h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A lot of people say that democracy is not a perfect system, but the best one invented so far. (Though I doubt that they say that in North Corea.) On this background I have often tried to imagine what a better system would look like. The best one that I invented was that everyone should have to be nice to each other all the time, and any nortyness should be punished. Its a very simple system and some of you might say that it would never work, but dont be so sure... It has never been tried before and that was the case with democracy too, until the greeks broke the ice.

The problem is that people need people to be nasty to but not really mean it. This helps release the tensions of life. Would a NICEOCRACY exclude this?

Couldn't we adopt the Japanese method for getting rid of tensions by having replicas of people we want to be nasty to, and throw cups and plates and things at them? And Prozac in the water supply would be a good idea too; this would help everybody to be really nice all the time. And as with Prozac your sex drive goes straight out the window, it would be good for limiting the population - which is the real reason why people are nasty sometimes. This would also help with the traffic problem.

I once read this story about a system where they found one person who was the most average, representative guy in the country and asked him what he thought about all the issues of the day. Then they would implement all his answers as government policy. Much cheaper and less fuss than democracy. Heaven help him if anything went wrong, though.

Maybe some of the tentions could be released by letting the guys who feel a need to be nasty punish the guys who are norty. Sandbags to box on could surely be of some use, and I also like the japanese metod presented by nr.47158 a lot. There are a lot of ways to rage without hurting anybody else.
These methods are of course only nessesary in the initial state of the niceocracy. The thought is that everybody in time will learn to take plesure in being nice.

So why ARE we nasty? Surely it is so obviously sensible for everybody to be nice that nobody would ever be nasty? Is it hormones? Perhaps it would be a good idea to go back into the trees.

Yeah!! Treeocracy, groovy!!!
The leaves could vote.

I once read a book where everybody switched jobs every day. When you woke up, you got a message telling you whether you were a teacher, biologist, police officer, politician or whatever. You didn't even have any personal belongings, as you also woke up in a new house every day, with new children, friends and wife. This way people lived in a almost perfect society, as there were no point in making laws that would benefit yourself, or stealing, as you would have lost it all the next day anyway. (Sounds awfully boring to me Most people could not even remember what they did a few days ago, and nothing new ever happened as you only were a scientist, actor or author for one day at a time.

Perhaps one-day-intervals are a bit short. Lets say that everyone got some ground to do what you wanted with for some years, you could grow beans if you wanted to or maybe build an amusement park, and then after two or three years everything would go back to status quo and all the rollercoasters and beans would be taken away. Here we have a system that maybe would work. Or?

This is a short story by Isaac Asimov. I'll get the reference if I can find it.