Umoja Utopia

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People love exploring possibilities; actions define unity and how others view love, regardless of its temporary nature. Let’s imagine you’ve been given a chance to start a new society from scratch. Inspiration, encouragement, and positivity push you to do better and to solve the problems of current society. You’ve been given an ideal piece of land, with natural resources. There’s plenty of freshwater and farmland, and enemies or corporations do not surround it. Everything you hate about society is gone, there’s no Wall Street; and there are no corrupt governments. The chance to start over and to make sure you build a society in which everyone has what they need all the time. Everything is free except when a natural disaster strikes and people are needed to provide manpower. The big building used to store food for the winter has been damaged during a storm and you need 100 people to come help repair it and you’re on a deadline. This has to be done before the weather turns cold. In a perfect utopia, people come together to do the necessary work that affects everyone. Of course, everyone is free to pursue their dream. Whatever work they feel they were called to do, you ask for volunteers to help rebuild the structure. You need 100 people, and only 50 show up. The question is, the hardest question in the world, how do you go about getting the other 50 workers that you need? Because when you start to go around and ask people, everyone of them, in their own mind, believes they have a good excuse for not doing what is needed. This one has a newborn that says, “Well, of course I’m going to stay home with my baby.” I’m not going to neglect my child for work. This one says I disagree that the food should be kept in that building at all. I think everybody should have their own space in their own homes. This guy says it’s not my dream to do construction. My dream is to become an artist and work on my craft. How do you coerce these people into doing work they don’t want to do? In a perfect society where you make all of the rules for all of civilization, how would you make it fair? Specifically, who would get exploited because that is how things have worked throughout history. There are only a few ways to do this. For example, you could point a weapon at the men and force them to do it, but I assume none of you would choose that, or you could pay them to do it. The moment you do that, you introduce any inequality into the system because you are literally saying, “Hey, if you agree to come help build the storehouse, you will receive more than the people who don’t participate. People who can work will have a nicer home than the person who didn’t agree to do that.” The other way is to build hard and necessary work into the culture, but that’s just another way of saying that social pressure from the neighbors would make you do it – that if you don’t show up to work, then everyone will be mean to you, and they will exclude you from their social circles. In other words, you’re using extreme fear and anxiety to motivate people to come do the work. “Well, in my perfect community people would want to help,” but that’s like if I asked you to design an airplane and you said, “Well, mine could be any shape I want it to be because this would be for a world where gravity doesn’t exist.” It is a fundamental mathematical law of the universe that the work that needs to be done to keep a community running and the work that people enjoy doing and find satisfaction in doing are not the same work. It would be an incredible coincidence if it were. Having a society that survives factually requires people to do a lot of work they would rather not do. I feel like everybody is getting this wrong and getting it wrong in a really important way if you’re unaware of the controversy. Embrace time, knowing it is precious; excitement happens, and expectations measure experience and temper disappointment. Stay grounded with commitment to your goals, and ignore negativity while striving for success. Survivor’s guilt is common even when there is nothing to do to prevent a tragic situation. The way we speak to each other should convey empathy and confidence that everything is going to be alright. An alarming number of role models, teachers, and religious leaders recommend beliefs that weaken and shake your faith in yourself, but you could be a hero; nurture that spark with passion and cherish the warmth and comfort love brings.