Unilateral Utopia: Community+Culture
The justification for community and culture to your Human Ideal Self
Community
If you have a family of Humans, your family likely most prefers to have their own array of friends–including but not limited to you. If an Ideal friend is then necessarily a Human, and shares your values and beliefs in order for you to relate most to them, then a friend’s Intrinsic Ideal Self in turn prefers its own family. In this exponential fashion, from your own Intrinsic Ideal Self a broader community is justified within your Utopia. It is a community maximally compatible with your Intrinsic Ideal Self and its values and beliefs.
For the private community of the Intrinsic Ideal Self, a high degree of compatibility and relatability is required. These are family and friends, and the family of the friends and the friends of the family, which are first derived from the Intrinsic Ideal Self within Utopia. A community can be defined then as: “The group of other Individuals with whom your Intrinsic Ideal Self spends its most time to satisfy its preference for other Individuals.” This community must share highly compatible beliefs and values with your Intrinsic Ideal Self, but also has some novelty and uniqueness and satisfies your Intrinsic Ideal Self’s preference for other sovereign Individual Humans.
To ensure compatibility, no different from family and friends, communities must also adhere to the principles of stability, sustainability, and being preferred by their members. A community must not have a structure, or an environment, or norms which make its existence impossible or contradictory. A community must maintain all of these so that it can exist in the future as well. Then, a community must be preferred by your Intrinsic Ideal Self for the community to exist in a Utopia derivative of that very Intrinsic Ideal Self. And because you prefer other sovereign (though highly-Compatible) Humans, a community must also be preferred by them as well. If members don’t like their community, or if your Intrinsic Ideal Self disprefers a community, there exists sufficient reason to abandon or heavily change a community.
Given this justification of community in an egoist fashion only from one’s own Intrinsic Ideal Self, I was shocked to discover the initial justification for all diversity. Diversity first among friends and family, but foreseeably for those family and friends beyond that. It is always only ever a compatible diversity, that does not transgress upon your Intrinsic Ideal Self, and yet it emerges intractably nonetheless. The justification for Diversity derives from the following observations:
A Human, to be valued by another Human as family or friend among their community, must be unique. They must be their own Individual, with an Identity and specific values and beliefs. Your Intrinsic Ideal Self is unique. To truly relate to another entity, it must be similarly unique. There is of course a balance to this diversity, same as there was a balance between the Immediate Self and the Potential Self; Yes in a Utopia derivative of your Intrinsic Ideal Self, the values and beliefs of friends and family never intractably contradict your own in an incompatible fashion. Often, you must be able to live alongside a friend for them to be a friend, same as with your family. But for something, and someone, to interest your Human Ideal Self, it cannot merely be you.
And so it can be said that our Human curiosity, our Human thirst for novelty, our preference for companionship, our Human desire to be entertained and valued by an equal–and not merely a slave–is what gives rise to a healthy appreciation of diversity. Our family must be different. Our friends must be different. And their friends and their family and so on and so forth must be somewhat different as Compatible Humans are.
This is not the sort of post-human appreciation of diversity that pretends wall-watching is as valued by our Intrinsic Ideal Selves as our own Humanity; For friends, family, and community, being surrounded by wall-watchers is not as preferred by our Intrinsic Ideal Self as being surrounded by Compatible Humans. Thus it seems our Human given gives us an appreciation of the “other”, but this is always balanced and grounded by an appreciation of our own selves. We wish to see ourself in the other, and if we cannot, then the other ceases to be derived from our Intrinsic Ideal Self’s preferences.
With this requirement of diversity, a norm of tolerance becomes necessary. Your Friend might have a different favorite food, and just because he makes it for dinner one night instead of making your favorite food doesn’t mean the Ideal preferred action is to stop being friends. Part of being a Human is to exist with other Humans, and to tolerate their eccentricities relative to you. There are definite incompatible values and beliefs, but if there were no unique and different values and beliefs between your friends and family, and thus also your broader community, there would be no joke that would surprise you, no thought that genuinely entertained you. There would be no true Compatible Humanity, for Humans evolved for tribes that had compatible differences.
Culture
For any given Community of Humans, a shared Culture is destined to emerge. This culture exists for a myriad of reasons, to safeguard shared norms and values and beliefs, and to express the particular preferences of the amalgamation of Individuals within a group. Given a maximally preferred community derived from your Intrinsic Ideal Self’s preferences, the culture of such a community is therefore also a culture maximally preferred by your Intrinsic Ideal Self.
A culture derivative of the Intrinsic Ideal Self entails an entire culture–language, music, architecture, traditions, celebrations, stories, history, religion–that is all the most maximally Ideal to an Individual’s Identity across all environments. However, it is not merely you and your preferences that a culture must represent.
A culture must uphold the principles of social interaction. It must be stable. It must enable and strengthen itself, it must imbue in its norms a reverence for itself. A culture must make its members uphold it. A culture must also make its members uphold it in the future. A culture must have itself be propagated into the future, else it will not exist in the future. Lastly, a culture must have its members prefer its existence. If members do not prefer a culture's existence, of their own volition, then members will not act to ensure the stability and sustainability of the culture. Members will let the culture deteriorate and dissipate, for it did not provide them value in return.
In order for a culture to be willingly preferred by a member, it must derive from the Individual’s Intrinsic Ideal Self. But because of the aforementioned necessary diversity of community for Human Ideal Selves, a culture is not just representative of you, but also of all the other different members of your community. Else, the culture and community will fail the third prerequisite of social interaction–being preferred by the members.
To satisfy this “preferred by members” principle of social interaction, a community must curate a culture that satisfies the Intrinsic Ideal preferences of each of its members, but also all of its members. As previously deduced, a community must tolerate diversity between the Ideal preferences of each of its members to satisfy all of its members. But it must also bind these members together, to ensure the community does indeed represent them maximally, and this is achieved via culture.
A culture must therefore represent the similarity of the members, else it will not be maximally preferred by its members, and the social interaction that creates the culture–and underlying community–will cease. If your entire community unanimously decides on an architectural style, cuisine, and genre music you detest, you will rightfully reason such a community to be dispreferred by your Intrinsic Ideal Self.
Because you value your community, however, and you value a degree of diversity within this community, you must tolerate the fact that your community’s culture will not perfectly derive solely from your Intrinsic Ideal Self, but rather from an amalgamation of your Intrinsic Ideal Self’s Communal Ideal. This Communal Ideal is what a culture derives from, both to secure and satisfy a community.
Historically the Human Ideal Self is constantly managing a fine balance of: Wanting a community that is interesting and novel and entertaining, and wanting a community that is fine tuned to be representative of its OWN Intrinsic Ideal Self. This is observed with friends, as you want friends who have the true Individual freedom to uniquely not appreciate you, but uniquely appreciate you anyways.
Balancing similarity and diversity is crucial. Make a society that is totally alien and foreign to an Individual’s specific cultivated beliefs and values, and they will feel alienated and dispossessed. Make a society that is filled with perfect clones of an Individual, and a Human Ideal Self will feel bored and prefer instead a novel and interesting community.
Just as tolerance was a crucial virtue to hone on behalf of diversity, discrimination is a crucial virtue to hone on behalf of similarity. Sadistic psychopaths and wall-watchers alike are dispreferred by the Intrinsic Ideal Self as its Ideal neighbors. The Intrinsic Ideal Self would discriminate against the incompatible wall-watchers if they sought to appropriate his Ideal community, culture, and Utopia. To favor one's own family over the other’s family is derivative of one’s Intrinsic Ideal Self, and thus it must be a norm cultivated among the family and community.
Often, it is unnecessary to stress the virtue of discrimination when resources of energy and space are ample such as in Utopia. Far better to stress the virtue of tolerance, as discrimination, while a virtue, is far easier to express in excess in a Utopia. But in social interaction, resources are not quite as infinite, even in an Ideal Utopia with total control over reality. You cannot be neighbors with everyone, and your Intrinsic Ideal Self does not prefer to be neighbors with just anyone. For this reason discrimination remains a virtue held in reserve by all stable, sustainable, and preferred communities and cultures. To favor the Compatible Human over the wall-watcher is a virtue.