Sociology and the Utopian Society

Edward Bernays and Group Psychology: Manipulating the Masses  Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOUcXK_7d_c

Discovering a better socio/economic model for us to live by should certainly be something we put our best minds to working on.

In my limited experience with thinking or working with this theme I found little opportunity for any significant change from the status quo.

   Yet  recently, when I found the work of Kohlberg, I felt there was real hope for new dynamics. Prior to this, it seemed that any structure would quickly fall apart if it had no religious center to it. Something besides self interest was needed in its economics to give it backbone. Something besides religion was necessary to unify and and give some moral bearing to the community.

I personally have some problems with religion versus freedom. It's just that faith is so contrary to truth and truth is so central to education and morality. Also, freedom should be of central importance to a community and its people, and religious dogma mostly requires the opposite, it requires compliance.

Kohlberg not only describes morality as a learned behavior but says you can test for it. He also shows that moral rectitude is not natural, you need to be conditioned to moral principals.

The economics of community based systems from the peasant/landlord of kingships to the modern mill towns are well tested platforms for society.

Today, a large variety of religion based groups prosper.  Christianity, Scientology, Mormonism are all based around mythical religious belief.

In my opinion, the possibility of good results from experimenting with secular concepts of social organization is uniquely opportune today. Given all the new information we have from other disciplines and technologies, efficient models for social development can now be designed and built that could be the growth industry of this century.     

Ferdinand Tönnies describes the evolution as the development from informal society, where people have many liberties and there are few laws and obligations, to modern, formal rational society, dominated by traditions and laws and are restricted from acting as they wish. He also notes that there is a tendency of standardisation and unification, when all smaller societies are absorbed into the single, large, modern society. Thus Tönnies can be said to describe part of the process known today as the globalization. Tönnies was also one of the first sociologists to claim that the evolution of society is not necessarily going in the right direction, that the social progress is not perfect, and it can even be called a regress as the newer, more evolved societies are obtained only after paying a high cost, resulting in decreasing satisfaction of individuals making up that society. Tönnies' work became the foundation of neoevolutionism.