Most humans, if given the choice, would prefer to live in a utopian reality, in which all humans trust one another, collaborate, achieve their objectives simultaneously, without conflict.

Freed from poverty, enslavement, lack of shelter, humans would all be free to achieve self-actualization, a state of complete fulfillment of one’s potential in service of humanity.

For desiring such an outcome, the majority of humans are idealists in some way.

However, the real world is filled with challenges, competition, and despite the sophistication of human civilization, survival of the next day is by no means guaranteed to anyone.

Depending on how you view things, the world is either driven by scarcity or a structural problem tied to an inadequate allocation and distribution of resources and influences among homo sapiens groups.

In a state of nature, in the era of hunting-gathering, finding food, water and heat were the primary concerns of homo sapiens. Once our level of sophistication exceeded the requirements of our caloric intake, humans would have “excess calories” they can expend for other pursuits. The products of these excess calories are what we understand as “value”.

Therefore, all of the human struggle for meaning is inherently tied to how it handles value. Values involve making decisions that favor one outcome over another – they inherenly involve trade offs and decisions made at the expense of another.

Since values are tied to excess calories expended by man, they are inherently scarce and need to be optimized. Achieving a utopian world is therefore closely linked to how man organizes value.

Building a harmonious world relies on constructing a win-win formula that accounts for the needs of billions of individuals on Earth, and the emergence of many conflicting desires.

Instead of ignoring these conflicting desires and pretending they are the mere product of a “few evil forces”, we should confront them just as they are, with extreme clarity and objectivity, as a reality grounded in the laws of human nature and interaction.

.Instead of striving to be idealists, we should all aspire to be utopian realists, striving for a dream reality while acknowledging the limitations that separate us from achieving it.