# On Utopia - a class room lecture transcribed by Restream.NeuralFeed ## By Geoff Wasmith of the Free University of Utopic @ the capital of The United Federation of Utopia. last updated 83396 Okay. So Utopian history and the history of the United Fed the People's Federation of Utopia within the United Federation of Urban. Utopia is a fascinating part of Federation history. It's an under discussed part of Federation history up to now, and that's a real shame. And this is going to hope to rectify that just a little bit. So what is the poor people's Federation utopia history? The answer is that it's a group which spun off with the federation at about the same time or just a little bit before, really, emperor Palpatine took over. Specifically, what happened is a group of colonists, investors, and concerned Democrat citizens looked at the federation as it was happening in the late first federation and said, look. This place isn't tenable. This isn't sustainable. This isn't this isn't gonna work for us. We need to make a true democracy. We need to make a place that is a utopia for what we believe in, for our values, for for what humanity and liberal democracy and all the progressive values and positive values in history, a place which can truly embody this, a place of liberty, of freedom, of democracy, of equality, all of those things. And so these predominantly middle class of this federation, individuals brought up a bunch of revolutionaries and progressive thinkers and all sorts of people of that sort of that nature and brought them together, put them on a bunch of colony ships. The first of their class, really, the ships that were the prototypes for what the majority and largest ships that were used to leave the first Federation after its collapse and head to the Twin Shadows galaxy to meet up with the United Augmented Republic there in the thousand year great journey. Again, we're really back in the early days of federation history here, right in that right in that first federation time period. Right in a bit, of course, but still. So these first truly transgalactic colony ships, they were put together by a group of people not unlike those who set up the first colonies outside of Earth. Investors and people with deep pockets and deep interests in these things largely wanting democracy away from what the federation has established. The established federation norms that had previously granted tolerance and respect to various groups had faded, and now people were demanding they be restored. And it's that context that Palpatine takes over in, but equally, it's that context that the People's Federation of Utopia breaks off from the rest of the Federation. So, excuse me, returning to the topic of this this history. Really now thinking about first, just to briefly comment on where the utopian people are going and then thinking about the nature of this democracy, this very progressive group of people. Where they're going is what's called is what is it named, the Utopia galaxy or the Utopic galaxy. It is a galaxy larger than the Milky Way. And for a long time, the the Utopians were a small population in it. It takes a while for them to really come to command the whole galaxy, and it's a unique place in some of its own rights here. It's it's the most relevant factor of it is just purely its size, but also the large amount of aliens involved in it who are all very powerful, factions in their own right. But we'll get into that perhaps later, perhaps not probably not in this particular discussion. Going back to the utopian people, and what makes them so special? What what what did they believe? What was the foundational values of utopian society? The answer is very heavily democracy. They didn't just believe in the federation's House of Commons. They thought the senate was an aberration, an insult, a problem. They wanted something more representative, more authentic to the people, more authentic to the society they were living in, something which would properly represent them. And the solution they come up with was something modeled on older American democracies. And in many ways, the People's Federation of Utopia is to the United Federation of Earth what The United States Of America is to The United Kingdom. A related descendant with a lot in common, but its own unique interpretation that focuses a lot more on individual liberty and democracy. And that is really the core ideal of utopia. They want to make things as democratic as possible, give as much rights to the individual as possible. They really don't want a large government. They came from the federation. They saw as various waves of utopian colonists were leading the federation. They saw Palpatine's increasing government might and power. And their conclusion was, no. We don't want what they're getting. We want freedom. We want liberty. We want to be people in our own right, to have rulership over our own lives, to be governed at the local level, and to be governed through democracy. And so they built they and so, fundamentally, first of all, their democracy was not rooted in the way that the Federation of Earth's democracy in quotation marks appears as in the early second federation. It's not a democracy of sort of different fleets. Rather, the founding charter of the Federation of Utopia as it was initially known, operated on the idea that and that for the time being, for the journey, we are ships and fleets of ships. But some of our largest ships hold hundreds of millions, millions or hundreds of millions, or even billions of people. So it's only right for those ships. They have multiple levels of democracy. But for smaller ships that are coming with us that may only have a few thousand people, that ship should be treated as a democracy in its own right. And we need to interplay these larger federalized democracies of larger ships with these smaller individual ship democracies. But at the end of the day, utopia needs to be about working with our fellow citizens to arrive at the conclusions of what we wanna do. The end result of what they constructed for governing structures and the like were a bicameral or two house government system with a strong executive presidency and a heavy judiciary system, all of which is deeply controlled through democratic elections. If that sounds like the US government, it's because it kind of is. However, unlike the federation where the upper chamber of the government or the, legislature, sorry, represents the government, in this case here, what the people of Utopia did is they essentially said, we are going to accept right off the bat Please. That this chamber is going to represent the communities. It's like the states in The US, but where the lower house is divided by population and uses its own maps, the upper house is communities themselves. A person registers with the community, and they can move between communities, but they give up their old community to join a new one. But the upper house is the community. If you're a part of this ship or this township in this ship, that is your community that elects you to the upper house. And altogether, this creates a very democratic structure. The Supreme Court justices are not confirmed unlike in The US by the Congress. They're direct democratic votes. A justice seat opens. A number of people campaign for it. The people vote who they want in as a justice. There is not even an obligation that the Supreme Court justices have any kind of legal qualification, only that the people voted for them. That is the heart of the People's Federation of Utopia. So when we fast forward tens of thousands of years into the future to just before the Great War, when we look at the People's Federation of Utopia then, first what we need to note is that in the interim period, especially after the second federation, from the second federation and through its existence, Utopia was treated as a sister country, a sister federation. They were equals. There the Federation of Earth did not have the power to control Utopia. At best, it had the power to negotiate with it, but on the whole, the two of them recognized each other as different independent equals. They both come out of the First Federation. They both venerated parts of the First Federation. But where Utopia venerated the First Federation predominantly in a negative manner as being the horror state which things can fall into to which the empire is simply the logical conclusion. The Federation of Earth glorified the First Federation and continuously acted like its innovations were actually restorations of First Federation policy. There is no need in utopian law or utopian legislative norms or constitutional operations to root anything in some supposed first federation documents or first federation norms. That's wholly irrelevant to Utopia. They don't care what the First Federation says. And they'll regularly say this in the modern Fifth Federation, which they're a part of. They'll look at legislation that's been passed or they'll look at Supreme Court rulings, and their law reports, even the Utopian Dominion Court, will say, actually, we think this ruling doesn't apply to us because according to our legislative norms, things from the First Federation and norms rooted in the First Federation are not relevant. Case law has to be fitted to fit our norms, and so we need to take into account what this says and find ways it's compatible with our law. But if our law and the law of the Supreme Court of the Federation disagree, Utopia, even after the Great War, says we want the right to say our law is right. We don't care if other dominions don't have this right. We have an ancient history of having developed our own legal system, our own legal traditions, and you can't take that from us. And the federation, even under, the recent lady damn Goodwin, she's had to acquiesce. She couldn't keep up the fight and say, yes. I will defend the rights of the federation and enforce a single common law across all of it. Because first of all, federation law doesn't operate that way. But secondly, because Utopia's ancient history simply must be respected in Federation law. So Utopia, even into the Fourth Federation and Fifth Federation, had its own legal conceptions. And it we're gonna talk more about this in the fourth federation in a moment, but, essentially, we're skipping over the first federation history and the first phase of Utopian history, in large part because it just isn't going to be that relevant. We don't need to talk about how Utopia rose. What's relevant is that as the second federation comes to completely dominate the Milky Way, so too does effectively Utopia come to completely dominate much of there's not the whole of the Milky Way, the whole of its galaxy, the large majority of it as well becoming the dominant power. Such that by the time of the third federation and its early rise, Essentially, Utopia is in fact the sorry. My cat has just come in here and decided it wants loving, so we'll see what happens with that. I love you, Cheddar. Yes. Very much. Utopia desperately, desperately, in the second federation was becoming more and more powerful. And by the time the third federation began to form, utopians had come to the realization that they were slowly becoming less and less seen as a sister federation at the same level and equal, but rather that utopia was increasingly becoming, especially as the Federation began to develop other colonies and other dominions and began to assert itself as not a sister, but a mother dominion, utopia struggled to articulate itself. And this is in the third early third federation now that we're looking at it. Utopia struggled to define itself as being a sister or an aunt to these new dominions rather than a sister. Utopia wanted to treat all of the dominions, those others which had spun off the Federation, which Federation colony ships in the in in the end of the second Federation and early third Federation were creating, Utopia wanted to treat them as equal dominions, as equal to her and thus all sisters to Earth. The Milky Way said no. We are the mother. These are our children. And, really, that is why the earlier mentioned legal dispute is so important and relevant to Utopia and Federation law and the dispute within it. Because Earth is able to make all the other dominions except first federation law as the basis, they acknowledge that they're creatures born out of roughly the second or early third federation. This is the fundamental point of departure and deviation for Utopia. Utopia is born out of the end of the first federation, not the second. It simply can't be compared to the other ones, it says. And it's not wrong to say that. It has a lot more history. It is, or it was for a long time, equal to Earth. And the thing which really changes it is that Utopia doesn't engage in colonialism to near the same level as the Milky Way does, as the Federation of Earth does. Utopia doesn't engage in it. Utopia continues to just expand within its own, much larger galaxy and take over its nearby dwarf galaxies, which the Federation of Earth had already done and become quite powerful from, and was just continuing to snowball. So that by the mid third federation, whether Utopia wanted to acknowledge it or not, whether Utopia appreciated it or not, whether Utopia desired it or not, increasingly, the parliament and federation of Earth was saying was saying to Utopia, we're not trying to negotiate with you. We're not trying to discuss with you on this topic or that topic if we can reach an agreement. You know, we're not gonna negotiate a treaty with you. Our laws are what you have to follow because we're legislating for the federation, and you are part of the federation. And this really begins to drive the key dispute that would define much of the fourth federation from a foreign policy perspective, or at least an internal federation broader than the Milky Way challenge perspective, which has deep foreign policy implications. And that is that for a while, utopia tries to put forward various claims of why this isn't true, why this isn't valid, why utopia is actually something different, why it can't be handled under federation foreign policy, and maybe you sure. We'll pass a law that matches the federation law as you're telling us to, but it's because we're choosing to, not because you're telling us to. But by the time damn Malek comes into power and the Fourth Federation is really acknowledged as being in existence, For several thousand years by that point in time, Utopia had been in an increasing state of rebellion against the Federation. It didn't acknowledge or accept federal government rule. It increasingly was within the sort of trade bloc and diplomatic entity and political alliance that was the Federation and cultural alliance that was the Federation. It was increasingly feuding with the Milky Way and the rising challenger of Takara as who would be the dominant power of the Federation? Where would the center of gravity be? Utopia's consistent argument was that the Milky Way has run its course. Utopia should be the new power, the new center hold, or at least we should be equals within this. And in large part, this came down to utopia developing internal trade policies, internal development policies. It would help out in internal wars and internal disputes. And it increasingly developed its own foreign policy and had, lesser dominions within the federation that were aligned to it follow its dip, foreign policy and require, say, ambassadors in their dominions or in those subdominions from various foreign nations to receive permission from utopia rather than Earth on being granted permission to operate there and the like. This was utopia consistently over time challenging the Milky Way. And by the time that Malek comes to power, what had essentially happened is utopia is the Milky Way had said to Utopia, no. We're we're done listening to you try and pretend to think that you're anything equal to us. We created you. We were born out of the first federation as were you. But the Milky Way says, we are the natural inheritors to the Federation's legacy. You are an offshoot branch. Because we are the inheritors, we're the rightful heirs. We continue the legacy in name. And you're an offshoot branch. We're in charge of you. We rule over you. We grant that you need special protections and you get special rights that the other dominions don't get. But, the Milky Way says, you don't get to challenge us in the way you've been challenging us. You don't get to assert the things you've been asserting. You don't get to make the claims you've been making. We disagree with you. We are the ones in charge. You do not have get the chance to raise our internal forces against us or to turn our internal dominions against us, and you will pay the price for that. And increasingly, an intolerant regime, as it was come as it was called by the Utopians, was imposed on them, requiring federal troops and federal ships. And increasingly, Utopians lashed out initially diplomatically, but increasingly after that violently and through economic actions and economic warfare. And the end result was an outright essentially civil war between the utopians and the Federation. And that is what Malek was fighting, and that's what Malek came into power on. That's what he was able to manipulate so much control for because he was fighting to try and put down the Utopian resistance and its allies across the entirety of the Federation. He was able to create an enemy out of them and really ruin them for this. So when Malek fell out of power, when that first horrendous dam of the fourth Federation was lost, there was a real question. Sorry. One moment. So, essentially, after Malek is removed from power and the populist wave that comes after him puts Johnny, Johnny Rockefeller, I think it is. Let me check that one moment. Sorry. Yes. Johnny Rocker, sorry, into power. One of the other effects of this that's less talked about is that Rokker essentially was forced into very heavily moderating what was happening to Utopia. They had to stop attacking. They had to stop deploying ships. They had to stop deploying troops. And in effect, for the next several thousand years, there was a fundamental shift in internal federal policy that really began to recognize the slowly brewing Cold War between Utopia and the Milky Way. That previously mentioned light economic subversion and trying to get dominions on their side and, diplomats, that went to the extreme. It was now full on utopia, sort of half respects that it will kind of do what the federation wants. And in return for this, it demands the right to send people to sit in the Federation Parliament and send a handful of lords to the House of Lords. But it doesn't, it says, have to follow the laws that the Federation produces. It exists beyond those laws, which no other dominion gets to do, not even Earth. And it says that it's doing this out of the kindness of its own heart, and any dominion which joins it or follows it actually is also bound by it and comes under its legal sphere. And this really creates the main tension or at least a main tension within the federation as a institutional structure of the Fourth Federation beyond the Milky Way and beyond the political structure. And it really is the conflict with Utopia that lies at the heart of it. Is Utopia, does Utopia have its right to be its own independent thing, or does it have to follow the laws of the federation? Do they have to follow and listen to Earth? And the fifth federation gives a clear and conclusive answer to this, And that answer is, we are going to elevate Earth above the Milky Way, above all the other dominions. We will make everyone subject to Earth. So Earth is now the mother dominion that it's always been claiming to be, so we aren't actually changing anything. But now we're saying the Milky Way is a sister equal in stature and status to Utopia and to Kara. So we are in effect recognizing and accepting Utopia's complaint, and we're going to grant it special privileges and permissions within this. And part of this, something that doesn't get discussed very much in the rationalizing of federation common law, is that there's actually really now three, but really two major schools of federation law. And those are the two main ones, at least, are utopian and Milky Way or Orthodox or Classic or just the Federation's common law. And then it's Utopian variant. The third one that I've been kind of hinting at and sort of half exist is that various parts within the federation, Saldor and Takara, most notably, have developed much more complex and nuanced and personal interpretations of parts of federation law that are unique unto themselves that the other dominions within the federation have copied from but don't necessarily innovate to the same level. But really within federation law, there are two rules that a dominion could draw on, and they must pick which one it chooses to stick to. And this was part of the fifth federation structural reforms as, theoretically, the utopian body of law has to be brought into line with the Milky Way's body of law. But it's allowed to exist within its own special and unique sphere, within its own special rights. And dominions within the federation are allowed to choose and may vote to move from one system to the other if they want to and have a developed history of it and can articulate a reason for it. And the like there's there's minor bounding conditions on it. But, predominantly, if a dominion votes, it can choose to move from federation law rooted on Earth to utopian law rooted in utopia. And that's a really powerful thing. And that really is the result of a lot of that fourth federation development where you had the United Federation of Earth and what for a long time called itself the United Federation of Utopia, but increasingly came to call itself the People's Federation of Utopia, and fundamentally said, we don't have your class system with lords and aristocracy, Earth. We reject that. You tried to impose it on us in the Third Federation, and we've now said no. You tried to oppress us with Malek. We threw you off. And now us and the people who choose to subscribe to our way of living don't have to have lords. We reject that. We don't accept it in our law. Furthermore, Federation, we don't acknowledge the way you understand your senate to work or your government to work. We don't accept your house of lords, but we also don't accept the house of business, nor do we accept the way you structure your senate. Our senate is representative of the provinces, what you would call sovereignties, of our federation. Third, we do not accept many of the legal premises in federation law of how individual rights operate. Federation law, in Federation contexts, includes things like partable and alienable rights. That is, people can effectively choose to give up some of their rights. Utopia, we say no, you cannot give up any of your rights. You must hold on to them at all times. We're obligating this of you. But we're also gonna protect this for you. This has massive implications for a lot of the ways things operate. Other ones include, for example, in the federation, you need to apply to the government, at least at a federal level to be listed on the federal or Federation Stock Exchange, the FSX. In Utopia, they're equivalent to the Federal Stock Exchange, their FSX, or the Utopian Stock Exchange, USX. They have essentially if you're a company, you fill up the paperwork, you register, you incorporate, and that registration happens essentially at the local level. The local the voting block which sends a person to the senate, that is where you register your company. There's no federal registration database of all the companies in People's Federation of Utopia. And the goal with this is to allow as much power to evolve to people as possible. In many ways, the People's Federation of Utopia is very much like Jermusha in that it widely accepts personal liberty, large amounts of corporate power and interest, and almost extreme libertarian views. Where utopia differs is that they say, but we're not gonna give drug cartels power in our system. We're just not gonna criminalize drugs or cartels. We're not gonna have cartels because drug companies are just gonna be legal. And on the other hand, Utopia says that because we don't allow alienable or partible rights, because we believe all rights are inalienable and impartible, or they may be partible but they are certainly inalienable, we don't allow things like medieval techno feudalist societies within our Federation. We have a minimum standard of dignity we demand our citizens meet and be held to and uphold. And if they can't, well, then the obligation comes on local institutions to either make them meet it or support them in some way when they can't. And it's a lot of these sorts of things that makes Utopia vastly different than the Federation. There are parts of the Federation that are very inspired by and operate like Utopia. But Utopia is not the Federation. And, essentially, throughout the second federation not sorry. The second federation. The fourth federation, utopia consistently and constantly presented a threat to the federation because the offer it was putting forward is compelling. Many people found it so. It was hard to deny that, yeah, maybe not having to have lords who control things, maybe not fetishizing and idolizing Earth, maybe believing in empowering the individual as opposed to sort of the abstract concept of the federation and of sort of people within it. But, more or less middle class individuals, which is the main body of the federation, but still, you know, I mean, maybe we should just kind of accept this whole all people equal, one law, one thing. Everyone within that province or sovereignty, whatever you want wish to call it, they're bound by the same laws regardless of who they are. And this has an interesting implication because it's actually that principle, which is where some of federation fleet or ship law principles come from. In effect, the federation in the second federation if you read the history of fleet reform, there were attempts at fleet reform. And part of this is that in the second federation, the founding principle assumption was if you were part of a sovereignty, if you were part of one of the original 25 lords or any of the other lords which developed throughout the second federation, you were a ship in their fleet or you were a free independent person and, well, you're still kind of bound to that fleet. So you can't raise your own fleet, but you can work and partner with other people who are also bound to that fleet. In the third federation, that went away. But in the second federation, that developed a very strong legal principle that the captain of the ship is effectively the lord of their own ship. And in effect, only their lord as their admiral of the fleet they're a part of can actually order them to do it. And as the jurisprudence developed that, well, actually, the lords have power over the fleets directly under their rule, those employed in the work of governing the sovereignty. They do not have power over private ships, and on private ships, their own captain is the lord of that ship. Now, Utopian law didn't doesn't have this concept. It just doesn't exist there. There was never a need to develop this concept. It didn't exist in the First Federation. It's not rooted in First Federation law at all. It is a pure Second Federation onward development. And Utopia consistently has fought against it. But because they need to make their laws work, especially in the Third Federation with Second Federation laws, What ended up developing on both parts is that within Utopian law, this concept was essentially imported in many ways based on a property right claim, and that property right logic became the real foundational logic of this concept in federation law. It's the bidirectional development of law and ideas within the federation. So in effect within Utopia, the argument was the owner of the ship, when their ship is in space, is the lord of that ship because they're the one who owns it. They have absolute authority to do with it what they'd like with their property. In federation law, this developed into the debate over effective versus real ownership that effectively killed fleet reform. But the foundations of fleet reform were based on this and the idea of even creating this and of having real versus effective ownership and separating out real ownership and letting real owners own multiple ships and recognize that as a basis of creating fleets was all based on the importation of utopian legal principles based around the idea of personal property rights and individual liberty who federation lost. In return, Utopia had to accept that basically, yes, when you're on your own ship, you're the lord of your own ship, much like US Castle Doctrine is kind of like saying you're the king of your own castle even though America doesn't accept kings. Well, in utopia, it was we don't accept lords, but no one can tell you what to do with your property on your ship, and that's effectively what a lord is allowed to do. And in the federation, it was decided that, well, no one is allowed to tell you what to do with your ship and your ship. That is the most fundamental right of federation law. It is, like, legitimately, all other rights and property rights after the second federation, all human rights, all individual rights, rights of individual dignity, The idea of alienable rights and partible rights is entirely because you had federation law had to figure out how to handle the primacy of the idea that the captain of the ship is that person in absolute charge of it. So the crew of the ship may have some rights, but they also have to give up some of their rights to the captain. And because of that, federation law had to come to accept the idea that those rights that were given up were rights that had to be alienable in some way. Utopian laws is fucked up. That that that's simply not an acceptable conclusion. They're not alienable rights. They're able to contract them and choose to engage in them, and they're able to always have the right to reverse and pull out of it. And that brings with it a whole other set of frameworks and laws and complications that comes with it that increases the cost of using those rights and doing things. But one of the benefits of it, as has already been mentioned several times, is that utopian law allows for people to own multiple ships and co coherently create a fleet without all the dumb federation laws. And that is fundamentally what made Utopia very attractive to businesses and to shipping companies, what made it a threat to the first order, and what led to the first order working with Utopia such that when the first order caused its great revolution just before the great war, effectively, it said, alright, Utopia. You get your dominions, and we won't attack you in them, and you can hold on to them. You just can't help the Federation. We are the new movement on the Federation. And Utopia said, okay. Sure. We'll we'll basically take over half the Federation. You get the other half, and we'll split it. You'll get part of it. We'll get part of it. And we'll both prosper. And it was when that failed, and all of a sudden, the Federation is half looking at Utopia and going, so did you decide with the enemy and we need to destroy you? That utopia begins its real radicalization of we hate the federation. The federation is engaging in harming us, so we need to start purging ourselves of federation people. The utopian homeland can't trust any Federation citizen, anyone with Federation citizenship because they're spies. And we can send people out to our dominions, but only our people can come back to us. And it became a deeply nationalist entity around its utopian roots. All of the dominions, it recognized that they weren't the developments of utopia. There there were a handful that were, and those ones were sort of special exceptions. But for all the rest of the dominions in the federation, even the ones it got onto its side, it fundamentally would look at them and say, but you aren't equal to us. It was doing the same thing for a different reason the federation had done to it, while promising to treat them equally. Uber time has radicalized the People's Federation in utopia into a hateful, fascist regime, and its death camps towards Federation citizens and extremist policies drove the Federation, to war with it. And given it had allied with, at this point in time, the megacorporation and its allies in the war against in the great war, essentially, the factions aligned against the federation. The federation brought itself into the war fully on the side of, well, against those who were against those who were with Utopia and her allies. The federation said anyone who's against them, we're on the side of. And the rest is history. Utopia couldn't couldn't defeat the might of the Federation when it truly brought all of it to bear. Even with all of its advantages, it simply had ruined the Federation very quickly was able to damn good one was really able to negotiate, with the various groups and dominions of the federation Four, what do we need to do to get you back on our side, get your loyal to us, get your troops, get your people, get your military resources, get your natural resources, get your factories, get your intellectual resources, all of that? What do I need to do to get that back on my side? And by the end of the Great War, he'd done that. He'd rallied all of it. He defeated Utopia. He defeated the other enemies. And when his granddaughter took up the throne, her first move really was to try and figure out how do I make a federation where I don't have to deal with Utopia being a problem. And that's where my earlier discussion of the fifth federation where, okay, we'll acknowledge utopian law. We'll let larger amounts of free trade operate. We'll give more power back to the dominions. We'll increase the amount of democracy. We'll make everyone equal under Earth. We'll do all of these things. Is that enough to earn utopia back to our side? And only time without what happens. So thank you for joining me for this episode and listening to this, discussion on utopia. I've been your host, and, I wish you a great time. Hope you have a great day. Thank you so much.