Creating Utopia
By Barry Wadsworth – May 8, 2026
I was born in the late 50’s and grew up with the assumption that the world would just get better and better with time. I had great confidence in humanities ability to solve problems and our collective moral compass to navigate toward a better future for all that inhabit the Earth. I was influenced by Bucky Fuller, The Whole Earth Catalog, books from the Rodale Press on organic gardening and green building design. I learned Transcendental Meditation in the 70’s and bought into Maharishi’s theory that if 1% of the Earth’s population practiced meditation, it would cause a societal phase transition that would elevate collective consciousness and lead to an Age of Enlightenment. I later practiced Chan (Zen) meditation and was swayed by the Tibetan envisioning of an enlightened society. I went on long meditation retreats, got certification in Permaculture design, studied Passive Haus design and built a highly efficient off-grid home with my wife. I never bought into distopian visions of the future so prominent in science fiction novels and Hollywood movies. I believed countries would collaborate and share information on what works and what doesn’t, that each country would gravitate toward the common good.
But then, in 2016, people in the United States elected Donald Trump. This was quite a shock for me. He seemed to be the antithesis of my world view and my assumed vision of the future. I wondered how people could be so gullible. How could they overlook his obvious character flaws? How could anyone think he could represent us on the world stage?
To further underscore, we U.S. Americans voted him in again in 2024, even after reading Project 2025, which was definitely moving us in the direction of authoritarianism, and from my perspective, distopia.
Recently, I’ve been experimenting in various ways with ChatGPT and Claude AI. Just for fun, I created a project in ChatGPT called Creating Utopia, uploading a file that ChatGPT helped me create to set the parameters of the Creating Utopia Project. What I present here is a first draft of our collaboration on what such a project would look like, again, complements of ChatGPT.
My purpose in sharing this is to get people thinking about how we can use AI for envisioning the future, one that most everyone would find desirable and worth working toward. I think it is important to start with blue sky thinking, not simply how to tweak current systems. What would lead to the greatest happiness and fulfillment for Earth’s inhabitants and future generations? What would we do if we had the opportunity to reimagine the world we want to live in? Well, we have that opportunity and I believe AI can help in this regard.
Conversing with ChatGPT and Claude is like sitting in a room filled with experts from every discipline, all with encyclopedic memory and amazingly fast recall. And they are all willing to collaborate on your every question, synthesis relevant information across disparate disciplines and get back to you with an answer faster than you can copy and paste the last question and answer into a document to record the conversation. The ability to scan for relevant information and synthesis it into extremely lucid, logical alternatives, considering psychological, political and moral factors, is astounding.
Here’s a summary of my initial discussions with ChatGPT on Creating Utopia.
Introductory Project Summary
The Creating Utopia project is an effort to imagine, design, critique, and gradually refine a better form of society and government. By “utopia,” we do not mean a fantasy of perfection, a rigid ideology, or a society imposed from above. We mean a living civic project: a society that continually learns how to help people, communities, other living beings, and the Earth flourish together.
The central question is:
How could a society govern itself so that it respects Earth’s living systems, protects the environment, preserves freedom and dignity, and enables the maximum sustainable fulfillment of all citizens?
This project treats utopia as a direction, not a final blueprint. It is a horizon toward which society can move through experimentation, democratic participation, evidence, moral reflection, and institutional learning. The project source defines utopia as movement toward ecological harmony, deep human fulfillment, freedom, dignity, pluralism, justice, peaceful conflict resolution, stewardship of the commons, and governance that learns and repairs harm.
Our Working Definition of Utopia
A utopian society, as conceived in this project, would aim to combine four major commitments:
- Ecological harmony
Human society must live within the limits of Earth’s life-support systems. The economy cannot be treated as separate from soil, water, forests, climate, biodiversity, and the more-than-human world. - Deep human fulfillment
The goal is not merely more consumption, more production, or higher GDP. The goal is meaningful life: health, belonging, creativity, love, beauty, learning, purpose, leisure, contribution, and freedom to develop one’s capacities. - Freedom, dignity, and pluralism
A good society must not impose one official way to live. People should be free to pursue different forms of family, work, spirituality, culture, art, community, and self-development, so long as they do not violate the dignity of others or the ecological commons. - Justice and non-domination
People should not be dominated by poverty, concentrated wealth, abusive employers, arbitrary bureaucracy, surveillance, racism, sexism, ecological destruction, or lack of access to basic life necessities. Freedom must be real, not merely formal.
The project therefore rejects both authoritarian utopianism and status-quo realism. It asks: can we imagine boldly without becoming coercive, and can we remain practical without surrendering to the failures of the present?
Why These Goals Matter
The rationale begins with a simple fact: human civilization depends on ecological stability. Climate disruption, biodiversity loss, soil depletion, freshwater stress, pollution, and resource overshoot are not isolated “environmental issues”; they are threats to food, health, peace, migration stability, economic resilience, and democratic life. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment synthesis emphasizes the interdependence of climate, ecosystems, biodiversity, and human societies, while the planetary boundaries framework warns that humanity has already pushed several Earth systems beyond safe operating limits. (IPCC)
At the same time, the project recognizes that ecological repair alone is not enough. A society could be environmentally strict yet unjust, joyless, unequal, or authoritarian. Therefore, the ecological goal must be joined to a human goal: every person should have access to the foundations of a dignified life, including housing, healthcare, education, clean water, meaningful work or contribution, safety, political voice, and time for relationships, rest, creativity, and spiritual or philosophical growth. This aligns with the project’s principle of a “social foundation for everyone.”
The project also moves beyond GDP as the primary measure of success. GDP can rise while loneliness, ecological damage, inequality, stress, and distrust also rise. The OECD’s well-being framework explicitly supports measuring societal progress “beyond GDP,” across dimensions that matter for people, the planet, and future generations. (OECD)
Existing Sources and Movements Already Working Toward These Goals
This project is not starting from nothing. Many existing frameworks, institutions, and movements already point toward pieces of this larger vision:
- The UN Sustainable Development Goals provide a global framework for ending poverty, protecting the planet, and promoting peace and prosperity. They are not a complete utopian model, but they show that the world has already recognized the need to integrate social, economic, and ecological goals. (Sustainable Development Goals)
- The planetary boundaries framework offers a scientific way to think about the ecological ceiling within which human activity must remain. It helps define what “respecting the Earth” could mean in measurable terms. (stockholmresilience.org)
- Doughnut Economics combines a social foundation with an ecological ceiling. Amsterdam’s “City Doughnut” is an example of downscaling this idea to a city, asking how people can thrive locally while respecting global ecological responsibilities. (doughnuteconomics.org)
- OECD well-being work provides tools for measuring human flourishing beyond economic output, including health, education, housing, environment, civic engagement, life satisfaction, and inequality. (OECD)
- Ecovillages and intentional communities are already experimenting with participatory governance, ecological design, regenerative culture, local economies, and community-scale decision-making. The Global Ecovillage Network defines ecovillages as communities using local participatory processes to regenerate social and natural environments. (Global Ecovillage Network)
- Transition Towns are community-led efforts focused on reducing fossil fuel dependence, strengthening local economies, and building resilient communities. Their own description emphasizes local experimentation, learning networks, and community-scale change. (Transition Network)
- Participatory budgeting, especially as pioneered in Porto Alegre, Brazil, shows how ordinary citizens can directly deliberate over public spending priorities. The World Bank case study describes Porto Alegre’s process emerging during democratization and decentralization. (Open Knowledge Repository)
- Citizens’ assemblies and deliberative democracy show how randomly selected citizens can study complex issues, hear from experts, deliberate, and make public recommendations. The OECD has tracked hundreds of representative deliberative processes across multiple countries. (OECD)
- Employee ownership and cooperatives point toward a more democratic economy. The National Center for Employee Ownership summarizes research showing that employee ownership can benefit workers, firms, and communities, while Mondragón in Spain remains one of the most important examples of large-scale cooperative enterprise. (National Center for Employee Ownership)
None of these examples is perfect. Each has limitations. But together they show that many components of a more ecological, democratic, cooperative, and fulfilling society already exist in partial form. The Creating Utopia project asks how these scattered pieces might be integrated into a coherent, adaptable, rights-respecting civic order.
The Emerging Theory of Change
Our current direction is not to design one master plan and impose it. Instead, the project is developing an iterative refinement model.
The basic idea is:
Start small. Test honestly. Protect rights. Measure outcomes. Learn. Improve. Scale what works. Abandon what fails.
This could happen across several levels:
Eco-villages → neighborhoods → towns → cities → counties → states → interstate learning networks
Eco-villages and intentional communities could serve as early test beds for local governance, ecological living, cooperative economics, conflict resolution, shared services, and participatory culture. Towns and cities could then adapt the most successful practices in more diverse, real-world settings. States, such as California, could become larger democratic laboratories, testing policies in housing, food systems, employee ownership, ecological restoration, education, healthcare, energy, and civic participation.
A peaceful transition would not require overthrowing existing institutions. It would work through lawful, democratic, voluntary, and incremental pathways:
- Build shared language and public imagination
Help people understand that “utopia” here does not mean perfection or coercion. It means a society intentionally designed around Earth, dignity, freedom, justice, fulfillment, and learning. - Create pilot communities and demonstration projects
Support ecovillages, cooperative neighborhoods, regenerative farms, community land trusts, public banks, worker cooperatives, participatory budgeting experiments, local citizens’ assemblies, and ecological restoration corps. - Promote employee-owned and cooperative businesses
Encourage laws, tax incentives, financing tools, and public procurement policies that make it easier for businesses to transition to employee ownership, worker cooperatives, or mission-locked stewardship models. - Elect and support sympathetic local and state officials
Political change would require public officials who understand the goals and are willing to fund experiments, protect democratic safeguards, and evaluate outcomes honestly. - Use states as democratic test beds
A state could establish a “civic innovation framework” in which cities, counties, businesses, universities, tribal governments, nonprofits, and citizen bodies test policies aligned with ecological health, well-being, justice, and resilience. - Create transparent metrics
Success should not be judged only by economic growth. Metrics should include ecological restoration, carbon reduction, biodiversity, public health, housing security, loneliness, trust, inequality, democratic participation, worker ownership, education, time affluence, and life satisfaction. - Protect pluralism and civil liberties throughout
Participation must remain peaceful, lawful, democratic, and rights-based. People must retain freedom of speech, religion, dissent, movement, association, property protections, privacy, and due process. - Scale only what works
The goal is not ideological purity. The goal is practical wisdom. Policies should be piloted, audited, improved, expanded, or ended based on evidence and citizen experience.
Key Guardrail
The project’s most important safeguard is this:
Utopia must never become an excuse for authoritarianism.
Ecological goals must not justify coercion, dispossession, surveillance, forced conformity, suppression of dissent, or sacrificing minorities for some claimed collective good. Expert knowledge is valuable, but expert rule is dangerous. Democracy must be deepened, not bypassed. The project source explicitly distinguishes utopian aspiration from authoritarian perfectionism, ecological limits from anti-human austerity, collective well-being from suppression of individuality, and expert advice from expert rule.