A reader asks why smart people have not set up an advanced society and created their utopia?
It should take them only a decade to create the most prosperous and smart nation on the planet .. and leave us in their dust. Why are they so dumb that they haven’t done it?
She’s right. What is wrong with these people?
My ex-boss’ IQ well-exceeded 150 and I marvelled at his tolerance, neither hiring more like genii to take some load off, nor treating me like the lap dog I was. Perhaps those practiced knowing looks and dry sarcasm kept him in check. I had cunning to fall back on, after all.
And precocious kids. No matter how brilliant the student, they aim no higher than military-industrial footsoldier and “hope to be a scientist.” Sigh. Even beauty pageant wannabes set the bar at world peace!
Science fiction authors have long toyed with scenarios of scientists forming communes of intellect.
Howard Fast’s “The First Men” painted an unlikely but ultimate outcome: his advanced society began as a military experiment that isolated itself just in time to survive the predictable reaction of a feeble-minded society - so often portrayed in film and novel - to destroy the advanced or mutated species as a survival threat to resident room-temperature plodders.
Fred Hoyle based Ossian’s Ride on off-planet interlopers sealing off some of Ireland, with much detail on security and organization. Herbie Wells smote us all with a comet to clear the planet of woe, while John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos - though alien and malevolently implanted - showed what a bunch of really smart kids (with supernatural abilities) might do.
But what if the smarties have done it already? Where the heck are they?
Have they created utopia but cunningly present as a failed state, like the rest of us. If so, can someone kindly blow the whistle?
Is it Iceland, New Zealand, Tasmania, Sweden, Monaco, Anguilla, Maui, Liechtenstein? The United States of America?
On that trail, why haven’t the world’s wealthy - who also are typically smarter - purchased, or simply invaded, a big fat tropical island and set up their own bank and government - eliminating taxes and controlling security?
While they like to hole-up in luxurious ghettos in quieter precincts of certain cities, that isn’t a plan, it’s a reflex.
My reader and I again plead:
- - If anyone knows the whereabouts of an advanced collective of altruistic, scientific minds, kindly reveal
- - If certain it exists not, explain then why smart people are so dumb .. in terms we, the dumber, might understand.
Subscribe via RSS
Stumble it
Digg it
Deli.icio.us
Technorati
Up till now most of the smart people were happy with the USA. But seeing how it is heading for socialism they recently cashed in their bonds and sold their stocks. Some at seasteading.org are trying to figure out how to live on the open ocean. So the 10 years started just recently.
Vince - Left USA for Anguilla in 1994
Thank you, Vincent.
While your comment is welcome, and appreciated, the linkback to seasteading.org is the pearl in the oyster.
That site’s FAQ more than answers this somewhat facetious posting - though the question it posed was, nevertheless, deadly serious.
So, delighted I am to see bright minds address social ideals I feared had long since suffocated. Coincidentally seasteading’s FAQ explains in detail how difficult is acquiring land/territory for these lofty aims.
It’s no barrier to oil princes, dredging beachfronts from salty gulf waters and plastering them with prefab mansions as I write. Those Dubai images of La Palmera and El Mundo, after the initial ‘Ahhh’ fades, evoke a shiver of doubt about how far one can live from survival fundamentals without coming undone.
Seasteading’s platform superficially resembles Dubai’s pipe-dreaming. But SeaStead’s concept is all about sustainable infrastructure. Dubai’s is intent on stretching ’sustainable’ till it almost breaks, for the most socially and culturally puerile of reasons.
Ed.