Ah, there’s nothing as refreshing as an easy question. An ideal society would be one that I ran!
For maybe thirty seconds or so.
Humans, as I’ve noted elsewhere, are “social animals.” Way back in the past, if you couldn’t live with the rules in your particular community, you could go over the hill to the next valley and check out their rules. If necessary, you could even find a mate and launch your own ideal society.
This worked so well that eventually all the valleys were filled, and we started wiping each other out or modifying our rules to accommodate those of our neighbors, which is more or less where we are now.
At this point in human history, we seem to value Coordination (“Do what you want, but keep me in the loop!”) ,Equality (“You get as much freedom as I do, and we all obey the same rules!”) ,Self-determination (“One person, one vote!” and “That governs best which governs least!”) and Power (“What I say goes!” and “My way is the best way!”) Making this arrangement work is, to say the least, challenging.
An Ideal Society would be perceived by all of us as fair and just. It would provide for all. It would be responsive to change, flexible where it needed to be, but stable at its core. It would function within the limits of the global environment, using and replacing resources sustainably, which probably means population growth would be managed.
I have no idea how such a society could be constructed, of course.“It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.
Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.”
