Have you ever realised how different we are from one another? Each individual has a different imagination and perception of how the future world is going to be. If someone had the option to form the ministries of the future, what would be considered as a department of miracles as an option? One such thought-provoking experiment was recently conducted at UTS, along with a few others from SP Jain School of Global Management, students got the opportunity to be a part of a discussion which looked at the aspects of forming a new imaginative world order and how it would look.
Your Future Government is a thought experiment. An initiative to bring out the imagination of people across different backgrounds of culture, age, ethnicity, and nationality together to discuss about a possible new world. A question at that stage on one’s mind would be, can a group of such diverse people really come up with a collective agreement about what is it that humanity really needs?
The experiment was designed in such a way that all participants were divided into groups of six for micro-level discussions within the group and also amongst other groups later on. As the discussion began in each individual groups, one particular group was debating on choosing a department from the multiple ministries that the participants were provided with. Some of the ministries they were deciding on included, department of innovation, discovery, newness, tinkering, caring etc. One of the group members came up with a phenomenal idea for a Ministry of Having Fun. This seemed like a great idea to all until they realised in unison that the world still lacks the basic needs each human is entitled to. Thus, they decided on the Department of Planet Sanctuary.
The Department of Planet Sanctuary was to ensure that all humans and (after-much debate to go vegan or not) animals receive the basic needs of food, water, shelter, clothing and acceptance. Since, the experiment did not look at the limitations of each of the departments in terms of funding, drawbacks, each of the ideas had abundance of possibilities and infinite goodness coupled with them. Adding acceptance to the basic needs was crucial since everyone understood that what each individual needs is being accepted. It does not just mean being accepted by others but self-acceptance was deemed essential to the growth of a better world. The ultimate factor however, as it turned out to be was a simple answer, happiness. So, the simplest thing to measure if the Department of Planet Sanctuary is functioning well or not is using a happiness index. Discussions regarding trade-offs continued until they came to a united decision on the Department they would have in the future. It was then time to witness what a couple of other groups had come up with at the macro level. Each group presented their idea and they realised that everyone in the end wanted the same thing. Everyone wanted acceptance from each other and from ourselves. The fact that 150 minds from different backdrops had come to a joint understanding of what they would like to see as a part of the future world was astonishing.
Acceptance is the way to happiness and in one’s daily lives everyone is looking for that through different channels. A couple of groups came up with extreme thoughts as to how to achieve the desired objective which included, Department of Miracles, another department which ensures craziness and fun, crowdsourcing of policies based on the similar lines of Tinder, Trip-advisor based rating for humans and other such wild concepts came to the fore.
This thought-provoking experiment led each student to believe in the good fate of humanity and how them, as individuals could bring about a change in the world. The pursuit of happiness was undeniable and felt closer than it was ever before.