Skip to main content

Let's take a trip to a parallel Universe

 I proposed this question to my students.

Let's take a trip to a parallel Universe. Suppose for a moment that since the fifth century before the Christian Era (about 2,500 years ago), human beings had achieved gender equality. 

What science and what technology would we have today?

 

A possible answer. Gender equality implies class equality. Otherwise, a slave woman would not have gender equality in relation to a free man, nor would a slave man have gender equality in relation to a free woman. Since there is only one class in the world, there would be neither rich nor poor people. As there are neither rich nor poor, capital gains would not be generated based on slave labor or underpaid labor. The trade would be fair, with minimal margins of capital gains, the equivalent to whatever the average wage would be. Furthermore, human communities would not have capital gains to generate industries beyond non-slave handicrafts. By having equality worldwide, there would be no wars, we would not need war technology. The control and use of metals and raw materials based neither on trade nor on industry would generate a lower number of produced objects (much lower than those found, say, in Classical Antiquity itself). Our technology would not be anywhere near what we have today in the First World. On the material plane, we would have advanced very little, but our psychological and spiritual capacities would be much more developed than they are today. Neither algebra, linked to commerce, nor calculus, linked to the needs of exploration and conquest of the world, would have been developed. We would have much more artistic mathematics, in many points indistinguishable from what we now call music theory. And therefore, the sciences would be of a very different character. The ecological and population problems would not have occurred. The arts would be at the level of our psychological capacities, etc...

But all this is only on the basis that we have achieved gender equality and therefore human equality at all levels. This equilibrium is as desirable as it is highly unstable. Very little against it would make it collapse. It would be enough for someone to want to dominate someone, even at a very basic psychological level, to break down the whole house of cards. Like the small stone that falls on the mountain and produces the avalanche. The most probable thing is that in a couple of generations after reaching the goal of gender equality, somewhere on the planet that is less favored in resources, or after a famine, someone would start a revolt that would end in war, dragging the balance of all the others. And we would go back to something similar to what we have today.

With great probability, the parallel universe described in the question would end up converging on ours. The solution to our problems is much more difficult than we think. It is necessary to build a new society based on idealistic and egalitarian principles, yes, but perhaps we will have to accept submitting ourselves to a psychological change of greater depth than the one that our social system presents to us right now. Only by changing ourselves can technology change. How do we do that?

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Limen et Continuum

  Existence is Encounter. Meeting at the limen. In the limen, the masks disappear, that is, the basic intuitions of identities, such as the identity that I feel and think in relation to the tree that I see in front of me. The identity of the tree is a projection of mine: the unity of my process of perceiving the tree generates a mask in me, the ghost of a limited unity separated from everything else. The simplest form of intuitive understanding of masks and limen is given to us by numbers. Numbers intuitively express the liminal tension that is Existence. A little etymological note. Rythmos in Greek means flow. Arythmos (number) is what does not flow, what remains solidified. Numbers express the liminoid, and flow, rhythm, expresses the liminal. A rhythm becomes liminoid when we can trace patterns in it, that is, when we can construct masks of identities. Mathematics has spoken of flow using the Latin word “continuum”, the continuous. All modern science, since Leibni...

Ritual, Scientific Experiment and Truth

 Human rituals have their roots in animal behavior, and the animal pattern has its roots in the need for repetition of living organisms, in the cyclical structure of physiological actions. At the human level, ritual behavior involves a delimitation of space and time, as well as a different meaning of both with respect to the spaces and times of everyday experience. From the ritual ceremonies of cold societies, we observe the care and thoroughness of the shaman to determine with precision the spaces, times and elements that intervene in the rite. Sacred space delimits the world, not only as a place of action, but also the scope of meaning of the things contained in that space. It is a space loaded with meaning: there is an order in things. Time itself acquires its meaning in relation to this order of things, and cyclically closes the space in the “tempo” of the rite, a tempo that is a symbol of the tempo of the World. What is not in the rite or is not referable to the rite has no re...

What do we marry?

  The narrative tradition of India contains true gems of fantastic literature that give rise to the most entertaining ethical and metaphysical speculations. In the collection of stories from the 11th century Katha-Sarit-Sagara ( The Ocean that Contains Streams of Stories ), which collects traditional stories from India, the loquacious ghost of a corpse taken down from a gallows tells the king who took him off the macabre swing a very interesting tragicomic tale. Two friends undertook a pilgrimage to a sacred spa of the goddess Kali, and there they saw a beautiful girl. One of them fell ill with passion, stopped eating and sleeping, and was sure that he would die unless he could have that girl as his wife. His friend contacted her father and explained the situation. The father, hurriedly, went to the girl's parents in order to organize the wedding. Shortly after the hasty marriage, the young couple and her friend left for her parents' house. On the way, they ca...