[whalabi]

I'm struggling to agree with this.

Take a... Syria during civil war society and compare it to... Norwegian society.

I'd argue Norway has vastly more security and freedom. Increasing one didn't increase the other. And both metrics are pretty close to maximum.

Using your example of security vs freedom, yes there are measures you can take to increase security at the cost of freedom.

But there's also many measures you can take which do not compromise freedom. As a very basic example, having laws against murder. These laws (I can't imagine) effect "freedom" in any meaningful way, so I can't agree that they're fundamentally opposed in some kind of inherent way.

What we call security and freedom (and utopian for that matter) are just words, definable in any number of subjective ways.

But a theoretical Utopia is something theoretically perfect, which while technically possible, we probably agree is not practical.

I suppose my point is that subjective, indefinable properties like "infinite security" and "infinite freedom" are not fundamental, literal forces that increase when the other decreases and vice versa.

They're just words, and anything is possible, including a society where everyone enjoys maximum freedom and maximum security (by some definition)

[pas]

Though I obviously don't know exactly what OP meant, but maybe there is a difference between simply looking at Norway as a pretty close to utopia versus doing that from scratch in one step, skipping the organic "annealing" of culture and politics.

Simply having a few determined goals means the design necessarily have to be biased against the unmentioned goals. And those might be important for the general state, but it can be a hidden preference.

[whalabi]

Bias against the unmentioned goals? Sure, plausible. But theoretically is argue not necessary.

There's no reason why all goals could be covered, in some not to hard to imagine system (perhaps a post-secondary society simply allows anyone with a grievance to get in touch with whoever can fix it, if it should be fixed,as opposed to having a bunch of top down goals)

Also, I don't see why being optimum in one goal, let's say transparency, wouldn't help many other goals, like freedom and security.

I just don't think these concepts are as simple as levers, and I think anything is possible.

That said, humans are far from perfect, so their societies are difficult to perfect.

But with enough education, knowledge, and a sprinkle of genetic engineering, maybe?

[pas]

It's harder to optimize a system if there are a lot of dimensions.

For example, tax report transparency is bad if you have inequality and also lack an efficient anti-hate-crime enforcement system, because then people will lynch/rob rich folks.

So even just getting closer to the optimum takes time and a lot of resources.

> I just don't think these concepts are as simple as levers, and I think anything is possible.

Exactly. It's a complex dynamic system with path dependence. Trajectory is everything.

> But with enough education, knowledge, and a sprinkle of genetic engineering, maybe?

Maybe :) Though the problem is that without a great society powerful tools will be used to entrench the interests of those that lead the existing not-so-great society.

And it's very hard to align the interests of the leaders with the commoners.

[whalabi]

That does indeed appear to be the core problem in societies in this and the last century (and before, presumably.)

I'd argue that social democracy seems to be doing pretty well at distributing income and wealth and power. It's a shame "social" is a dirty word in the states.

If the EU can develop successfully over the next few decades into something superpower-like, maybe the benefits of such a system will become attractive to other powers and the ideas will spread.

Or maybe the China system of repression and threatening the neighbourhood will turn out to be more competitive globally and we'll see more of that.

And pardon the absurd typos in my last comment, my phone's keyboard is pretty terrible. I'd fix them but HN doesn't allow edits after a certain amount of time so the gibberish must remain.