The Utopian World Championship

The Globally Created Utopia

By Tom Milner-Gulland

Competition year: 2004
Place: 9
About Tom Milner-Gulland

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Summary

If it is to grow from the inside, a utopia can only be built from the outside. The GCU is a technologically pioneering project aimed at settling refugees from around the world and giving them goals towards which to work in unison. It is constructed on African desert, reclaimed by virtue of hydroponics and landscaped to be scenically the envy of the world. Its capital city embraces a visionary spirit and cutting-edge alternative technology, married with an ethos sustained by perceptive and philosophically rigorous, yet open-minded and pluralistic moral teaching, rendering it a model that speaks to the human condition in myriad ways.
Human nature requires goals that are abstract and self-propagating together with goals that are concrete and attainable. Nucleus achieves social harmony and aims to demonstrate the potential of the motivated, yet ordinary, human, when humans work in concert to make the whole of their energies greater than the sum of its parts.
Because the GCU is outward looking it becomes an engine for the betterment of the world, perpetuating a system of feedback: its ethos encourages states around the globe to be permanently concerned for the preservation of peace through the sanctity of moral principle. With the emphasis on education, transparency and pioneering development (in a period of crisis following from peak oil), a malleable political system grows as organically as does the state apparatus, the politics being free from the baggage of the preconceptions associated with right and left wing. A through-flow of visitors and inhabitants sustains vibrancy in culture, ideas and finance. The full power of the human spirit is demonstrated, evidence being presented to the world on the completion of every new engineering project, the excellence of the undertaking of the project being manifest in spite of the limited consumption of commodities.
This account of the utopia is founded in a system of theologically orientated moral philosophy, which is expounded in some detail. The GCU's vision is one aimed at propagating further visionary endeavours, the possibilities they open reflecting the infinite and self-developing possibilities of heaven.

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Contents:
Report
The Concept of the GCU
Nucleus: the Capital City
Justice
Politics and Administration
Health Care
Revenue
Education and Moral Teaching
Epilogue

The Concept of the GCU

The GCU is built on the desire for an economically and technologically regenerative, yet decidedly not a paternalistic, initiative, designed to generate moral awareness and address such areas of concern as peak oil, refugees and environmental crises brought about by a fossilization of industrial methods and global hegemony. Visionary ideas must be allowed to flourish, unfettered by an excess of prescribed institutional considerations.
For decades, the technology, notably hydroponics, has been in existence that will enable the reclamation of desert. All that was lacking in the Twentieth Century was the political will to implement it. The GCU is constructed upon an area of land on the Sahara desert. The society, comprising refugees and their descendants, remains chiefly agrarian and self-sufficient, but increasing numbers will take advantage of the technological and educational resources in the capital city. From inception the region is landscaped to be both splendidly scenic and also highly functional, in such a way that it develops the feel of being home. As a place where the nature of human endeavour is shown in a new light, the eyes of the world are upon the GCU, for its enigma, innovatory methods and physical beauty. Its long-term goal, involving the efforts of volunteers and paid workers alike, is to engineer, on a low budget, a river (more accurately, a man-made, hydraulically controlled estuary) in which it is entirely safe to bathe, meandering through the desert, the cultivated land and the capital, whose water reflects the sun at morning and evening in such a way as to suggest that human betterment begins with reflection upon one’s shortcomings and ultimately strives to reflect heaven. The intended course of the channel is marked upon the landscape from the state’s inception.

Nucleus: The Capital City

Conscious of the tensions associated with self-gratification, the GCU administration maintains tight controls on advertising. Multinational corporations are excluded from any sustained business activity. Ownership of shares in any company is restricted to those individuals who have a functional input into company operation, thus a share is an earned portion of profits. The prevailing ethos demands that shareholder meetings are steeped in moral awareness. Financial transactions are exhibited in publicly accessible, online reports, the structure of the finances being made comprehensible to all literate individuals. Electronic discussion forums associated with these and other sites are encouraged and interlinked, becoming an organ of the democracy. In their flow of personal assets, high-ranking civil servants, politicians and directors of business are monitored as a matter of legal obligation, such that underhand relationships can be detected. This is not regarded as an infringement of personal liberty, the general belief being that the measure in place is to the common good. Such individuals can therefore find fulfilment in being upstanding members of this wholesome environment. An inquiring attitude is integral to children’s education, breeding a population with a mindset geared towards revealing and acting upon misconduct of any kind.