Barack Hussein Obama,

a person of color, was elected to the Presidency of the United States of America. As such he is de facto leader of the "Free World", potentially the most powerful single individual human being on the globe today. Whether he accomplishes anything else or not, he has eliminated racism as a political ideology and established egalitarianism as a reasonable basis for a governmental infrastructure.

This does not mean that there will not be people who control political units who believe that their subjects are inferior to them and their coterie, but there will be no reason for the ruled to accept that belief, and no political infrastructure can continue to exist without the tacit, if passive, acceptance of the ruler's belief by its citizens. Even as coercive a regime as the Soviet Union failed when it lost the passive acceptance by the Russian people.

Egalitarianism is the key to the specific model of Utopia that is described in the novel Utopia that can be reached here . Along with ecological responsibility and creativity, it forms the ideological basis that makes the background to the novel realistic, even if the novel itself is a fantasy.

Sixty years ago ...

...I graduated from MIT with a degree in physics. After being a draftee and civil servant with the Army's Nuclear Defense Laboratory and a graduate student at Columbia University I had a Ph.D. in physics. I worked for a company that made particle accelerators, wandered around Europe for a while, and went to Yale to help build an accelerator laboratory. In none of these places did I find a social structure that made sense. The Vietnam War was going on at the time, so it was clear the lack of sense was not limited to the places I had actually been. We were all acting crazily.

It didn't seem reasonable that our species would evolve to be insane. If anything it seemed like we were in some sort of transition. We had done this once before when we changed our infrastructure from hunter-gatherer tribes to agricultural empires. I decided to see if I could understand how human behavior would evolve. Nobody had provided an explanation for where we were, much less where we were going.

I had the advantage of using mathematics based on Tsung-Dao Lee's approach to Statistical Mechanics and quantum theory so I was able to recognize the mistake that Darwin made when he adopted Spencer's idea of evolution, "survival of the fittest". Darwin's original idea, "non-survival of the unfit", was the correct version. Using that I was able to explain how human society evolved from the paleolithic to the present.

A short version of that explanation is given here. It had two problems. First, it was not easy to read because the ideas were unfamiliar, so nobody wanted to read it. It was mathematical in its essential arguments, which limited full understanding to mathematically-trained intellectuals, and there are few of them and fewer of those who are open to something new.

Second, the mistake Spenser convinced Darwin to make served to justify the superiority of academics and rich people, so neither wanted the mistake corrected. That eliminated academic recognition and foundation support.

I decided that I would follow the example of B. F. Skinner, and try to explain myself in a novel that would be relatively easy to read and wouldn't be so threatening to academics. It was set in a future Utopia that was globally egalitarian, ecologically responsible and creative. Unfortunately, I really didn't understand how we got there from here, so I had to finesse the actual steps in its evolution. Nobody was interested in reading that, either, because it was too fantastic to be comfortable and too realistic to be exciting. I put it aside and worked on a more readable version of the theory of evolution.

I almost missed ...

... the meaning of the most critical event in our era.

The problem with being an intellectual is that you believe that analysis precedes action. An ordinary citizen feels the problem, so that there is a need for the solution before intellectuals even understand that the problem exists.

One of the things that we needed to work around was racism, the notion that there are inherent differences in groups of human beings, and that the symptoms of those differences include gender and the differences of appearance we call "racial". Intellectually, I knew that to be false. I had even demonstrated it as part of my theory of human evolution. But I still believed that it was so fixed in the contemporary belief-structure that I had to "solve the problem"; and I didn't know how.

Barrack Hussein Obama solved the problem by ignoring it.

After Obama lost the primary in New Hampshire, the polls having predicted otherwise, there was an incident that David Axelrod described to Ron Suskind, who published it in the New York Times of 11/16/08:

It was Michelle who stopped the show. "You need to ask yourself, Why do you want to do this?" she said directly. "What are you hoping to uniquely accomplish, Barack?"

Obama sat quietly for a moment, and everyone waited. "This I know: When I raise my hand and take that oath of office, I think the world will look at us differently," he said. "And millions of kids across this country will look at themselves differently."

Obama understood, through his own search for identity, how America's seminal struggle over race was part of a wider story, of a search for dignity and hope that defined the lives of countless people throughout the world. A battered America, he felt, was ready, even anxious, to prove the truth of its sacred oaths: liberty, justice and equality. To show the world.

Barack Hussein Obama knew intuitively that the way to solve that problem was to ignore it.

Obama, as a person of color, has become the most powerful person in the most powerful country in the world, and done it by a process that is recognized by the people of the world as democratic, even populist. And he never mentioned that he was a person of color as if that was something any more unusual than his big ears.

What Barack Obama understood ...

... was that people of color had been left out of the progressive evolution of human society. He may not have understood why the progress exhibited in the previous 500 years had stopped, but he knew that it had and that his election would be the ultimate demonstration that appearance of the kind we call "racial" would no longer be considered a valid criterion for blocking upward mobility. That liberation was felt by the people who Toynbee called the "Proletariat"--the people who were alienated from Western Civilization. Not only the "Internal Proletariat" the people of color and the poor who were located within Western Civilization; but the "External Proletariat", everyone in non-western countries.

This does not mean that we have eliminated the appearance labeled "racial" as a way that people will measure social class, but it does mean that a negative attitude still held by some people will no longer be the general expectation. As this sinks in, we will take for granted that everyone, everywhere is as equally deserving of respect and consideration as anyone, anywhere.

To put it another way: no individual will be considered to deserve special consideration (positive or negative) based on the inherent qualities of a social group or class with which he or she is associated. Any such consideration will have to be justified by the benefits accruing to the population in general.

That change in attitude will have been a direct result of the decision of Barack Hussein Obama to run for the Presidency of the United States. And it will have other consequences as well.

Unfortunately,...

... the phenomenon that caused racial discrimination to be revived is a little more complicated, and isn't automatically solved by the election of Barack Obama.

For the last 500 years the mechanism of progress has been the upward mobility of the upper part of the middle class to the ruling establishment; and the certification of that upward mobility by the conspicuous display of the waste of resources. The certification of the corporate-governmental bureaucracy as the establishment, i.e., the "Managerial Revolution" of 1900-1950, left people of color, in both the internal and external proletariat, to be the next group that evolution had scheduled for upward mobility.

Unfortunately, too much of the globally available resources have already been used up. There aren't enough resources left to be wasted by the proletariat in order for them to be certified as equal to the Western establishment. That meant that the internal proletariat of Western Civilization, and everyone in the external proletariat outside of Western Civilization, had to be kept from being upwardly mobile by whatever means possible so that there would be enough resources for the establishment of Western Civilization to waste. Even within that establishment, between 1950 and the present more and more of the lower middle class were pushed down into the internal proletariat.

The result was that the human species was in an evolutionary crisis. Part of the "progress" associated with the Industrial Revolution, a steady increase in upward mobility toward a universal equality, was being blocked because of the choice of wasting resources as a status symbol for the upper strata. The establishment appeared to have the choice of blocking the recognition of people of color as equal to the current establishment, or facing ecological disaster; and they chose to embrace that ecological disaster for as long as they could.

Thus, in a sense, Barack Obama has already accomplished the major part of his contribution to the evolution of homo sapiens sapiens. Simply by being a person of color and accepting the role of the most powerful individual on earth he has demonstrated two things: that we are all equal and that that equality can be recognized by a democratic process. That is something that the world has recognized even if it doesn't fully understand why that feels as liberating as it does. There is simply no reason why any human individual should be treated as inherently inferior or superior to any other human individual. We merely need to retain that notion, of universal global egalitarianism, to create a Utopia. The rest of the problem is simply working out the mechanics of survival under that principle.

Unfortunately, although we have been slowly moving in that direction for the last 500 years, we keep letting the establishment tell us that we are fine just the way we are, and we participate by not looking at what Toynbee called the "proletariat"--those people who either live within the physical boundary of our society, but who cannot exercise full and free participation in it, the "internal proletariat", or the "external proletariat" who don't even have the physical advantages of our citizens. We have to accept the difficult proposition that the proletariat, as much as the elite establishment and the "middle classes" who fall between them, are human beings who do not have some inherent characteristic that makes them less deserving.

The election of Barack Obama has made it impossible to justify a society that excludes people based on their complexion, light or dark. But that isn't the only reason we divide ourselves into groups nor regard each other as superior or inferior.

There will be racists in the future, but it will be difficult to make racism the governing principle of a nominally progressive and democratic state. It will only exist as an abberation, like belief in a flat earth. By saving the soul of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama has saved the soul of the human species.

He can still fail to achieve everything he hopes to achieve, and everything we think we want him to achieve, but he has accomplished one thing: there can never again be a social infrastructure based on the idea that one part of the human species is inherently inferior to. and deserves to be opressively ruled by, another part of the human species. The rulers of such a system may believe that, but the ruled will not need to, and no governmental system can survive without the tacit consent of the governed. If that consent is not given, no government, not even one as coercive as the former Soviet Union, can survive forever.

So the problem of "race" is solved. We are all equally human beings no matter what we look like. But that raises another problem: if we are all equally human, why aren't we treated equally? In particular, why is it universal in Western Civilization that human beings who display the ability to use more money (their own or other people's) are treated as if they were more important, more valuable to society, better than people without that ability to waste resources?

All we have to do...

...now is adopt the principle of ecological responsibility.

This can be boiled down to a belief that waste is "extreme bad taste" or, as it used to be described in the Soviet Union, "nekulturni".

Unfortunately, waste has been a defining principle of Western Civilization for the last 500 years. For us simply to abandon waste as a desireable practice would not only be to abandon our economic system but even to abandon the idea of progress toward equality. We have to understand the role that waste played in our past social evolution so that we can abandon it deliberately and knowledgeably. In order do that we need to go back to the collapse of the Hellenistic Culture and the Roman Empire as the last example of a post-neolithic, or agriculturally-based civilization.

When the Roman Empire collapsed its Civil Service lost its ability to provide status symbols for the elite. These devices had to be provided by traders using the new technology of ocean-going ships and navigational techniques. The traders (and the bankers who were traders in money) became rich from the process of trade, but they couldn't get social satisfaction from it. No matter how rich they became they couldn't be nobility unless their ancestors were descended from warlords, and if they joined the church infrastructure they'd have to give up their wealth.

Calvin solved the problem by inventing a new kind of aristocracy, "The Elect", who were directly appointed by God over the heads of the existing nobility and clergy. The sign of being Elect was that God's Grace made you prosper, so that the Elect were those who demonstrated their sign of Election by accumulating and displaying wealth. The primary characteristic of the Industrial Revolution (1500-1950) was the upward mobility of the upper middle class to the establishment elite by the accumulation of money and the display of that status by demonstrably wasting resources.

The next generation, the Colonial Planters, didn't just steal the resources of non-european cultures by trading trinkets for them, they stole their homelands and made them slaves on plantations operated for profit. When they ran out of indigenous slaves they captured and imported africans. In America the Colonial Planters broke the control of their european principals (in the American Revolution and similar revolutions) and became the aristocracy of the resulting new countries.

In the Northern United States, where slave-powered plantations weren't profitable, entrepreneurs from Northern Europe brought new technology that was powered by running water (and, later, by steam). They then used that industry to fight the Civil War that broke the political power of the Southern Planters, and broke their economic power by abolishing chattel slavery.

By the turn of the Century the industrial entrepreneurs had become rich through using wage slaves to run their machines and, to show their status, built imitation palaces and married their daughters to impoverished european aristocrats. Unfortunately for them, while doing this they left the running of the mills, the source of their wealth, to their clerks and mechanics; who took control of the economy.

These clerks and mechanics called themselves managers and engineers and turned the stock certificales from symbols of ownership to chips in a gambling game. After two world wars and the Great Depression they had become the elite and rewarded the ex-soldiers by using the Universities and the G. I. Bill to turn them into functionaries in a vast corporate-government bureaucracy.

At each of these stages the elite certified their status by displaying their ability to waste resources, and, by the 1950s, the middle-classes of Western Civilization were imitating the elite by wasting resources on imitation status symbols at a rate that could hardly be maintained.

This meant that upward-mobility could not be extended to the lower-middle-class. The globe had been pretty well explored and the limits of its resources established. The level of resource used by the elite and middle-classes of Western Civilization as waste that was certifying their status, could not be extended to the people of color who constituted the external proletariat. In fact the status defined by wasting resources would have to be reduced for the lower middle-class within Western Civilization, dooming them to being the first generation in the 500 year history of the Western middle class to suffer downward mobility.

In the period after 1950 the progress in communications technology made the contrast between the developed nations of Western Civilization and the populations of the states not in that group more evident. This was particularly irritating to the upper middle classes of the "Third World" when they compared their status to that of Westerners. One of the points where this irritation was continually renewed was in the area around Israel. Israel had been formed by expatriate european (Ashkenazic) jews, so that it became a continual display of western ideas and practices in the heart of a world in which traditional Muslim beliefs had been used by European puppets to repress and rule a muslim proletariat.

Toward the end ...

... of the 20th century colonies, countries directly controlled by europeans, and their masters were a continual source of tension. Southeast asia was first a combat zone for native and French forces, and later native and American forces. Afghanistan had been an area of conflict between native and British forces and, later, between native and Soviet forces, and is now an area of conflict between native and American forces. Other areas in the mideast have erupted from time to time, and guerilla conflict between Israel and various muslim groups has been a continual low level irritant.

Before the Soviet Union collapsed, at least partly because of its conflicts with Muslim groups and Jihadists, they provided help to any group that was engaged in conflict with the U. S., and the U. S. provided help to any group that was in conflict with the Soviets. This not only provided escalation of the guerilla fighting at the time, but provided training that was useful when the guerillas changed their targets.

The U. S. had ignored the relationship between criminal organizations and the Batista government in Cuba, so when guerilla forces overthrew Batista and the Gangsters, it was not surprising that Cuba sought alliance with the Soviets. That provided an encouragement for revolutionary activity in the rest of Latin America, leading to a Bolivarian alliance centered on Venezuela. Venezuela, like the middle east, has oil; so it has the wealth necessary to provide assistance to leftist governments that the United States has been hostile to.

The net result is that two areas that have oil have reasons to be hostile to the US, and other Western countries have oil as a reason to be sympathetic to them and critical of the US.

Many fear that the guerilla warfare will be increased if the United States shows weakness by an economic collapse, but the election of Barack Obama as President will defer any real threat for an indefinite period.

Guerilla warriors depend on the tacit support of an otherwise passive population. In Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, no one in the ordinary population, irrespective of their politics, betrays the guerillas. This is the way they express their passive hostility to the repression of people of color in Western Civilization. Barack Obama has demonstrated, in a public and global way, that the ultimate upward mobility is possible for a person of color in the Chief Nation of Western Civilization. They will eventually come to feel that that is only possible for middle-class persons within Western Civilization; but as long as they have the smallest hope that it will be possible for their children, the passive support for the Guerillas will diminish.

This will mean, unless something happens to stir up the external proletariat unnecessarily, the Obama administration will have time to attack some of the economic problems. What they will do will amount to very expensive band-aids that will, fortunately, set useful precedents for the future.

The core of...

... the problem is that much of it is fantasy, or "smoke and mirrors". On November 20, 2008 the newspaper "USA Today" said:

"Stocks plunged Wednesday to fresh bear-market lows, putting Wall Street on track for its worst year since 1931, as a deepening economic gloom gave investors little reason to wade into a market that has wiped out nearly $10 trillion in wealth since the October 2007 peak."

The striking thing was that in the United States, and in much of the world, normal life continued for most people. Some people lost jobs producing things that no one wanted to buy if they had to borrow money to buy them, and some people lost residences that they didn't have enough money to pay for, and some economists worried that people wouldn't buy things they could easily do without. But most rich people stayed rich and most poor people didn't get much poorer, and most people just kept on doing what they had been doing.

So the "wealth" that had existed in October 2007 was merely "smoke and mirrors".

The difficulty is that the imaginary wealth that is a number in the data files of the Stock Market, and the real certificates and coins that we use to purchase food and clothing and housing and healthcare, things that it is hard to live without, are measured in the same units as the "Monopoly Money" that specifies the smoke and mirrors of the financial system. We believe that they are the same thing, so we get concerned when trillions of dollars worth of the play money vanishes; especially if we think of it in terms of loaves of bread. It was a similar situation that let Marie Antoinette say, when the peasants complained that they had no bread, "then let them eat cake". To her bread and cake were simply there, they had no value. Neither does the play money that is used to make the trades on Wall Street.

We are not going to be able to change the entire economic system fast enough to make a difference, even if we understood that the function of the system, to waste resources in a way that maintains the social class structure, no longer has an evolutionary function. What we can do is make minor repairs that will set precedents for an egalitarian, ecologically responsible global infrastructure without being too shocking to our ideology. Nobel prizewinning economist Paul Krugman approves of some of the steps being taken. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times of 11/21/08 he says:

Is economic policy completely paralyzed between now and Jan. 20? No, not completely. Some useful actions are being taken. For example, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the lending agencies, have taken the helpful step of declaring a temporary halt to foreclosures, while Congress has passed a badly needed extension of unemployment benefits now that the White House has dropped its opposition.

What this means is that we can provide unemployed persons with money for food, clothing and healthcare, and housing, in a way that will be unaffected by the worthlessness of the play-money used in the financial system. We even have a separate currency that can be used for this purpose: it is called "food stamps". That can easily be converted into a system whereby necessities on a level just above the "poverty" status will be provided as a matter of right, and variations in the value of trading money will have no effect on ordinary life.

In the 1940s...

... Norbert Weiner, the mathematician who opened up the field of automatic control, calling it cybernetics, said that when computers and robots were mature no one would be allowed to work unless they could do something better than a robot or computer. This would certainly be the case in a social system in which waste was bad taste, so that inefficient production would be something to be avoided. That is only possible where survival, in terms of food, clothing, housing and healthcare, was a right and available on demand.

We have a precedent for that in terms of welfare grants to certain groups of people and a certain amount of international food aid to parts of the external proletariat. But a more useful precedent can be established, perhaps by the Obama administration, if some form of healthcare as a right cam be devised. By moving to include preventative care, minimum standards of nutrition, shelter and public health can be established and provided on demand as part of that healthcare. At least in the early stages the minimum standards would correspond to a healthy level of poverty, but as long as there was no association of poverty with social status it wouldn't matter. This would also make it easy to convert to a "take what you want but use what you take" system, which would synchronize with a public attitude in which taking more than you needed was "nekulturni" or "extreme bad taste".

In such a culture the elite would no longer be those who displayed their waste of resources, but would be those who were creative enough, as judged by their peers and the "market", to design products or provide services that were better and more efficient than those of their peers; and they would only stay in that status as long as they were able to do that. They would constitute a meritocratic elite or "working class" and those with less useful creativity would constitute a "leisure class" whose only duty was to amuse themselves while they maintained a gene pool with sufficient variety.

The intermediate stage has already been taken: organizations that are inefficient enough to have suffered under the current economic turmoil will have to yield equity to the state. When the state has a monopoly of an industry there is no point in making variations of products that do not have a unique function, so that the "best" product of each functional class, i.e., whose qualities include production efficiency and consumer desireability, so that it creates minimum waste, will be the one produced.

The result will be that the competition that keeps the system vital and efficient will be between creative individuals, and the mechanisms of production and distribution will be computerized and roboticized and serviced by creative individuals. "Power", which is the ability to make someone do something they don't want to do, will be an irrelevant concept.

The result is that we can project the transition to the social system of the Utopia described in the novel by logical extensions of current social structures, and we can expect that the administration of Barack Obama will move in a progressive direction (i.e., in the positive evolutionary direction) rather than to go backward to an ideology that has proved itself to be a failure. Whatever the Obama administration is able to do, any step that is egalitarian, ecologically responsible and creative is a step in the right direction.

To complete this explanation, the appendix attached to the novel will be the analysis of human social evolution from the paleolithic to the present; i.e., an explanation of how we got to where we are and why we will evolve to the society described in the novel.

I expect to be revising this work for the rest of my life, primarily to integrate the parts dealing with the present more closely with actual history. But it is close enough now to being a history of human evolution and prediction of the human future to be a useful measure of how well we are doing.

The novel itself...

...consists of a story within a story. The inner story is a series of incidents that occur as the author's dreams, and the protagonists are Jesus during his stay in the wilderness, Gaby, an african-american whose waking persona is employed in the book trade in New York in the 1970s, and other supporting characters including the author. The outer story describes a visit by the author and Gaby to a post-industrial future civilization, the "Utopia" of the title in which they narrate the inner story to certain residents in that civilization.

The novel was first written in this format during the Presidency of William Jefferson Clinton, and thus that period was the "now" of the novels, i.e., the time in which the author was awake rather than dreaming. It is being rewritten in 2008-9, around the time in which Barack Hussein Obama was being elected President. In the original form Gaby could hardly believe that a governor from Arkansas could be elected President, but he served two terms and was nearly impeached. She will be even more surprised that a person whose father was an african and a person of color could be elected President even if his mother was melanin-deficient.

But the fall of 2008 was not only an interesting election in America, it was the time that the economic system under which the global civilization had been operating, a system centered on Wall Street in New York and the financial institutions associated with that location, almost came to a complete standstill. The actions of the U. S. government, in the administration of George W. Bush, to ameliorate the difficulties caused by the failure of the financial system provided the precedents for the post-industrial infrastructure of this Utopia. Not, of course, deliberately. But the measures taken to protect the establishment from the disasterous results of their own short-sightedness served to intimately entangle the government and industry in a way that made it impossible the disentangle them and return to an industrial infrastructure. Eventually the structure described herein became inevitable.

The publication format ...

...is that of an internet website. Like an e-book this is less convenient than a bound book of paper pages, mainly because that's what we are used to. It has significant advantages for self-publication in that it doesn't cost much more than a typed manuscript. And it can include graphics, as does the appendix, which describes the theory behind the plot.

The book is written in hypertext markup protocol (Http) so it can be read reasonably easily with any of the usual internet browsers. It is housed on the Apple site "mac.com".

On each page will be words that can be clicked on which will send the reader foward or backward. The table of contents can be used to move directly to the beginning of chapters.

If you have questions or comments on the contents or format, email them to:

karlek@mac.com or karlek76@gmail.com

I call the contents a "fantasy". It can be argued that it is a reasonable projection of our history from the paleolithic to the present, but it looks like a plot designed around ironies. For instance, 2008 marks the first time a person of color was nominated as a candidate for President by the party that, during the Civil War, defended the enslavement of persons of color. At the same time the administration, of the party that was anti-slavery in the mid-18-hundreds, pandered to the establishment by releasing the financial industry from the restraints of reason and caused a crisis in the worldwide economy that had to be ameliorated by providing precedents for an infrastructure that could be fascist or socialist.

The result would clearly be some form of post-industrial civilization, one version of which is the Utopia that our protagonists visit (and, inevitably, talk about).

Those of us who are surviving in the status quo will not welcome change, but common sense tells us that Western Civilization is just another stage in the evolution of human social behavior. Like the tribal organization of the paleolithic hunter-gatherers and the agriculturally based empires of the post-neolithic, we can expect that it will be followed by something else. The purpose of this book is to provide the hope that that "something else" can be an improvement, a Utopia rather than a Dystopia.

I speak of "hope" and "belief" because the future is not determined. My Utopia is one possible solution: we may choose another. Extinction is, of course, one possible choice: but this novel is intended to encourage us to make more positive choices.

To read it, click on the logo.

UTOPIA will be copyright in one or another open access form by Karl Eklund when he figures out which form to use. If anyone wants to publish it, he will be happy to listen to reasonable proposals