Engineering a path around tribalism to socialist utopia. in anticlimatic

Honestly, I hate politics- but lately I’ve been thinking about family and community. I’m very close to my family, my brothers and I share a business together, and our microcosm is as marxist as it gets. All for one, one for all. If someone can’t carry their own weight, we all gladly work together to pick up the slack for however long it takes. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. It’s easy for us, because we love one another and share a tribe. There’s trust, right out in the open, for all to see and share.

Up the scope a bit, however, and we are precisely the opposite. In our community we have a neighbor who is a recent immigrant from out of state, who is a bit of an eccentric. We don’t know him. But we do know that he has taken issue with the church bells ringing every morning at 6:00 AM, which is a community tradition. We don’t know why this bothers him, only that he just arrived and seems compelled to silence them through the usual channels (complaints, lawsuits, etc). Maybe he has a good reason that people might care about, maybe he doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. He’s an other. An outsider. Unknown, therefore untrusted. Consequentially, the town has rallied against him without any desire to even hear him out. There are no natural laws at play that could render him part of a self sustaining commune as large as my small town- which is not very large at all. The only way it could work would be under authoritarian force, which is the default for traditional civilization, but not any kind of goal anyone should have.

So how about a workaround? I was reminiscing about my travels across the country in my 20s recently, and remembered an interesting discovery I made: people are the same everywhere you go. This is a fairly common saying, and at a glance can easily be mistaken. It doesn’t mean that people, everywhere, are equals- and have the same base line level of potential. No. What it means, in perhaps a hyperbolic sense, is that there are only about 30 people in the world. And from those 30, an infinite number of doppelgangers and minor combinations of those baseline 30. You will move from one town to another, and meet people that are nearly identical to people you knew in the previous town. From style, to looks, to personality- people are the SAME, everywhere you go. There is a you, in every town. Probably several. Slight differences, but close enough in the grand scheme of things.

What if, through some means, we could see only those 30 people, with the faces we are most familiar with? In every town, my two brothers- with different clothes, and different lives, but at a glance that’s them. Perhaps with some kind of eye implants, personality database, and deepfake technology? I think I would be a lot more prone to send money to some random charity if the couple in the photo asking for money was my best friend growing up and my favorite aunt. To overcome the basic limitation of humanity in self sacrificial compassion for only those we know and love, how about we trick the mind into the literal lie- yet enlightened truth- that we are all the same?

Last updated October 10, 2021