Hello Friends, given the certainty of dystopia in the near future I am once again compelled to remember the old bud John Stuart Mill and the concept of Utilitarianism. The general idea is that the best way to run society is to create the most happiness while avoiding unhappiness; it's also largely pacifist. In the pacifism lies the utopian nature of the argument, as surely as death and violence are inevitable; but if we accept that death is a necessary component of life then Utilitarianism becomes immensely more interesting in a philosophical sense.
So, as China's incoming Tiananmen Square 2.0 brews in Hong Kong and Holocaust 2.0 continues in the Xinjiang provinces we come to this realization that either World War 3 must occur given China's new imperialist ambitions (as evidenced by films like Operation Red Sea and Operation Mekong (extremely jingoistic, 80'sesque military action movies)) or that Capitalism itself is so embedded into the global economy that restricting China is deemed impossible or impractical to extremely wealthy people who may or may not be pedophiles. The first option leads to a post apocalyptic horrorscape followed by a rebirth of nature and beauty given the absence of most humans and technology and the second leads to Cyberpunk where some very small handful of people has all of the world's resources and no one else has anything (but they do live, if a simulation of machine-life entitles living).
Thus the question presents itself: is it better to have 5 happy people and 20 billion unhappy people or to have 20 billion dead people and 500,000 happy people. This is an oversimplification in many ways but so is utilitarianism of course; wealth does not lead to happiness for most people in today's society so why would it in some theoretical future society? In the post apocalyptic land surely social and economic stratification would re-emerge in some fashion regardless of how technology progressed or was preserved. However if we grant that both of these do not nullify the greater chance of happiness for the remaining aspect of humanity, then the argument is still an interesting question.
It should also be noted that these are not mutually exclusive realities; Cyberpunk is not necessarily a bulletproof society and future decay may as yet lead to some different vision of the apocalypse.
Mill ignores this eventuality by embracing pacifism and eliminating harming others from the thesis; but it is abundantly clear that attempting to indoctrinate large sections of society in largely pacifist ideologies does not remove it from all aspects of society; if some segment of the populace seeks to be armed and/or violent it will not cease to exist because some greater portion merely wags its finger in disgust at them. Similarly if the most powerful actor controls a huge portion of the global economy and chooses to be violent and oppressive it undercuts any and all notions that pacifism is a universal possibility, let alone a universal good.
