Societal perfection will be attained only many centuries after the Twenty-First.
As in other aspects of life, humankind will remember and continue to study certain institutional features from those centuries long before perfection was attained, and in many ways life will be informed by those institutions: National borders will no longer be rigidly definitive but rather suggest areas within which culturally united people dwell; the best features of past social democratic government will produce the democratic, cooperative, egalitarian spirit that now makes highly formal governing institutions unnecessary; families will still be organized residentially and emotionally into nuclear units, but concern for one’s fellows will extend loving concern for everyone in the larger national and international family.
Similarly, people in the perfect society will remember and respect religious institutions to which humankind was long devoted. Memory and reverence for those institutions will preserve sacred literature, places of worship, and key concepts from the historical religions of the world:
Animistic heritage will inform an abiding, deeply held reverence for the destructive potential, constructive power, and transcendent beauty of Nature.
Respect for the Zoroastrian tradition will instill abiding gratitude that former tensions between Good and Evil have been resolved decisively in favor of the former.
Judaism will be revered for instilling in humanity a centuries-long desire to fulfill the expectations of the Divine.
Hinduism will be appreciated for producing in humanity an appreciation for a World Soul that unites all Life and induces respect for Ultimate Reality beyond the terrestrial.
Buddhism will be revered for producing in humankind calmness of soul, an enhanced appreciation for the inevitability of change, and a propensity to appreciate with profound, focused attention each moment of joyful, healthful, radiant life while comprehending and responding circumspectly to suffering, illness, and death.
Christianity will inspire in humanity a deep love of one’s fellows as the most important of all values, a refined sense of empathy, and a sense that for each human being in which such a spirit abides, immortality is assured.
Islam will be revered for penetration to the moral core, elimination of distractions, and relentless focus on singularity of the Divine.
Sikhism will be appreciated for inducing in humanity honest, loving, egalitarian behavior across race, gender, and creed with a passion for unity with the Divine.
In the perfect society, places of worship will be preserved as architectural treasures and as spaces that offer an abiding sense of peace, conducive to meditation and prayerful reflection. All will be welcome to all such places of spiritual repose. Such spiritual spaces will honor the past while abiding in a society in which borders and distinctions are suggestive rather than definitive.
As with the case of government, the religious institutions of history will inform the organic emergence of spiritual leaders inspired by the ideal qualities attributed to popes, patriarchs, and Dalai Lamas who exist now only in historical memory.
People will live abundantly, contribute greatly, and die fearlessly assured of immortality due to the nature of their lives.
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