Since there is no precedence to be found in history, there is
no reason to believe any society would ever be perfect. Human nature have
continuously corrupted and brought down even the most well thought out systems
of control, no matter how good and mutually beneficial they initially were.
This was the opinion of Thomas Hobbes, who believed that humans needed to be
controlled to control their inherent potentially evil nature. As much as I
would like to disagree, history has proven him right again and again, whenever
a society has been brought down and humans have roamed without check. Thomas
More famously thought up a perfect society, Utopia, where everyone would
co-exist in peace and harmony perpetually. Seeing history since his time, I
think More’s Utopia is just that though, a utopian concept. Yet with that said,
I believe there is sufficient proof in the collective consciousness of all our
ancestors, to believe that a society infused by knowledge and reason at the
micro-level would be more long lasting than any that has gone before. And if
that is the case, then at its ultimate inevitable collapse, it will have
created a foundation to build on to progress on even higher, no matter what
kind of timeline we are moving on. This has after all been the case so far.
Otherwise, we would still be living in the dark ages or in a cave.
A lot of post-apocalyptic fiction, including David Mitchell’s
Cloud Atlas, believe that if our
modern society collapses, humanity would regress to a more primitive state in
evolution. This may be true temporarily. But I believe the patterns of recognition would kick in and humans would progress once more, only this time
there might be enough remnants of the highest level of civilization yet, such
as perpetual and sustainable energy, to make the jump back up the ladder
quicker and easier. The human need to evolve will always prevail. It is a rule
as old as time itself inherent in our very ontological core. As a species, we
will always strive to exit the cave we inhabit, to explore new horizons and
make new discoveries. Once we ate from the Tree of Knowledge there was no going
back. A historic equivalent to this Biblical reference would be the cognitive
revolution which occurred around 70,000 BC, when humans first managed to create
concepts that existed only in their minds and outside the physical world.
It is this very quest for knowledge that since then has
brought us to where we are today. By trying to quench that fire through
prohibitive control, you will only build up the pressure leading to an
inevitable explosion. Maybe this is exactly why all the societies of the past
have eventually collapsed proving Thomas Hobbes right. But like his
contemporary John Locke, I have enough faith in the capacity for learning in
each human and thus humanity in general, to believe that we can achieve a
higher standard of society if not perfect like Utopia. Maybe a reason-fueled
one, made up of citizens rather than mere slaves, a Festival of Existence, would ensure enough outlet so
that the pressure would never build to catastrophic levels. That is why it is
something worth striving for. It could be the next big leap forward in
evolution, from a Type 0 to a Type I civilization. And once we are there it
will be hard to regress back once more because we will have sustainable energy
stemming from nature itself. So even when you take the grim human nature into
consideration, which would seemingly suggest that no society is built to last
forever, a global society driven by a shared reason-fueled consciousness might
just be long lasting enough to take us another step up the evolutionary ladder.
Thus it should be in our immediate interest to strive for exactly such a
society, especially now when it is seemingly within our reach for the first
time in our existence.
