Everyone has needs, wants and desires (newades).  The most basic of needs are air, water, food, clothing, shelter, and there are a range of other things beyond the physical necessities of life that we all need.  Similarly, there are a broad range of wants and desires.  What newades a person chooses to pursue is ultimately up to that person, but along the way that person's choice may be influenced by many things.  Family upbringing, media, religion and other factors go into the way a person thinks and feels.

One of the social needs that people have is the need to belong.  This will lead many people to want the same thing -- fashion in clothes, perceptions of what is beautiful, where to go, what to do, etc.  Thus it can be said that it is human nature for us to want much the same thing as everyone else.  Obviously this is not true on an individual by individual basis when comparing each newade, but overall, there are congruencies.

A possible way to cope with very polarized views about something is to separate and let the empirical evidence show which view makes more sense.  But even after one view is demonstrated as safer or more effective, or better in whatever way, we need to allow some latitude for those who insist on living by the other way or ways.  The line needs to be drawn at the point people's lives and well being are at stake.

An example of this might be gun control.  Some people think owning guns is a right that should not be denied.  Indeed the US Constitution, drafted in the aftermath of the War of Independence, grants people that right.  At that point in US history we needed to have guns for many reasons.  The frontiers were, from the settlers' perspective, open to attack from Indians or from settlers of other European nations.  If England knew that everyone in the US was armed, an attempt to recapture the nation would be much more futile.  Since there was much more open countryside centuries ago, hunting for food was more prevalent, as well.

What we must look at is how far we as a civilization have come.  Do we or do we not still need to own weapons of deadly force.  There is as yet no definitive answer, although there are still many reasons to own and not own a gun.  Some people enjoy hunting, and there are reasonable ecological reasons for allowing it.  There is a lot of crime committed, much of it involving guns.  If would-be victims were armed would there be less crime, or would the amount of violence accompanying crime escalate?

This is an issue whose solution might well be best determined by demonstration.  Suppose there were a particular geographic sector where no one was allowed to live with guns, another where those who chose to could, and another where everyone was expected but not required to wear a gun.  Then suppose people were assisted in moving to a different sector if they decided they wanted to go there.  Over time people would see the cumulative effect of different levels of gun ownership.  Then as they saw the benefits of living in one sector versus another they would be likely to reconsider which was the sector of their choice, eventually leaving fewer and fewer people in the less beneficial sectors.  Then as the population lowered in the less beneficial sectors, their allotted geographical area could be decreased, perhaps ultimately to zero.

The short term effect of having many small sub-Utopias would be a geopolitical shattering of area.  The long term benefits would be that we could see the consequences of various sets of rules.

Systems analysis is getting more and more accurate as the price of computing on a large scale decreases, speed increases and programmers improve algorithms. Systems analysis is brought up in several places and is intended as another tool to better guess potential outcomes in the future.  We have the past to give us a base of experience as a starting point in working things out.  However, the past has specific factors that have led to the known outcomes better suited for interpolation.  We have few tools to extrapolate.  Our options are educated guesses by trying to extrapolate from experience, leaps of faith, number crunching with systems analysis and experimentation on a localized basis.  Extrapolation may not provide much in terms of large improvements.  Leaps of faith can land whole nations in turmoil and hindered progress (such as the legacy of Marxism as attempted by many countries).  Systems analysis, the science of number crunching a large assortment of parameters simulated over various periods of time, is only as good as the logic that goes into the crunching routines and the accuracy of the starting assumptions.  Experimentation is limited and slow because it requires actual situations be created and monitored over time (and then we may not have a realistically accurate result because the situations involve people, who will have allegiances and prejudices that may skew the results).  So nothing is fool proof, but if we use everything we have, we stand a chance of coming up with a genuinely better way of life.