I read Arthur C. Clark's Childhood's End the other day, good book, but what surprised me was his naivety in describing the 'perfect' world. Briefly, the book starts with aliens peacefully invading and enforcing peace and order, while bringing prosperity.
He talked about how anyone could travel anywhere, and did, without ever reflecting that if you have a few billion people just travelling anywhere they wanted, it would be utter chaos in all the tourist spots.
It really underlines that he didn't even vaguely comprehend the incredibly privileged life he lived in (and I don't really either!), that he was so unfathomably richer than so much of the world's population that he couldn't even conceive the chaos of what he was proposing.
And now more of us enter that section of society (and still we are only a small fraction of the world's population) there simply isn't the capacity to accommodate us all.
A perfect society where everything is so great that everybody has the freedom to tromp all over the planet in an effort to occasionally distract themselves from their otherwise dreary existences.
There's a parable about what a deeply entrenched mind virus materialism can be hiding in there somewhere.
He talked about how anyone could travel anywhere, and did, without ever reflecting that if you have a few billion people just travelling anywhere they wanted, it would be utter chaos in all the tourist spots.
It really underlines that he didn't even vaguely comprehend the incredibly privileged life he lived in (and I don't really either!), that he was so unfathomably richer than so much of the world's population that he couldn't even conceive the chaos of what he was proposing.
And now more of us enter that section of society (and still we are only a small fraction of the world's population) there simply isn't the capacity to accommodate us all.