Dammit, Lance Part 3: COMMIES!

Okay, I know I need to go on a Twisty Faster post diet before I get all bloated with self-satisfied strawman rage, but I gotta do the comments on that last one. The good news is that a lot of her commenters actually did point out practical issues with this goofy-ass utopia. The bad news is... well, read on.

Everyone would be an artist and everyone a musician. If something needs fixing, everyone would try and if one excelled, they’d deign to teach others who wished to know and they wouldn’t own that knowledge, they wouldn’t carry it around on their chest like a badge to market and to demand “respect” because respect would not be something to be demanded, everyone would have it, everyone would get it because they exist and that’s all there is; existence, the beauty of existence in all things as they are.
That's nice. But some things aren't worth doing if you're going to be equally beautiful and respected either way. People may continue to make music just for the joy of it, but you're going to run awful short of plumbers if you don't offer them something that non-plumbers don't have.

Of course with this kind of fluidity with reality, I’d imagine there wouldn’t be a lot of “progress” as we know it, but then who cares? What’s the rush? Does a dog or a cat rush to find the answer to why they can’t sit at a table and eat with fork and spoon? No, they accept what is and are happy.
Does the mother of a child with a disease rush to find a cure for it? Does a peasant living on a few cups of rice a day rush to produce and distribute food more effectively? Does a farmer with dying crops rush to fertilize and protect and irrigate them? YES THEY FUCKING DO, YOU SPOILED DUMBASS.

But post-revolution, advancement of the species would FINALLY be merit-based. You do what you want, and if you are good at it, other people build off of your work. Whether its organizing people, sequencing DNA, writing music, or playing with kids.
Awesome! Now who's going to fix the shitter?

There is no official parent or guardian. The idea being that the baby is cared for by the community, to which time when its not. The child, who of course, needs less and less care as they get older, would decide for themselves when to move on, who to get guidance from, what they need most. The child would have full rights of self-determination.
When I was fourteen, I would've loved to move out and self-determine my life to center around staying up all night eating pizza and watching anime porn. In retrospect I'm rather glad that I was oppressively dominated out of that.

Education, learning, skills, food, support, information, everything should be shared freely and easily and not maintained as a badge of superiority. If you know how to do something offer to teach others, whether people you know personally or advertising the sharing of these skills. If you have food, share it with the person next to you who might not have any and even if they do have some.
I don't "have" food. I bought it. (Or for illustration let's say I grew it.) I grew enough for me. You want me to grow more? Sure, I'm not stingy... wait, how much more? (Without a market or a government you won't even know.) I might double or triple my patch for warm fuzzies and free music lessons. But if you want to support a First World country's proportion of non-farmers, you need agriculture on a scale that warm fuzzies alone can't motivate. No one clears, tills, plants, tends, and harvests a 500-acre cornfield because their neighbor gave them a free sweater and they feel all obligated.

You might avoid this by having a huge proportion of farmers, but then farming's nearly all your society can do, and by setting potential doctors and engineers and plumbers behind the plow you're dooming a lot of people to unnecessary suffering. Civilization requires specialization, and specialization requires power differentials.

Hey, here's a conundrum: say Farmer Alex grew 100 tons of corn, and Farmer Bob worked dawn to dusk and invented a new way of planting and grew 300 tons. Do they get the same amount of free music lessons and socks and butter from the community? If so, Alex is dominating Bob by getting the same reward for less contribution. If not, if Bob gets more, then he's obviously dominating Alex. You can't eliminate dominance.

Perhaps technological advances will mean there are ways to get robots to the things we don’t want to be doing - cleaning up shit, finding ways to dispose of garbage - but even that strikes a wrong note with me. We are the ones producing the shit and the garbage and should be taking responsibility for it rather than yet again handing over to ‘garbage people’ or even robots to deal with it because we don’t want to.
I am taking responsibility for it; I pay the garbage people. Spending an hour a day maintaining my own personal landfill isn't more virtuous than giving an hour's pay to Rabanco once a month, it's just massively less efficient. (Also... am I supposed to feel bad about imposing upon a robot?)

as soon as someone mentions utopia/revolution/post patriarchy etc there is a gut reaction of people to immediately say ‘but that is impossible!’ and then come up with reasons why it isn’t rather than putting their energy into making it happen.
Because if you don't think critically you can pour all the energy in the world down a hole, doofus.

the thing is that even post-patriarchy is a cultural construct, and has arisen out of culture, in its broadest sense.
OH SHIT PARADOX!!!


But in the end, commenter "Jael" nails it right on the head.
so basically, if we woke up tomorrow and everything was perfect, then everything would be perfect?