Political Philosophies: First university (or rather its philosophy department) to set up three...
...ocean-based communities, where one is made up of only communists, a second of only libertarians, and a third of only anarchists. Residents must pass a lie-detector test that verifies they truly believe in the purest form of their respective philosophies and are willing to run their communities only by those philosophies. The experiment is to see which of these three philosophies succeeds and which fails in real life. [Many adherents of these philosophies believe their philosophies have never gotten a decent chance to prove themselves. This experiment would give them that chance.] Each community must operate according to the dictates of its philosophy. The experiment will have a group of the university's philosophy professors work as referees to ensure the communities do this. Each community selects where it wants to be located in international waters. The community is started at that location.
Each community is given an identical budget to design and build its ocean habitat. The runners of the experiment select the 100 starting residents for each community (a good balance of professions and trades) so that none of the communities lack any important skills. The initial community sets its “immigration” policy that determines how other applicants who weren’t selected for the initial group, or who apply later, can or cannot join the community.
The experiment ends when each community is either declared self-sustaining or a failure by the experiment runners. This experiment is expected to take years to reach either point. Any self-sustaining community must be allowed to continue to exist and live beyond the experiment and the control of the experiment runners.
When setting up this experiment, the university must seek and respect input from published authors, political magazines, think tanks, and political parties which espouse one of these philosophies. For the libertarian community, the university must seek input from at least the
Reason Foundation,
CATO Institute,
Liberty Magazine, and the
Libertarian Party. For the communist community, the university must seek input from at least the
Institute for Policy Studies,
MSNBC,
The Progressive Magazine, and
Communist Party USA. For the anarchist community, the university must seek input from at least the
Institute for Anarchist Studies and
Fifth Estate Magazine.
To win this challenge, the university must get a reality TV production company to do a weekly hour-long reality TV show on the experiment and the show must premiere on either a US broadcast or cable TV network during their prime-time and air at least 26 episodes a year. The TV show must air for at least three years. The university must not have any creative control over the TV show, its production, or the production company BUT the production company must turn over copies of ALL video footage and audio recordings they take to the experiment runners unedited. The production company must also allow and make room for (or supply a second live-feed observation room to) the experiment runners to use the production company's video cameras and audio microphones to observe the test subjects live. This should be a very good mutually-beneficial symbiotic relationship between the university and the production company. The university cannot receive any payment from the production company or broadcast/cable TV network. Production companies and/or broadcast/cable TV networks bid to get the rights to the experiment by how much money they'll spend on production and promotion of the show as well as what timeslot they'll guarantee for the show in their programming schedule. The reason for this is to get the lessons learned from this experiment out to as many people as possible. The university is, after all, an educational institution and this experiment is meant to educate the general public as well as the academic community.
The research foundation(s) and/or corporation(s) that the university gets the grant(s) from to do this experiment must commit itself(themselves) to funding the life of the experiment. In the grant application, the university must spell out in clear terms what would cause a community to be declared a failure.
Discussion:
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