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Less Retarded Society

Less retarded society (LRS, same acronym as less retarded software) is a model of ideal society towards which we, the LRS, want to be moving. Less retarded society is a peaceful, collaborative society based on love of all life, which aims for maximum well being of all living beings, a society without violence, money, oppression, need for work, social competition, poverty, scarcity, criminality, censorship, self-interest, government, police, laws, bullshit, slavery and many other negative phenomena. It equally values all living beings and establishes true social equality in which everyone can pursue his true desires freely -- it is a TRULY leftist society, NOT a pseudoleftist one. The society works similarly to that described by the Venus Project and various anarchist theories (especially anarcho pacifist communism), but it also takes good things from elsewhere, even various religions (without itself actually becoming a religion in traditional sense); for example parts of teaching of Jesus and Buddha. As Freddie Mercury put it, this could be heaven for everyone -- achieving heaven for everyone to us is a goal truly worth living for.

How is this different from other ideologies and "life philosophies"? Well, one principal difference is that LRS doesn't want to fight, in fact LRS adopts a pessimistic, defeatist mindset to not compromise morality by any desire to "win the game", behaving correctly is more important than achieving a goal, ends do NOT justify the means; nowadays as well as in the past society has always been about conflict, playing a game against others (nowadays e.g. market competition, employment competition, media competition, ...) in which some win, some can manage and some lose. Most political parties nowadays just want to change the rules of the game or downright switch to a different kind of game, some want to make the rules "more fair", or to make it favor their represented minority (so called fascism), some just want to hack the game, some want to cheat to win the game easily, some want to play fair but still win (i.e. become "successful"). LRS simply sees any kind of such game as unnecessary, cruel, unethical and harmful in many ways not just to us, but to the whole planet. LRS therefore simply wants to stop the game, not by force but by making everyone see how bad the game is. It says that competition and conflict must seize to be the basis of society. There is no value in achieving anything by violence, such a change will soon be reverted by counter revolution, people themselves have to understand what's good and choose it voluntarily. That is one of the reasons why we are pacifists and reject all violence, only wanting to promote our ideas by education. We accept we may not achieve our goals and we most certainly won't achieve anything during our lifetime and that gives us the freedom to behave truly morally. We try to never be proud of anything, as pride leads to violence and fascism. We are also in many ways aligned with the ideals of cynicism.

Note that less retarded society is an ideal model, i.e. it can probably not be achieved 100% but it's something that gives us a direction and to which we can get very close with enough effort. We create an ideal theoretical model and then try to approximate it in reality, which is a scientific approach that is utilized almost everywhere: for example mathematics defines a perfect sphere and such a model is then useful in practice even if we cannot ever create a mathematically perfect sphere in the real physical world -- the mathematical equations of a sphere guide us so that with enough effort we are able to create physical spheres that are pretty close to an ideal sphere. The same can be done with society. This largely refutes the often given argument that "it's impossible to achieve so we shouldn't try at all" -- we should try our best and the closer to the ideal we get, the better for us.

Basis: Love Of All Life

When thinking about how to change society for the better, the first thing that needs to be done is defining a goal which the society should aim for -- an axiom which serves as a measure of what's objectively good and bad, which in turn helps us take the right steps towards the good. This is only logical, without a goal we aren't really trying to achieve anything and "good" and "evil" are just words without any objective meaning.

The basis of less retarded society is a universal and unconditional selfless altruistic love of all life (life at large, i.e. not just people, but also animals and other life forms and life as a concept); the kind of love a glimpse of which you catch when you for example observe an animal play and be happy of just existing as a living being that's able to feel joy and happiness. This kind of love and the strong emotion associated with it is to us possibly the greatest miracle of the universe and so we choose to support it, make it flourish, we define it as an axiom that life which experiences joy and happiness is good. Similarly we define it as bad when life feels suffering or when there is little or even no life in the universe. Here we set the goal for our society to support life, make it flourish, and make individual living beings feel happiness.

We purposefully make this goal a little bit vague, we avoid specifying our basic goal with exact mathematical metrics because defining maximization of any such measure as a goal leads to undesired results (as for example in capitalism setting the goal to maximizing capital leads to maximizing it on the detriment of all other values such as well being of people). This is known as the Goodhart's law: "when a metric becomes a goal, it stops being a good metric".

What does love of all life mean exactly? As hinted above, it does NOT necessarily mean maximizing specific measures such as abundance of life (which could lead to overpopulation and in turn to suffering), the sum of happiness of all life (which could lead to just dosing everyone with drugs or killing unhappy individuals), elimination of negative emotion such as hatred (which would likely prevent us from recognizing wrong directions of our society), it doesn't mean respect towards everyone etc. It doesn't even mean that we will never kill anyone on purpose, our society may support euthanasia without violating its principles. Love of all life mostly means that we start behaving selflessly and altruistically instead of pursuing self interest, at least as much as we practically can. It means that we start seeing the life on our whole planet (and possibly in the whole universe) as our own family, not as our enemies. This doesn't mean we will like everyone, that we'll agree with everyone's opinions, that we won't criticize anyone or that we'll be politically correct etc., it just means that we will never try to cause suffering to others, that we'll try to not exploit others, that we'll be aware of the needs of others and try to behave towards them with empathy and love. Importantly we will try to pursue these ideals even if we can't achieve perfection.

Basic Description

The following is a basic description of just some features of the ideal society, some of which are however only speculative. Keep in mind it is impossible to plan a whole society exactly -- even if some of the speculations here turn out to be somehow erroneous, it probably still doesn't present a fatal obstacle to implementing our society, things may simply just turn out differently or to be more or less challenging than we predict.

Our society is anarcho pacifist and communist, meaning it rejects capitalism, money, violence, war, states, social hierarchy etc. I.e. in our society money, market, capitalism, consumerism, private property, wage labor and trade don't exist, people are free and happy as they can pursue their true interests and potential without worrying about resource fight.

People don't have to work, basically everything is automated and extremely simplified so that the amount of work needed to be done is minimized by eliminating unnecessary bullshit jobs such as marketing, lawyers, insurance, politicians, state bureaucracy, creation of consumer entertainment and goods etc. One of the basic principles of our society is that any individual can simply live, without having to deserve this right by proving worth, usefulness, obedience etc. The little remaining human work that's necessary is done voluntarily. There is no life path ("elementary school, high school, college, marriage, work, retirement, death") lined up for anyone , no fight awaiting, only one lifetime given to the hands of every new born individual to dedicate to whatever he finds best.

Society is NOT based on competition, but rather on collaboration. Making people compete for basic life resources is seen as highly cruel and unethical. The natural need for competition is still satisfied with games and sports, but people know competition is kind of a poison and know they have to practice self control to not allow competitive tendencies in real life.

There is abundance of resources for everyone, poverty is non existent, artificial scarcity is no longer sustained by capitalism. There is enough food and accommodation for everyone, of course for free, as well as health care, access to information, entertainment, tools and so on. Where there used to be shopping centers, parking lots, government buildings and skyscrapers, there are now fields and food banks and people voluntarily collaborate on automating production of food on them.

Our society is NOT fair, everyone is happy whether he deserves it or not, happiness doesn't have to be deserved. In a fair society the talented is rewarded and the untalented suffers, the strong wins and the weak loses, fairness is about winning and losing, reward and punishment, therefore our society is unfair as there are no longer any winners or losers.

States and governments don't exist, there are no artificial borders. Society self regulates and consists of decentralized, mostly self-sufficient communities that utilize their local resources as much as they can and send abundant resources to communities that lack them. The is no law in the sense of complex written legislation, no lawyers, courts and police, society works on the principle of moral laws, education and strictly non-violent actions taken against negative phenomena (e.g. noncooperation, avoidance, ignoring, refusal of people to use money etc.). Communities aren't hugely interdependent and hyperspecialized as in capitalism so there is no danger of system collapse, but they aren't isolated or nationalist, they are altruistic, communist and help each other. Many decisions nowadays taken by politicians, such as those regarding distribution of resources, are in our ideal society made by computers based on collected data and objective scientific criteria.

Criminality doesn't exist, there is no motivation for it as everyone has abundance of everything, no one carries guns, people don't see themselves as competing with others in life and everyone is raised in an environment that nurtures their peaceful, collaborative, selfless loving side. People with "criminal genes" have become extinct thanks to natural selection by people voluntarily choosing to breed with non-violent people. Conflict between people is minimized by the elimination of self interest (and need for it) -- a lot of violence in current society comes from disagreement which comes from everyone's different goals (everyone aims to benefit oneself); in our society this is no longer the case, people rarely disagree on essential decisions because decisions are driven by pure facts collected without distortion or suspicion of self interest, i.e. there are common goals as opposed to a delicate balance between opposing forces.

Technology is simple, powerful, efficient, future proof, ecological, generally good and maximally helps people. Internet is actually nice, it provides practically all information ever digitized, for example there is a global database of all videos ever produced, including movies, educational videos and documentaries, all without ads, DRM and copyright strikes, coming with all known metadata such as tags, subtitles, annotations and translations and are accessible by many means (something akin websites, APIs, physical media, text transcripts, ...), all videos can be downloaded, mirrored and complex search queries can be performed, unlike e.g. with YouTube. Satellite images, streams from all live cameras and other sensors in the world are easily accessible in real time. Search engines are much more powerful than Google can dream of as data is organized efficiently and friendly to indexing, not hidden behind paywalls, JavaScript obscurity or registrations to websites, which means that for example all text of all e-books is indexed as well as all conversations ever had on the Internet and subtitles of videos. All source code of all programs is available for unlimited use by anyone. There are only a few models of standardized computers -- a universal public domain computer -- not thousands of slightly different competing products as nowadays. There is a tiny, energy efficient computer model, then a more powerful computer for complex computations, a simple computer designed to be extremely easy to manufacture etc. None of course have malicious features such as DRM, gay teenager aesthetics, consumerist "killer features" or planned obsolescence. All schematics are available. People possibly wear personal wrist-watch-like computers, however these are nothing like today's "smart" watches/phones -- our wrist computers are completely under the user's control, without any bullshit, spyware, ads and other malicious features, they last weeks or months on battery as they are in low energy consumption mode whenever they're not in use, they run extremely efficient software and are NOT constantly connected to the Internet and updating -- as an alternative to connecting to the Internet (which is still possible but requires activating a transmitter) the device may just choose to receive a world-wide broadcast of general information (which only requires a low power consumption receiver) if the user requests it (similarly to how teletext worked), e.g. info about time, weather or news that's broadcasted by towers and/or satellites and/or small local broadcasters. Furthermore wrist computers are very durable and water proof and may have built-in solar chargers, so one wrist computer works completely independently and for many decades. They have connectors to attach external devices like keyboards and bigger displays when the user needs to use the device comfortably at home. The computing world is NOT split by competing standards such as different programming languages, most programmers use just one programming language similar to C that's been designed to maximize quality of technology (as opposed to capitalist interests such as allowing rapid development by incompetent programmers or update culture).

Fascism doesn't exist, people no longer compete socially and don't live in fear (of immigrants, poverty, losing jobs, religious extremists etc.) that would give rise to militarist thought, society is multicultural and races highly mixed. There is no need for things such as political correctness and other censorship, people acknowledge there exist differences -- differences (e.g. in competence or performance) don't matter in a non-competitive society, discrimination doesn't exist.

Computer security is not an issue anymore, passwords and encryption practically don't exist anymore, there is nothing to "steal", no money on the Internet, no way to abuse personal data, no possibility to ruin someone's career, no celebrity accounts to hack etc.

All people speak the same language, possibly Esperanto or Lojban. Though some speak multiple languages, most of the world languages have become archaic and are studied e.g. for the sake of understanding old texts. Of course dialects and different accents of the world language appear, but all are mutually intelligible thanks to constant global communication and also people being so responsible as to willingly try to not diverge from the main form too much.

People don't wear clothes unless for practical reasons (weather, safety, ...). Fashion and shame of nudity doesn't exist and it is seen as wasteful to keep manufacturing, cleaning and recycling more clothes than necessarily needed. Of course it is NOT forbidden to wear or make clothes, people just mostly naturally don't engage in unnecessary, wasteful activity.

Anyone can have sex with anyone, without hurting anyone of course, but there are no taboo limitations like forbidden incest, sex with children, animals or dead bodies, everything is allowed and culturally acceptable as long as no one gets hurt. "Cheating" in today's sense doesn't exist, marriage doesn't exist, people regularly have sex with many other people just to satisfy the basic need. People have learned to separate sex and love. Of course many people still live in life-long partner relationships.

There are no heroes or leaders. People learn from young age that they should follow ideas, not people or groups of people, and that cults of personality are dangerous. There are known experts in different disciplines and areas of science, but no celebrities, experts aren't worshiped, their knowledge is treated the same as we nowadays e.g. treat information that we find in a database. This doesn't mean there aren't people who are good moral examples and whose behavior is admired, people are just separated from their actions, people admire behavior, not the individual -- all people are loved unconditionally, some had the opportunity to take admirable actions and took it, some were born to perform well in sports or excel in science, but that's no reason to love the individual any more or any less or to worship him as a god.

Education is not indoctrination, it is actually good, people (not only children) attend schools voluntarily (though such "schools" will be extremely different from what the word means today), there are no grades, degrees or tests that need to be passed or prescribed courses, only recommendations and guidance of other people. There is no strict division to students and teachers, teachers are students at the same time, older people teach younger. There may of course exist voluntary tests that people can take to test their knowledge and competence, but no one is forced to pass tests to continue studying etc.

People don't kill or otherwise abuse and torture animals, people just don't eat much meat and if they want to, artificial meat is widely available. Some may possibly eat meat of animal and people that died naturally, which is acceptable.

Cannibalism is acceptable as long as high hygiene is respected as it puts a dead body to good use instead of wasting food by burying it or burning it. Even though most people don't practice cannibalism, it is perfectly acceptable that some do. Many people wish to be eaten after death either by people or by animals (as for example some Buddhists do even nowadays).

People aren't individualist and egoistic, they don't have tattoos, dyed hair, piercing etc., that's simply bullshit of primitive competitive cultures. It is correctly seen as immoral to try to persuade by "good looks" -- for example by wearing a suit -- that's simply a cheap attempt at deception. Everyone is valued the same no matter his looks, people don't feel the need to change their gender or alter their look so as to appeal to anyone or to follow some kind of fashion, trend, to strategically join some minority to gain the best set of "rights" or to infiltrate specific social class. Of course cutting hair e.g. for comfort is practiced, but no one wastes his time with makeup and similar nonsense.

People live in harmony with nature, the enormous waste of capitalism and consumerist society has been eliminated, industry isn't raping nature, cities are greener and more integrated with nature, people live in energy-efficient underground houses, there are fewer roads as people don't use cars much thanks to efficient public transport and lower need for travel thanks to not having to go to work, utilizing mostly local resources etc.

Research advances faster, people are smarter, more rational, emphatic, loving and more moral. Nowadays probably the majority of the greatest brains are wasted on bullshit activity such as studying and trying to hack the market -- even professional researchers nowadays waste time on "safe", lucrative unnecessary bullshit research in the "publish or perish" spirit, chasing grants, easy patents etc. In our ideal society smart people focus on truly relevant issues such as curing cancer, without being afraid of failure, stalling, negative results, lack of funds etc. People are responsible and practice e.g. voluntary birth control to prevent overpopulation. However people are NOT cold rational machines, on the contrary emotions are present much more than today, for example the emotion of love towards life is so strong most people are willing to die to save someone else, even a complete stranger. People express emotion through rich art and good deeds. People are also spiritual despite being highly rational -- they know rationality is but one of many tools for viewing and understanding the world. Religion still exists commonly but not in radical or hostile forms; Christianity, Islam and similar religions become more similar to e.g. Buddhism, some even merge after realizing their differences are relatively unimportant and stop competing for mass control of people, religion becomes much less organized and much more personal.

Art is rich and unrestricted (no copyright or other "IP" exists), with people being able to fully dedicate their lives to it if they wish and with the possibility to create without distraction such as having to make living or dealing with copyright. People collaborate and reuse each other's works, many free universes exist, everyone can enjoy all art without restriction and remix it however he wishes. Art is not someone's property or capital, it is a discovery made by someone for everyone's benefit.

People live much longer and healthier lives thanks to faster research in (actual) medicine, free healthcare, more doctors (those who nowadays do bullshit business), better food (no junk/fast food), less pollution, higher living standard, more natural life closer to nature, minimization of stress and elimination of the antivirus paradox from medicine. They also die more peacefully thanks to having lived a rich, fulfilling lives, they die in the circle of their family and are not afraid of death, they take it as natural part of life, death is culturally accepted and not feared. Euthanasia is allowed and common for those who wish to die for whatever reason.

FAQ

How To Implement It

This is the hard part, however after successfully setting things in motion it may start to become much easier and eventually even inevitable that the ideal society will be closely approached. However at the moment society seems too spoiled and change of a direction seems very unlikely, it seems more probable that we will destroy ourselves or enslave ourselves forever -- capitalism and similar misdirections of society connected to self-interest, competition, fascism etc. pose a huge threat to our endeavor and may ruin it completely, so they need to be strictly opposed, but in a CORRECT way, i.e. not by revolutions and violence but rather by education, offering alternatives and leading examples (i.e. means aligned with our basic values). It has to be stressed that we always need to follow our basic values of nonviolence, love, true rationality etc., resorting to easy ways of violence etc. will only prolong the established cycle of suffering in the society which we are trying to end. Remember, we are not creating a revolution, we aims for a rather slow, nonviolent, voluntary evolutional change.

We already have technology and knowledge to implement our ideal society -- this may have been the most difficult part and it has already been achieved -- that's the good news.

For the next phase education is crucial, we have to spread our ideas further, first among the intellectuals, then to the masses. By this we seek to unretard society. Unfortunately this phase is still in its infancy, vast majority of intellectuals are completely uneducated in this area -- this we have to change. There are a few that support parts of our plan such as simple technology, nonviolence, not hurting animals etc., but almost no one supports them all, or see the big picture -- we need to unite these people (see also type A/B fail) to form a small but dedicated community sharing all the proposed ideas. This community will then be able to collaborate on further education, e.g. by creating materials such as books, games, vlogs, giving talks etc.

With this more of the common people should start to jump on the train and support causes such as universal basic income, free software etc., possibly leading to establishment of communities and political parties that will start restricting capitalism and implementing a more socialist society with more freedom and better education, which should further help nurture people better and accelerate the process further. From here on things should become much easier and faster, people will already see the right direction themselves.

Inspiration

Here are some of the ideas/movements/ideologies and people whose ideas inspired less retarded society. It has to be stressed we never follow people, only their ideas -- mentioning people here simply means we follow SOME of their ideas. Also keep in mind mentioning an idea here doesn't mean fully embracing it, we most likely only adopted some parts of it.

See Also


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