11. What We Strive For

11.1 Introduction

You could easily add more futurities between Chapter 4, “Preface”, and Chapter 10, “State”: policing, the legal system, eldercare, disaster response, defense, the tax system, and so on.
There are so many areas where, starting from a blank slate, you could design a futurity that works completely differently. In this book I’ve presented futurities for the areas that seem especially important to me, and for which I’ve developed ideas over the years. My draft of a possible good future.
Maybe the ideas I’ve presented can inspire others to develop their own futurities for other areas, using similar criteria, and to share them with the world. Or to come up with other, even better utopias for the areas discussed in this book.

To close out this book, in Chapter 13, “How We Begin”, we’ll look at what paths might lead to the point where a society actually implements a futurity designed in this book (or any other radically new system). But before we get there, let’s take one step back from the concrete ideas about how to improve the world.

In this chapter, I want to look at the more basic question of what each of us, and what we as a society, are actually striving for.
First historically and in the present, and then looking ahead. Because if we could find a goal for the future that we all see as worth pursuing, we’d have something we could use to measure futurities against.

This is something I haven’t talked about yet: I’ve written a lot about what my futurities would look like and how they would function. Why they would be feasible, affordable, resilient. I’ve explained what I hope to get from them (for example, better opportunities for poorer children or more balanced media coverage). But I haven’t talked about what the fundamental goal of all these futurities actually is.
When I compare two futurities, what yardstick do I use to decide which one is better? If I can’t implement everything because resources are limited (for example, costs in health care), or if different goals conflict within a futurity, what criterion do I use to decide?

You could call this core that decisions emerge from a “value system”, a “core value”, a “fundamental goal”, a “target function”, or simply “what you’re striving for”. It depends on whether you approach the topic from philosophy (“value system”), artificial intelligence (“target function”), or everyday psychology (“What am I striving for?”).

So why did I try, in my futurities, to promote equal opportunity, education, healthy living, balanced media coverage, and freedom of speech? What shared core underlies these goals?

This isn’t us spending time on a purely theoretical topic: When there is yet another public debate about how well children should be protected from sex and violence in the media, the discussion is implicitly about exactly this question. Which of two values matters more to us, freedom of the press or protecting children? And how do we weigh them against each other?

So when I lay out my value system in this chapter, it is, on the one hand, to give an understanding of the basis on which the futurities in this book were developed.
On the other hand, this explanation is also important because it gives the futurities a better chance of being realized.

In Chapter 7, “Education System”, I wrote: “... that they [the teachers] are all well able to support children in their development into mature adults. In addition to sufficient knowledge of psychology, this requires them to have internalized the philosophy explained in Chapter 11.5 (‘Self-Development’).” So having a shared value system that is taught is part of the futurity I present for a better education system.

In Chapter 1, “Negative Future Outlook”, I used the anti-nuclear movement as an example. I described the problem it became for all successor organizations that this unifying core only covered what they were against, but not what they were for: “All these positive concepts are not part of their ideal, not part of the vision of the future that the anti-nuclear movement initially created together.”
No matter how you approach implementing a futurity, or any change to current systems: you will look for allies, discuss, agree on something, and then do something. And what you agree on will become the shared, unifying core of that organization or movement.
If the effort fails, then it doesn’t matter how small or large that shared basis was. But we don’t want to plan for failure—we want to plan for success! And success leads to new goals. At the latest when people start talking about new goals, it becomes crucial what shared basis you originally came together on.
My hope for this chapter is that it helps make that shared basis larger.

A shared value system is also a major advantage for implementing the kinotarchy presented in the previous chapter. The state I propose may be more adaptable than previous ones, with more room for citizens to live their lives as they want. Even so, it benefits enormously from a shared value basis that most of its citizens can agree on. A foundation for the central laws, and for the development of customs and practices. A shared view of reality that makes meaningful discussion possible in the first place, and constructive collaboration among citizens and communities much easier.