Selling the Ideal Community

 In my midterm paper for Materialism and Idealism I outlined my ideal community. Among many of the unique and attractive features of this community, were the methods of land conservation. The community takes great pains to have sustainable agriculture as well as sustainable logging.  I believe that the way to galvanize people into rallying around my ideal community is by starting to live the lifestyle that my community is based on slowly acquire a group of friends and similarly minded people that will take up residence in the town. Once the town has enough people in it to have the subculture necessary the community can grow faster by going on TV and writing books about how great it is to live in a community that values a simple sustainable lifestyle.

The difficulties I would face is selling my utopian community would be that at this point it is almost impossible to live a simple lifestyle and still enjoy modern comforts. If the world ran out of Oil, or if we had a disaster worse than the great depression, my community would not face the same challenges that it does today.

Consequences of Success

For Vablen success might be the accumulation of wealth and status, driving by the invidious nature of human kind, But I do not believe that is how everyone measures success and thus the consequences of success will be different depending what that success is.  It is true that a large segment of society seems to buy into the idea that success is having all  their material wants met, and enough money to cover any emergencies (for instance if the neighbors across the street get a newer model of heated boxers) that might occur. The current state of our nation, what with people suing over ridiculous pretexts to collect wealth that doesn’t belong to them, is a good example of what the consequences that that type of success brings.  I was raised with in an atmosphere that represented success as working hard at a job that you love, and having good relationships with the people around you. As yet it is hard to look back to see what the consequences of that definition of success will be, but I have high hopes that they will be positive.