The Perfect Country

Utopian thinking is not idle daydreaming but a practical tool for problem-solving because focusing on the ideal version of something clarifies what is wrong with the present and brings reform plans into focus.

“Sketching utopias is a way to address current problems and understand how to solve them. Focusing on the ideal version of something helps us more clearly define what we feel is wrong with what we have. Utopias bring our plans for reform into focus.”

Educational curriculum should be reverse-engineered from the problems that caused people the most trouble in the old world rather than designed around abstract subject mastery, meaning courses should focus on vocational discovery, emotional self-management, conflict resolution, relationships, and affect regulation.

“The curriculum is reverse engineered from the things that used to give people most trouble in the old world. Therefore, there's extensive study of things like how to find your vocation and settle into a job you can love. How to be confident, diffuse conflicts and know your own mind, how to have satisfying relationships, and this is a huge class. How to wind down and not lose your temper.”

News media should be curated and interpreted by philosophers rather than presenting all available events equally, because its purpose should be to cultivate mature citizens and guide the collective toward flourishing rather than maximize emotional reactions.

“There are some quite bad things on the news in the perfect country, but no one comes away terrified or incandescent with rage. The nightly news, which is drawn up and read by philosophers, provides a subterranean lesson in maturity and calm. The news isn't just any old thing that happened today. Its purpose is to guide people to the information that can best help them and their country to flourish.”

Meaningful work—work that produces a genuine improvement in others' lives and exercises one's distinctive talents—provides more fulfillment than leisure because it combines purpose with the use of higher capacities.

“work can be far more fulfilling than leisure... work that feels meaningful. That is work that leaves one with a sense at the end of a working day that one's made a genuine improvement to the lives of others and that one's done so through the exercise of some of one's distinctive and higher talents and skills. That's a lot more fun than sunbathing.”

Discovering and cultivating what sort of work each person is best suited to is so important that it becomes a national priority in a well-organized society, requiring extensive character assessment and aptitude drilling from early childhood.

“a lot of time is spent drilling into people's characters from an early age in order to determine what sort of work they'd be best suited to. Realizing the potential of every worker is pretty much the national priority.”

Art should have an explicit therapeutic and civilizing purpose rather than pursuing aesthetics for their own sake: to make important ideas vivid and memorable so they remain at the front of people's minds and to foster emotional states like calmness, forgiveness, and openness.

“people love art, but they've entirely given up on the strange idea that art should be for art's sake. Being an artist is a job with a very practical purpose. It's to make the best ideas vivid and persuasive so that we can keep them at the front of our minds at all times. Art is there to remind us to be calm, forgiving, open to experience, and properly aed by all that exceeds us. It's a therapeutic medium”

Celebrity and fame should be awarded not to entertainers and performers but to exemplars of qualities society genuinely needs—such as people skilled at public apology—because most people will never become movie stars but all benefit from everyday virtue.

“There are famous people in the perfect land, but not the usual suspects. Here, celebrities are exemplars of qualities we really need in our everyday lives. One of the most famous people in the country won the good apology contest last year. Few of us are ever called to be movie stars or great singers, so these aren't the names people know about here.”

A sign of being well-educated should be happiness and kindness rather than erudition or knowledge breadth, because these are the traits that matter for individual and collective wellbeing.

“A sign of being well-educated isn't erudition. It's being happy and kind.”

Romantic relationships function better when people are emotionally literate about their own pathologies and treat romantic attraction as the enemy of sustainable love rather than as a guide to partner selection.

“People are incredibly unromantic in the perfect country. That's why, unsurprisingly, relationships go so much better here. People don't talk endlessly about finding the right person. They know there's no such thing. Romantic enthusiasm is deeply frowned upon and seen as the enemy of love.”

The success of systematic parenting training in the perfect country is evidenced by the fact that few 11-year-olds aspire to fame or unusual beauty, and childhood trauma no longer ruins lives in adulthood.

“Evidence of the success of the nationwide parenting program is that hardly any 11-year-olds want to be famous or unusually good-looking. The last person whose life was ruined by a messed up childhood died several decades ago.”

Wisdom, defined as the application of knowledge to human flourishing, is positioned as one of the country's largest and most important industries, replacing or reorienting other industrial sectors toward this goal.

“It's an applied branch of one of the country's biggest industries, wisdom.”

Secular rituals marking major life transitions (weddings, funerals) and moral frameworks can be written and designed as carefully as religious liturgies, and should be created by the culture's best writers to maximize their psychological and ethical impact.

“There are rituals for all the major life stages. and the best writer in the country has recently written a secular liturgy for weddings and funerals. There's a replacement also for the ten commandments”

A secular moral framework should emphasize that most harmful human behavior stems from anxiety and vulnerability rather than evil or malice, reorienting moral judgment from condemnation toward understanding.

“There's a replacement also for the ten commandments which makes a big deal of the idea that most people are mean through anxiety and vulnerability rather than strength or evil.”

Art should be judged and funded as part of the National Health Service rather than as a separate cultural sector, because its therapeutic function for population wellbeing is equivalent to medicine.

“It's a therapeutic medium which is judged to be part of the National Health Service.”

Urban beauty and livability can be achieved through strict adherence to proven design templates and density principles rather than pursuing originality, because this approach prevents nimbyism, keeps property prices reasonable, and produces consistently excellent results.

“partly because there are very few architects around and originality in design is really frowned upon. So rather than call in architects every time a new building is required, developers here just follow templates that have already been shown to work. Six-story high buildings with large windows, contemporary forms, and natural materials abound. You build densely, don't give up all roads to cars, and make sure that the streets are lively. As a result of this beautiful, slightly boring predictability, there's very little nimbyism and property prices stay reasonable.”

The aesthetic standard for development (similar to the beauty of Venice or Bath) is achievable and worth replicating, and people would not object to new development if it consistently met this standard.

“Though people love nature, they're never that unhappy when a new development is announced, as none of us would be if Venice or Bath was about to be built in a field near us. That's the sort of standard of beauty expected and delivered by developments in the perfect country.”

Democratic governance that is genuinely transparent about serving citizens' long-term interests justifies paternalistic policy (business regulation, behavioral guidance through TV) because citizens understand and trust it.

“People accept that they need help with many things. So there's no terror at living in quite a paternalistic or even you might call it nannying culture. The perfect country is a complete democracy. Therefore, people know and trust that the government is always acting to defend citizens own best long-term interests... That's why the government bans business doing certain quite unhelpful things and why there are shows on TV about how to be a kinder person. It's not spooky because it's properly democratically sincere.”

Patriotism and pride in collective national achievement are not aberrations but appropriate emotional responses when the government and society are actually structured to serve flourishing.

“People are grateful in a perfect country. Patriotism isn't seen as a weird aberration. It's an appropriate response. You don't just feel proud of what you've achieved. You can feel part of a bigger, better collective adventure.”

The perfect country is not a radical fantasy but an achievable improvement from current societies because it requires 'a little more philosophy and a lot more willpower and imagination,' suggesting the structural problems are tractable rather than intractable.

“the surprising thing is that perfect land is oddly not so far from many of the places we live in already. All we need is a little more philosophy and a lot more willpower and imagination and we'll get there.”

Entrepreneurs who pursue profit while maintaining deep customer satisfaction and avoiding exploitative practices deserve social prestige, whereas those who accumulate enormous surplus wealth while extracting value are implicitly viewed as failures of courage and imagination.

“The perfect country is rife with a new breed of entrepreneur. Like the entrepreneurs of old, they want to make money, but they want something else, too. To properly and deeply satisfy their customers. There's no selling of [here], even if it flatters the balance sheet... That's why entrepreneurs are so lorded here.”

Parenting should be treated as a skilled profession requiring formal training from childhood, not as something people can do by intuition, because its consequences for human wellbeing rival or exceed those of professions like medicine and engineering.

“There's a routine assumption here that no one has a clue how to bring up a child, just as no one knows by intuition how to land a plane or perform brain surgery. That's why everyone is given a good deal of training. Classes start from an early age.”

High emotional literacy and widespread psychotherapy access correlate with better relationships and mental health because they give people accurate models of their own psychology and how it affects others.

“People are extremely emotionally literate about their feelings. Psychotherapy has high prestige. It's not unusual to hear someone say, "Your transference is interfering with my projection of your ego ideal." People have a really good grasp of their own craziness and how it might affect their relationships.”

Secular temples dedicated to important human qualities (calm, community, forgiveness, kindness) can replace religious institutions in providing community, ritual, and moral structure while avoiding the theological commitments of traditional religion.

“People gather in new kinds of secular temples dedicated to important qualities. There are temples to calm and temples to community, temples to forgiveness and to kindness.”