Addicts make bad employees, and they can sometimes do a lot of damage before they're discovered and fired. So employers and religious folk etc want to eliminate addiction, and they try to do it with coercion, to prevent the market from functioning, and that doesn't work. The obvious way to reduce addiction is to have fewer people who feel like failures. But that's difficult too.
I have a solution to this.
I'm somewhat hesitant to even mention it, though, because it's
really going to make me sound like a kook. If you think you AnCap guys have it bad in a society that can't imagine anything but statism...
Somewhere on this forum, it's been claimed that Utopias in fiction require that human nature be changed. That may be often true, but I don't think that it's a defining characteristic of the genre. That is, they might require a change in human nature to work in practice, but those proposing the Utopia intend it as a way to produce a good outcome with humans as they are.
We can think of Utopian Socialism as largely a reaction to the miseries of the Industrial Revolution. What was imagined was that if one eliminated factory owners getting very rich, and just had everyone living in communes with a reasonable amount of land and resources allocated to them, relative to the number of people in the commune, then with handicraft-level technology and fixed prices, everyone could have all their reasonable wants fulfilled, and thus only the rare sick individual - instead of the much more common individual who could be pushed into it by dire poverty - would be a criminal.
Competitiveness and ambition are real human traits, but I'm not sure that I can just assume that they're so strong that they're a full explanation to why Utopias don't work. I want to find the
real reason, because it might let me
do something about the problem.
Air. Water. Food. If you deprive a human being - or, for that matter, an animal - of any one of those, it will fight frantically to obtain access to them. No deliberate decision to act based on an intellectual recognition that these are essential to survival is required. Humans experience hunger and thirst: Nature makes sure that we don't forget about things that are essential to our survival.
For a certain level of population, our technology is competent enough to provide all of those to people. Given the triumphs of Norman Borlaug on the one hand, if we introduced meat rationing on the other (a la Francis Moore Lappe, and, yes, I know that's an initiation of force), every human on Earth could have an adequate diet now. Safe drinking water for everyone is also possible; if the Third World weren't wracked by wars and dictatorships, voluntary charitable donations would likely be sufficient to achieve this.
Our technology is such that we can also easily satisfy desires further up the Maslovian hierarchy. Electronic gadgets are so cheap these days that a private-enterprise funded charitable program plans to give a
laptop computer, once a luxury reserved for the rich, to every schoolchild in the poor countries of the world.
What is there, almost as essential to human happiness as the basic necessities of life, that can't just be churned out cheaply on an assembly line in any quantities required by today's marvelous technology?
If you forget to breathe, in a few minutes you will be dead. So nature impels you to breathe.
If you forget to drink fluids, in a couple of days or so you will be dead. So nature subjects you to thirst.
If you forget to eat, in a couple of weeks or months you will be dead. So there is hunger.
Is there anything else that, if you don't do it, you will be dead? Perhaps on a slightly linger timescale.
Let's take 200 years.
What? Everyone alive now is going to be dead in 200 years, no matter what they do or don't do?
Quite right. But remember how evolution works. What happens if we substitute "eliminated from the gene pool" for "dead"? Now then, what other action will nature compel us to do with a force possibly comparable to hunger or thirst?
It compels us to
mate.
Noting that, at birth, there are 105 males born to every 100 females, noting that political leaders, revolutionaries, demagogues, trade union activists, policemen, soldiers, and violent criminals are preponderantly or even overwhelmingly male - this has a simple hormonal explanation, of course; cultural sex roles don't explain why bulls are more dangerous than cows on a dairy farm - I think there's a clue here.
In short, "Love makes the world go 'round".
Not some insane compulsion to greed and envy and ambition - but competition with other males for mates, a basic pseudo-necessity - is what drives men to compete very intensely for a bigger share of the pie than can sustainably be allocated to everyone. It's like a game of musical chairs.
Because menopause robs women of their fertility, and hence of what men are selected to regard as physical attractiveness, the more successful men sometimes have more than one wife during their lives, born progressively later.
Women can be sexual assault survivors, with a tendency to be uninterested in mating as a result.
And women don't go into heat every month either; Elaine Morgan, in
The Descent of Woman, explains why; rather well, I think.
So, if one's ambition is to build a William Morris style Utopia - or even a relatively free, relatively capitalist, somewhat mixed economy that is prosperous, quiet, and tranquil forever and ever (think of the 1950s and the Cleaver family), without an
exponentially growing population size (men marry women on an average 2 years younger than they are, so population growth at 2% per year effectively increases the proportion of women by 4%)... then the solution is to "put something in the water" and alter the human sex ratio.
Then, without elaborate socialistic manipulations of everything else, without massive police coercion, you achieve the desired goal: only a tiny percentage of those rambunctious violent males "feel like failures", and whatever social order you choose otherwise hums along smoothly producing outcomes so good few people are tempted to think things would be fixed if only a completely different social order were put in place.
