ia Equilibrium
©Lelanthran Krishna Manickum
November 2011
“uto·pia
often capitalized : a place of ideal perfection especially in laws, government, and social conditions”
- The Merriam-Webster Dictionary
The state of UTOPIA was a goal ever since man first learned speech and communication. There was a word for UTOPIA before there was a word for “wheel”, before man first discovered agriculture and animal husbandry. A blissful state where everyone would have food, and everyone would be free of disease, and where no one ever wanted for anything. Every revolution and age of enlightenment experienced by humans had been accompanied by the hope that we have finally attained this remarkable trophy.
The Upper Paleolithic Revolution was the first step towards UTOPIA. It was the shift in thinking that every individual lived and died alone, or in small groups. The Upper Paleolithic Revolution changed all this; it brought us a social structure that accompanies us to this day. It gave us the social structure that made mankind alone thrive over every other creature in existence. It gave us society, and laws to ensure our safety, and government to ensure that everyone worked for the greater good and obeyed the laws. It gave us large societies, and with the large society came the benefits that we now take for granted, benefits such as Laws for the good of the people, and Culture for passing down of knowledge between generations.
Of course, the large society needed to be fed, and while the pre-Upper Paleolithic revolution hominids could easily get by as hunter/gatherers, the explosion in population that was the result of living in the relative safety that a large society brought was not sustainable by simply hunting or gathering. It forced us to invent agriculture and with it, the agricultural revolution. It is not inconceivable that many of those first proto-humans around at the invention of the farm proclaimed that no man, woman or child would ever starve again, as it took the efforts of a handful of the population to feed everyone. One step closer to UTOPIA, but not there yet.
The development of animal husbandry no doubt brought renewed hope that the goal of UTOPIA was almost attained. Why hunt and risk losing valuable members of society when you can simply grow poultry and mammals in the same way you grew grain? Thus, even more people were freed up from working all the time to feed themselves. Society could simply expend a few people to spend all their time growing meat and poultry, and the rest of society need not hunt. Even more people with free time. Another step closer to UTOPIA, but not close enough. Not nearly enough.
Commerce and bartering, and the resulting development of money and currency allowed people to specialise. Now a man need not learn how to shoe a horse, as well as build a wall that won’t fall down in the rain. He could spend all his time perfecting a single activity. If he needed any other activities performed, he would simply pay someone to perform it for him, and he in turn would get paid by others to perform his specialised activity. This lead to a rapid advancement in technology, because the activities were all performed by experts who could practice getting remarkably good and quick at what they do, and thus saved even more time for the average person. Commerce brought the world yet another step closer to UTOPIA. A step closer, but still light-years away.
The Industrial revolution rocketed the climb to UTOPIA to new, stratospheric heights. A single machine could now do the job of ten men, and never get tired, and never require a rest. Machines were the slaves and man was the master. With a single machine, the manufacturing and production of those material items demanded by UTOPIA could be completed by only a handful of people, and free up hundreds more. All these people, with all this free time, because the machines were doing the work, made many feel that a state of UTOPIA was reached. The world was merely closer to UTOPIA, but yet not close to UTOPIA.
The rapid development of technology was due to both machines that produce more than people could ever produce and to the fact that some people, freed from the burden of chores required to stay alive, instead speculated and pontificated, and eventually invented abstract math, in the process inventing the computer. The Digital revolution arrived over a process taking hundreds of years. At last, here was the ultimate machine.
Man had solved his food problem by making sure that the majority of people had no need to grow their own food. Man had solved the meat problem in a similar way. Survival problems solved, man had gone on to refine everyone into a specialist role, to get the most out of those that were freed from gathering and hunting. With Mankinds ingenuity it was not long before the existence of specialists lead to even more people being freed from chores, and thus was born commerce. That commerce lead to even more people freed from having to expend effort to sustain themselves, which lead to actual invention of machines, which lead to even more people with free time on their hands … It seems that society, in the process of trying to find a use for everyone in society, had simply resulted in even more people with free time.
But, as even the enlightened scientists of the 1800’s argued, actual thinking would be the one chore that never gets taken away from man. That one thing that separates us from the rest of the primates, that grabbed us and dragged us to the top of the food chain on the planet, that makes us unique in every single way. That one thing would never be something that man gets respite from.
But, then came the digital revolution, brought about by men and women sitting about with nothing to do, because the invention of society, laws, culture, agriculture, animal husbandry, currency, commerce and machines had made them redundant. They invented what was often called (even before the first one was created) Thinking Machines. Finally, we were so close to UTOPIA we could smell it and almost feel it within our grasp. Finally, we wouldn’t even have to think anymore, and everyone could do whatever it is they wanted to, and all their needs and wants would be taken care of. UTOPIA was just around the corner and from this level Mankind could barely see the humble beginnings from which he first started his growth towards this climax, towards UTOPIA.
UTOPIA was achieved not with a bang, but with a whimper. It was not announced with trumpets and fanfare, but with a dry academic publication in a science journal, read by other scientists in the same field. UTOPIA was not even recognised for what it was when it was first discovered. Indeed, it was not even being searched for at the time it was achieved, it was simply in the way of a young woman who wanted to complete her graduate studies and research. All she really wanted was to graduate.
But before I describe the results of this leap of mankind, I need to first explain about the very first invention in Mankinds stumble towards UTOPIA, the invention of society, and of laws and rules and government.
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Throughout the history of mankind, various different systems of governing society were attempted. Several were discarded. At one extreme there was a system based on letting every individual cast their opinion, in the form of a vote, on what rules society would adhere to, and what was best for society. At the other extreme there developed the system that rigorously governed without letting individual members of society decide; the controlling powers decided for everyone what was best. Most systems of government was a compromise between the two extremes, with some systems leaning more towards one extreme and others leaning more towards the other extreme.
Both leanings had their advantages and disadvantages, but in practice all workable forms of government had more in common with each other than they had differences. The only major differences between them could be seen when examining the mechanics and workings of each systems’ economy. The winning economy (which was defined as the one that squeezed the most value out of each member of society) was deemed to be Capitalism at the time that the mechanics of UTOPIA was first achieved,
sometime in late 2034. Capitalism was simply the result of an economy where everyone was free to trade with everyone else.
Such an economy relied heavily on the law of supply and demand; the purchase price of something was not how much it cost to produce, but how much people were prepared to pay for it. Hence, the law of supply and demand necessitates that in order for anything to have value, it needs to have rarity. No one will pay for something that is legally available for free. However, because effort went into the making of something, the act of expending effort meant that no one would simply give away the fruits of their labour for free. This resulted in a pleasant equilibrium for items produced and sold in a Capitalistic society.
If you priced your item too high, someone else would simply make a similar item and price it lower, and thus you would have to drop your price in order to sell your item. If you offered someone too little for an item you wished to purchase, then they would simply sell it to someone else for a higher price. This equilibrium was well understood, and had been well understood for thousands of years. There remained a few exceptions, notably in that items that had a zero