Consensus Society
Today I went around Beijing to do a number of things, among them:
- buy pillow slips
- buy table runners
- heal a nation
- check out micro SD cards
I managed to complete only two of the above, thus rendering my excursion relatively futile. For those interested, I managed to buy the pillow slips and discover that I couldn’t find the micro SD card I was interested in; but as I shuffled around the city, I got to complaining about how everything around me was wrong (which I suspect is a symptom of living in a crowded society).
It’s easier to point the finger at other people here, whether rightly or otherwise, and lament their lack of social consciousness. In a less crowded environment, we’re more likely to point our fingers at institutions or structures that we believe aren’t functioning properly and thus make our lives harder. Anyhow, thinking about this, usually with rhetoric like ‘people who board the train before letting others on should be shot’, ‘people who smoke in crowded areas should be shot’ and so on and so forth, it inevitably makes me wonder about what a world would be like if such criteria were met.
Ahem, that isn’t to say that I actually think all these various miscreants should be executed; I don’t think a society in which such people are produced should utilise such barbaric means to enforce its ‘developing’ criteria; but were such a society to exist, what would it be like? How could it come about?
Ideally, the only way it can come about humanely is for the city to determine the population, rather than the reverse as has been the story of human civilization. For the city to come before the population, it’s ‘beacon’, that is, the things that draws people to the city, must be capitalized and monopolized on. I’d like to think that everyone would want to go to the city because ‘everything just works’ there, but that seems like a fairly unrealistic and unsustainable expectation, so there must be some other resource that attracts people there initially. Later on, the everything-works idea can be relied upon to draw people, but in its early stages, it wouldn’t be sensible.
Now, in the early stages of this new city, if a resource has been identified and dominated, the next stage is for the company in charge of this initiative to engineer the rules that will govern the workforce that will seed this city. This is where the necessary ideals for this new city can be established and, not only that, be followed all thanks to operation of the company. Instead of a loose idea of a social contract, the citizens of the budding society would have the rigid guidelines of their actual contract; the breaching of which can thus see that person removed (exiled) from the company city.
This is all well and good in the beginning. I keep referring to this company as a city, but in truth, it would be more like a town (if that) than anything else, but it’s the only humane way I can see that a society can be built on certain ideas without infringing on the rights of those who don’t agree with those ideas. At first, the market would be the motivating force that would draw people to this place in exchange for their ‘rights’ to rampant individualism to the detriment of their peers and society as a whole. So long as that strain of consensus remains throughout the development of the city, it would add a dynamic that isn’t regarded as fair in cities today.
Well, all of this is merely a castle in the sky; but it’s good food for thought.
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