Smokes and Glasses Club

Had another great weekend, maybe not THE BEST WEEKEND EVER, but still not to shabby.  Helped one of my fellow EMT's out and did a little extra staffing and training with the crew.  Had ice cream with cinnamon and chocolate chips for dinner on Saturday (I love being an adult) after I got home, and even got my lazy butt out of bed to work out the next day.  Sunday was beautiful and after our workout decided to consume as many calories as possible in the form of Kraken rum, home made bacon, jalapeno, smoked cayenne cheddar bbq burgers and home made apple cider donuts.

Best part (or one of the best parts) was either curling up in my reading chair and living in my book world for two solid uninterrupted hours, or our meeting of the Smokes and Glasses club. What is a Smokes and Glasses club?  It is when you get something tasty to drink (wine, whiskey, scotch, rum) that has to be drunk from an actual glass and then light up your favorite cigar or pipe (no cigarettes) and talk about to most
random things while sitting on the porch.  Last night me and the Hubbin (founding members of the Smokes and Glasses Club) started with a discussion of Atlas Shrugged by the late Ayn Rand.  This is one of Hubbin's favorite books, and he is enjoying the movies as well.  After a bit of a talk on our favorite characters,(Fransico for him and Rearden's wife for me) we moved on to the discussion of potential utopia scenarios in books and what works, what doesn't and why it seems they can't last. In Atlas Shrugged the potential utopia happens when (SPOILER ALERT) a small group of like minded people purposely isolate themselves from the real world.  This seems to be a common theme in utopian scenarios, almost every ""perfect" society seems to be one of limited humans in an isolated condition.  Of course this works, because in general if you have a small group (compared to the rest of the world) who are all agreeing to work towards one goal and eliminate most of the outside interference then you probably have a better shot at that coveted working as one happy happy joy joy society.  In books we either see a person stumble upon one of these groups, or we see the utopia
being threatened by outside sources, or we see where there are cracks in the utopian ideals making it actually more of a controlled experiment and less of a choosing to live in perfect harmony.  In the novelette Genesis society only works for about one generation or so, as soon as a generation is born into this created peace, they don't have the fear and knowledge of the outside world to motivate them into following specific rules that were earlier agreed upon. So essentially we see any long term, wide spread perfection is almost impossible even in fiction.

Of course after this discussion, I took it upon myself to try and form, if not a perfect society, then at least a form of government that would actually be accountable for its actions, be able to respond in a timely manner and still be representative of the general populace.  I came up with a weird mix of elected monarchy, a life time elected super court (kind of like the supreme court but bigger) and general populace voting.  My Hubbin always looking to improve ideas helped my by playing devils advocate and was finding the potential strengths and weaknesses.  The biggest weakness of course is the one that essentially dooms all human run societies to potential ruin and that of course is humans themselves.  We determined that society works best when individuals are given freedoms, and those individuals use that freedom, by choice for the good of the whole. Of course that leaves us wide open to those humans who because of various reasons choose to do something that might not be in the best interest of the whole and that brings the whole thing crashing down.  Of course legislating good behavior has also never worked because then we start getting molded into faceless puppets with no individuality.  All this to say is that I have yet to read a book, watch a movie, or see a real life instance where a perfect society can or does exist in the long term.  I think this is ok for two reasons, one is we need those challenges and adversities to make life worth living, to learn and help us grow (not that I want bad things to happen, just that we can use them to grow).  Without these challenges we grow complacent and stagnant, also it makes for really bad
books and movies, I mean who really wants to read about a perfect protagonist with a perfect life where nothing arises to challenge them? The second reason I am ok with a lack of perfection is it gives us something to strive for.  Even though perfection seems impossible, we can at least try to make it better, and if we continually try and make it better, it will get a little bit better and then we can try for more better (was that thoroughly confusing?).  I think this is where books play such an important role as a way to examine and play out some of these idea's, to see where the flaws may be and to even possibly see the long term effects.  You can put crazy idea's in books because the risk to actual humanity is pretty low, but who knows we may look back on those ideas and realize, maybe they are not as crazy as they sound?  Ok so this post got really long and talky so if you made it this far, bravo and go get your self something tasty to drink. I appreciate you all letting me indulge in a little blah blah blah time.

What is your favorite Utopian book?  Have you ever read about a successful long term, wide spread Utopia? What is your idea for a more perfect government?  Should I quit watching CNN before writing these posts?