I doubt they would make a vast majority.
      • yolesaber 10y ago
        Your point is interesting because all of those examples were indeed conceived of due to competition and conflict, yet most had their potential realized because of the need to cooperate between people. Computers were the blinking bean counters of corporations and governments before people started getting together and sharing their ideas and schematics about them (Even before the homebrew club - Stanford AI lab, Engelbart's work etc). The Internet was developed as a means for the military to communicate, sure, but it didn't become anything truly useful or empowering to humanity until we adopted commonly-held standards and protocols which were developed by a peaceful international research lab. Seems like you may need a bit of healthy competition to make the breakthrough, but afterwards cooperation is crucial otherwise the gains of the breakthrough are never realized.
        • drabiega 10y ago
          > Seems like you may need a bit of healthy competition to make the breakthrough, but afterwards cooperation is crucial otherwise the gains of the breakthrough are never realized. I think it's just a product of the societies we've had. In all those cases it was the cooperative aspect that made the breakthrough. The competition was only needed to allocate the resources for it, though, given the nature of our society.
          • TeMPOraL 10y ago
            I think you nailed it. What competition did in this case is allowed enough resources to be allocated for those projects - there are a lot of worthy endeavours today that are mostly competition-free and end up resource-starved because of that. Competition adds urgency to an issue, which reprioritizes things.
    • NoGravitas 10y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolut... http://libcom.org/library/mutual-aid-peter-kropotkin http://libcom.org/library/mutual-aid-peter-kropotkin
    • Amygaz 10y ago
      I think we are, maybe in a different way than mvdwood is suggesting. The way I see it is that, the same way one doesn't become asperger or autist, you don't become narcissist, your brain is wired that way, early on during its development, so it's in your DNA and what affects it. Medical research on narcissism is still very young, but so far we have indication for genetic inheritance and therefore potential genetic markers have been found, we observed defining prefrontal cortex signatures, and reproducible and predictable phenotypes (e.g. atypical responses to an environmental stimulus). Similar trends are also observed in altruism, which is seen as the opposite narcissism.
  • tomp 10y ago
    There's nothing wrong with competition. Some people enjoy it, and it undoubtedly improves the world. My idea of utopia certainly includes competition in many areas (arts, sports, science, space exploration, computer games). It should, however, be possible to opt out of competition (in any particular area) and still live a good life. I think it's perfectly possible to achieve that in a post-scarcity society. Furthermore, a political & moral advancement could ensure that all "common" wealth (infrastructure, land, property, energy) is more-or-less equally distributed (i.e. "you don't deserve to own that penthouse just because you were born in the right family"), perhaps using taxation by "renting" from the society (e.g. more valuable property owners would be paying more taxes/rents to the rest of us, so they will only be able to keep it if they produce outstanding amount of wealth themselves). Then, the only competition would be based on things like intellect and creativity. The story Manna [0] includes something similar, where energy is distributed equally among all citizens, who can then "use" it (e.g. to create food, clothes, ...) or "donate" it (e.g. to interesting science projects). [0] http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • ArkyBeagle 10y ago
      I don't think we can tell competition from parodies of competition any more.
    • FilterSweep 10y ago
      I agree with you on many of the values of competition in our current society today, but I believe you totally missed his point. When there is competition, there are winners, there are losers, and there are significantly more losers than winners. There is a _reward_ for winning, whether that be tangible (a trophy, or monetary sum), intangibile (pride of winning), or reproductive (potential mates prefer winners). And therein lies the rub - the losers can surely "live a good life"....depending on your definition....but they surely are not in a Utopian setting, as there are intangibile "rewards" to losing as well - lack of partners, shame, insecurity, among many others. It doesn't matter the arena of competition, the implications of competition are the same - but to different extremes.
  • cousin_it 10y ago
    I disagree. In the long run most of our problems won't be caused by genes, but rather by intelligent entities trying to achieve their goals. Intelligent entities are faster than genes and can edit genes.
    • tim333 10y ago
      Though we get to program the intelligent entities, to begin with at any rate.
  • Styx- 10y ago
    Pessimist! :) I disagree. I think much of human suffering due to competition stems from lack of security, or the lack of reassurance that basic needs will be met. Imagine a technological utopia. All of your needs as a human being are met. All of the needs of your friends and family are met. Can you not imagine how much easier it would be to advance toward a "social utopia"? Before the Renaissance, the cut-throat psychotic human beings tended to do the best in terms of gathering resources, security, etc. Since the Renaissance, this has become less and less true and merit has started to take precedence. Eventually, once the conditions for a technological utopia are met and for the majority of the population, it will be a like a light has suddenly been turned on. Those that have all of their basic needs met, tend to be nicer to others on the whole. Besides, even if I'm wrong, it's not hard to imagine some sort of machine or system that short-circuits "our biologically driven urge to dominate the gene pool" for the good of humanity.
    • wdmeldon 10y ago
      > All of your needs as a human being are met. All of the needs of your friends and family are met. Can you not imagine how much easier it would be to advance toward a "social utopia"? This is the case for basically everyone I know, and I'd imagine this being the case for a lot of the people here. But we're not advancing to a social utopia.
      • XorNot 10y ago
        There's a loooooong way you can fall in our society. Until that floor is a lot closer to what we call "middle class" you're not going to realize many social benefits.
      • st3v3r 10y ago
        Is it? Most of us are one major medical disaster away from being bankrupt. And losing your job generally would throw all that out the window.
    • tim333 10y ago
      Slightly off topic but I can't help but be reminded of the quote from The Third Man: "in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." I'm mildly optimistic that we can at least encourage the better bits of society found in the real world today.
  • emodendroket 10y ago
    If that urge is really so deep, then why do so many people voluntarily not have children, or have fewer children than they could? If your main goal is to dominate the gene pool it seems clear that the best strategy is to sire as many children as possible.
    • FilterSweep 10y ago
      Cost, artificially-induced social stigma, time investment, and the foolish belief that hard work would procure partner with better genetic material, mainly.
      • emodendroket 10y ago
        Many of those don't explain all the married couples electing not to have children. If cost and time investment are the concern, we might surmise that the urge to rule the genetic pool is not really so innate and irrepressible after all.
        • FilterSweep 10y ago
          What about the couples marrying for reasons other than having children? Or the couples incapable of having children?
          • emodendroket 10y ago
            What about them? If the urge to affect the gene pool is so irrepressible, the reason you married doesn't matter; you should still, instinctively, yearn for children.
  • Grishnakh 10y ago
    I think you're absolutely correct. Humans are selfish assholes, basically. It's too bad our branch of the great apes family is the one that evolved high intelligence, instead of the branch that has the Bonobos. If they were the ones who grew huge brains and high intelligence, they'd probably already have Utopia by now.
  • germinalphrase 10y ago
    In his utopian novel "Island" - Aldous Huxley proposed rock climbing as a suitable alternative to the desire for domination over others. Instead of sating this desire by building power over (or commuting violence against) others, you exercise domination over yourself. As a sometimes climber, it's a nice - if incredible - thought.
• sudhirj 10y ago
  Historically, competition is what drives humanity forward. For a utopia to be stable, it'll probably need homogeneity has well, which sort of defeats the purpose.
  • sudhirj 10y ago
    In other words, is utopia still utopia if all its inhabitants are designed to uniformly enjoy it?
    • AndrewDucker 10y ago
      In other other words, is Brave New World a utopia or a dystopia?
      • akerro 10y ago
        Depends if you take pill of happiness or not.
        • Amygaz 10y ago
          "You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." ―Morpheus, to Neo Couldn't resist...
  • LionessLover 10y ago
    I could make an equally valid one-sentence comment. "Historically, cooperation is what drives humanity forward." What I'm pretty sure about is that simplified-to-utter-uselessness statements are NOT what drives humanity forward. Lots of empty meaningless phrases here.
  • mrow84 10y ago
    It seems to me that, historically, it is simply adversity in a general sense (be that other humans or not) that has driven humanity forward. "Competition" per se is not the motivating factor, it is just that there is a problem that needs to be solved. When the necessity of problem solving diminishes, so does progress. The competition theory of social organisation tries to stimulate this by creating artificial adversity through (typically non-violent) competition between people. I speculate that one of the key issues with this approach is that a lot of the problems that you create are not bounded by "underlying reality" as such - they emerge from the competition itself, and so we end up spending a lot of effort solving meta-problems which, if you stripped away the competition, aren't really "helpful". Further, it seems difficult to distinguish which problems are "real" problems, and which aren't, because the competition does exist - what we end up with is a pervasive sense that a lot of what we're doing isn't useful, but we can't work out what or why.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• golemotron 10y ago
  The problem is when people expect work to be pleasurable. It's good when it is is, and it's something to strive for, but the reality of work is that some of it is unpleasant. Software development in particular is hard. The problem you work on doesn't care about your feelings. We gloss over this fact when we turn our workplaces into creches. Pride in doing a job well is more sustainable than a demand for happiness and novelty.
  • gadders 10y ago
    If work was that much fun, they wouldn't have to pay us to make us do it.
    • k__ 10y ago
      Well, there are many OSS/FS projects out there, where people do exactly that. Do that work without getting paid. It's not the software work per se that isn't fun most of the time. Often the problem is that people who have no idea about software development want to shape "how" we work. "I pay you mad bucks for this, so you have to sit here and be watched multiple times a day so you I know you're really working!"
      • gadders 10y ago
        Is that the exact same work as what they do in their day job? I'm not saying software isn't fun, I'm saying that the stuff you choose to do in your free time is less fun than the software you do 9-5. Admittedly some lucky people get paid to work on the open-source thing they created, but they're in a tiny minority.
      • TeMPOraL 10y ago
        Maybe I'm a weird case, but most of the time the part in which the work is paid for is enough for me to immediately lose interest. That is, I can do equivalent work 10x faster as long as I'm doing it out of my own motivation, and not because someone expects me to do it. (Yeah, I had problems with assignments in school too. I'm just wired this way.)
    • 10y ago
• ctulek 10y ago
  The core problem of utopias is that they take one dimension of human character and push it to its extreme. We are both competitive and cooperative beside many other things. On top of that, the same person can become/look as if more competitive or more cooperative in different groups. That is, even in a group of heavily cooperative people the one with more competitive tendencies will be described as competitive. This may even results this guy being expelled from the group. Many novels and movies use this to build their story. In a "bad" world a guy saves everybody or in a "good" world things go wrong because one of them starts doing "bad" things. The modern approaches we take give more emphasis to the differences of people in both work environment and society.
• ap22213 10y ago
  I don't need utopia; I would be happy with just less stress, more support, and more free time. Stress is working over 55 hours a week. It's having bosses who want impossible things faster. It's being overwhelmed with complexity and responsibility with little control. It's being compelled to continuously mask my personality, identity, and emotions. But, that's just me. I just want a safe, simple place to think about ideas and concepts and collaborate with other like-minded people whom I trust to build them into reality. The trust part is really important (and increasingly hard to find).
  • Chevooz4 10y ago
    Low-cost living, outdoors and internet is accessible to everybody.
    • ap22213 10y ago
      Sounds pretty easy!
  • drchickensalad 10y ago
    Why is the trust increasingly hard to find?
  • ap22213 10y ago
    As a side note, while capitalism has been great at allocating resources, is it really the best way? It seems like it over-allocates politicians, middle managers, bean counters, marketers, advertisers, record keepers, and market optimizers. (and, of course, all of the duplicated efforts) With billions of people networked together and with general understand of who the inventors, thinkers, leaders, and doers are, why can't we have something better? I'd pay $$$$$$$ if some of you brilliant people can figure that out.
    • TeMPOraL 10y ago
      People treat economic systems like static things. They're not. Personally, I think capitalism was good, but is not good anymore. It has driven us to the era of plenty, of advanced technology, but its incentive system seems to be increasingly misaligned with the shared values of humanity - hence e.g. the misallocation you refer to. So, for instance, competing on merit was working for a long time - but it no longer does, hence great rise of marketing that exists to game the market into profits. Capitalism served us well, but it's time to move on.
• ilostmykeys 10y ago
  the war against any emotion other than "happy", is a real thing, but it's also something that we do subconsciously because of lack of grounding
• shruubi 10y ago
  I thought most, if not everyone was unhappy at work? I always thought the idea of being happy about doing a job was a little weird, and maybe it's just me, but given that almost every job puts you in a service position, I find it weird that people expect you to be happy to act as a service-monkey to someone's whim all in the goal of making someone else lots of money.
  • TeMPOraL 10y ago
    When I was younger I bought the idea that "you can be happy at work if you work on what you love". Well, few years and three jobs later I now know I hate programming. Or rather, I still love to code - I just immediately switch to loathing it when the "for money" part gets involved. In time I realized that there is likely no job that would make me happy, and even if I started my own business, I'd probably be overwhelmed by various market-related bullshit. I stopped expecting to be happy at work, and... I got much happier. (It's either that or SSRIs working.)
• eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  I don't see why on Earth I should be happy about wage-labor.
  • st3v3r 10y ago
    You shouldn't, but that doesn't mean you have to be unhappy while doing it.
• kstenerud 10y ago
  "Utopia" is simply one person's idea of the ideal. If he's lucky, he'll get a group of people together to build that vision, but eventually new people will be born or coerced into it, and be unhappy with it because they would not choose such a structure. Not to mention the fact that not a soul on this planet is capable of the foresight necessary to endure the changing needs of the people. We feel far safer keeping rigidly to the known doctrine, even if it makes everyone miserable. Every single utopian vision is tyranny.
• preordained 10y ago
  I think the most accessible evidence for the likelihood of anything nearing a "utopia" is right here in the discussions people have about it. You have divisions, factions, "camps"...opposing points of view on this and anything else that human minds might ponder. As long as people are capable of disagreeing with each other, you will never have peace. While you might try to put constraints on how damaging a certain division might be, that form of control or "management" will only produce a feeling of oppression in those it would constrain, no matter how well intentioned. As long as anyone can feel disenfranchised or marginalized at any level (the key here is "feel", again, intentions don't matter), you have the seeds of rebellion.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• nxzero 10y ago
  Unlikely that it's possible to be truly happy unless you know it's possible to be unhappy; aka lack of free will is often a killer.