Paradism

Paradism is the Raëlian doctrine of a post-scarcity, fully automated, moneyless society — a civilisation in which machines perform all necessary work, material scarcity is abolished, and people are freed from wage-labour to think, create, and fulfil themselves. In the Wheel of Heaven framework it is read as the socio-economic shape of the Golden Age: the form Aquarian-age society takes once automation is carried through to its conclusion, modelled on the world of the Elohim, whose home planet the canon describes as already organised this way. Its principal source is Claude Vorilhon (Raël)'s Extra-Terrestrials Took Me to Their Planet (1975), consolidated in Message from the Designers (2005), where the claim is put simply: machines can look after the daily chores by themselves, so human beings need no longer sell their lives to earn a living.

Paradism belongs to the wider Aquarian-age programme the canon calls the New Commandments, alongside Geniocracy, which governs, and Humanitarianism, which reforms property and inheritance. Where Humanitarianism restructures an economy that still runs on money and labour, Paradism describes the further horizon in which both have become unnecessary. The two are read as stages rather than rivals: Humanitarianism the nearer-term transition, Paradism the long-term destination. A separate advocacy body, the Paradism movement (paradism.org), promotes the idea as a political proposal and is kept organisationally distinct from the Raëlian Movement, whose own mission remains the diffusion of the message and the building of the Embassy.

The doctrine

The core claim of Paradism is that technology has already made human toil obsolete, and that a society organised around this fact would free people for the work they were actually made for. Vorilhon states it directly:

"Science and technology can totally liberate humanity, not only from the problem of hunger in the world, but also from the obligation to work to live, since machines can quite easily look after the daily chores by themselves, thanks to automation."

The argument is not for better wages or shorter hours but for the abolition of necessary labour altogether. Vorilhon points to a trend he already saw underway in 1975 — the factory where hundreds of workers had been replaced by one person overseeing a machine, and where, he predicts, even that one person will eventually be unnecessary. The half-century since has borne out the direction of travel: industrial robotics, and now artificial intelligence, have absorbed a widening share of routine physical and cognitive work.

The point of that liberation is a positive one. Freed from labour, human beings are to turn to what the source calls their true vocation:

"Machines can easily do all the chores and take care of all the work, enabling people to dedicate themselves to the one thing for which they were created — to think, create and blossom."

Paradism therefore rejects the moral elevation of work for its own sake. Vorilhon extends the critique to the trinity of work, family, country — the wartime Vichy slogan Travail, Famille, Patrie — arguing that each has been used to bind people to a labour they need not perform, and proposing in their place fulfilment, freedom, and universal fraternity.

The mechanism. What makes a post-scarcity economy conceivable, on this account, is the convergence of automated manufacturing, artificial intelligence, and — in the corpus's forward reading — nanotechnology. If food, shelter, and everyday goods can be produced on demand from common materials at negligible cost, the central economic problem shifts. Production ceases to be the constraint; the remaining question is how to distribute an abundance rather than how to ration a scarcity. The corpus frames this as a change of kind, not degree: once the machines do the producing, the economic problem becomes political — how to organise the sharing of plenty — rather than a matter of extracting enough from human effort.

The abolition of money. The endpoint of the doctrine is a society without money. Vorilhon distinguishes two stages. In the transitional phase, before automation is complete, differentiated reward still has a place:

"Although everyone has the right to have sufficient means to live decently, those who do more for their fellow human beings have the right to receive more than those who do nothing for the community. This is obviously a temporary rule until human beings can have robots to perform all menial labor, so that they can devote themselves exclusively to their fulfillment, after having totally abolished money."

Money is thus read as a rationing device for scarce goods. Where scarcity ends, the reason for money ends with it, and a fully realised Paradism dispenses with monetary exchange altogether.

A third way. The canon positions Paradism against the two dominant systems of the twentieth century. In the "Society and Government" material the judgment is blunt: capitalism "enslaves people to money, benefiting a few on the backs of others," while communism "places greater importance on equality than on liberty." Paradism claims to be neither. It does not redistribute a scarcity-bound economy, as communism proposes, nor accept the concentration of wealth that capitalism permits; it removes scarcity itself through automation, which the canon presents as making both extraction and forced redistribution obsolete. Human contribution becomes voluntary and creative rather than driven by necessity.

Two further specifics recur in the source. The first is the biological robot — Vorilhon's preferred image of automated labour, a bioengineered worker rather than a mechanical one: "Do everything possible to create the biological robot that will release you from all menial labor." The second is a matching vision of urban form: tall communal buildings set in open country, each capable of housing some fifty thousand people and equipped with everything its residents need, so that individual houses do not, in the source's phrase, "devour" nature. Both are offered as concrete features of the paradise the doctrine names.

Etymology and naming

The word joins paradise to the suffix -ism. Paradise descends from Old Persian pairi-daēza, an "enclosed garden" or walled park, by way of Greek paradeisos; the Septuagint used the same Greek word to render the gan — the garden — of Eden, fixing the long association between "paradise" and the garden of Genesis. The suffix marks Paradism as a systematic doctrine rather than a mood or a picture, on the pattern of the other Raëlian coinages Geniocracy and Cyberparadism.

The French source terms matter for the sense. Vorilhon writes of a paradis terrestre — a terrestrial paradise — and titles a section paradis sur Terre, "paradise on Earth." The adjective is doing deliberate work: Paradism names a condition to be built on Earth by human hands and machines, not a heaven awaited after death. It is an engineering programme dressed in the oldest word for the garden, not an eschatology.

The Wheel of Heaven reading

The framework reads Paradism as the economic face of the Golden Age — the age the canon expects the Elohim to help humanity reach, and which it describes as a return, on Earth, to the conditions of the creators' own world. Of the several characteristics the corpus assigns to that age, Paradism carries the first two: the end of material scarcity through automated, and eventually molecular, manufacture, and the end of human labour through machine and artificial-intelligence substitution. Where the Golden Age names the whole realised civilisation, Paradism names the organising principle of its economy.

Read in the canon's own voice, the doctrine is not a wish but a description of where the Age of Aquarius is meant to arrive. The Elohim created humanity scientifically and have, in the Raëlian account, already crossed this threshold themselves; the New Commandments they transmit through Vorilhon are the programme for humanity to do the same. Paradism supplies that programme's socio-economic content, as Geniocracy supplies its politics and Humanitarianism its property law. The full realisation is expected to follow the return of the creators and the transfer of advanced technological knowledge that the Embassy is built to receive.

Like the rest of the New Commandments, Paradism is read as a directional orientation across the long Aquarian age — roughly the span from the mid-twentieth century to the fifth millennium in the corpus's chronology — rather than an overnight conversion. The transitional and fully realised phases are stages along that arc: today's partial automation, with its differentiated rewards, is understood as the early stretch of a road whose end is the moneyless society. Whether humanity reaches that end is, in the wider framework, bound up with how it navigates the Number of Man threshold and the choice the age presents.

Comparative currents

Paradism's structural features — automation as liberation, the end of scarcity, the withering of money and wage-labour — recur across a long line of secular thought, and the resemblances are close enough to be worth naming, even though the canon grounds the idea differently from any of them.

The oldest lineage is the utopian-socialist one. William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890) and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) both imagine post-money commonwealths, as do the community experiments of Fourier and Owen and the anarchist abundance of Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread (1892). These share Paradism's destination but not its engine: they precede the age of automation and place their hopes in reorganised human labour rather than in machines that make labour unnecessary.

Closer in time and mechanism is the contemporary literature on post-scarcity and automation — Peter Frase's Four Futures (2016), Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee's The Second Machine Age (2014), Daniel Susskind's A World Without Work (2020), and the post-capitalist arguments of Paul Mason and of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. The nearest single parallel is Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019), which likewise treats extreme automation as the infrastructure of a liberated, abundant society; the difference lies in the theoretical frame — a Marxist one for Bastani, the Raëlian revelation for Paradism. Universal Basic Income, in the work of Philippe Van Parijs or the campaign of Andrew Yang, converges only partway: it is compatible with the transitional stage but keeps both money and the market, and so falls short of the fully realised doctrine. Transhumanism and the technological-singularity discourse of Nick Bostrom and Ray Kurzweil share Paradism's technological optimism while pointing it elsewhere — at the enhancement of the human being rather than the reorganisation of the economy. In popular culture, the moneyless Star Trek Federation, with its matter replicators standing in for nanotechnology, has done more than any manifesto to make a post-scarcity future imaginable.

The framework treats all of these as convergent readings of the same technological possibility, arrived at independently. Its own distinctive claim is not the vision of abundance, which it shares widely, but the account of where the vision comes from — the Elohim civilisation the canon holds up as the working model — and its integration into the single Aquarian-age programme of the New Commandments.

Critical perspectives

Paradism inherits the objections that attach to post-scarcity utopianism generally, and it is fairer to the doctrine to state them than to pass over them.

The first concerns automation and work. That machines displace particular jobs is not in dispute; whether they abolish the need for human work in aggregate is very much so. Economic historians such as Carl Benedikt Frey (The Technology Trap, 2019) note that past waves of automation destroyed some occupations while creating others, and mainstream economists remain divided on whether the current wave is different in kind. Paradism reads displacement as a transition cost on the way to liberation; critics reply that the hard questions — who owns the machines, and how the gains are shared — are precisely the political problems the doctrine assumes will be solved rather than showing how.

The second concerns money. Whether a complex economy can allocate resources without prices is a long-standing question in economics, sharpened in the twentieth-century "socialist calculation debate." The canon's answer is that artificial intelligence and distributed coordination can do what prices once did; that this could work at the scale of a planet is, on any honest account, unproven, and belongs to the speculative rather than the demonstrated. The same caution applies to the nanotechnology that underwrites the promise of near-costless goods: universal molecular manufacturing of the kind the doctrine assumes remains a hypothesis, not an achieved technology, and mainstream materials science has produced nothing like a general-purpose assembler.

Finally, Paradism's realisation is made to depend on the other New Commandments — on Geniocratic governance and on Humanitarian property reform — each of which carries its own well-rehearsed objections, treated in the Geniocracy and Humanitarianism entries. Read as a forecast, Paradism is exposed on every one of these fronts. Read as the canon presents it — a directional orientation, a description of the destination rather than a route map — it is better understood as a normative vision of what a fully automated society could be for, and it is on that ground that it is most defensible.

See also

• Golden Age
• New Commandments
• Geniocracy
• Humanitarianism
• Cyberparadism
• Age of Aquarius
• Number of Man
• Cosmic Chain
• Embassy
• New Jerusalem
• Elohim
• Yahweh
• Raël
• Raëlism
• Message from the Designers

References

Principal Raëlian source

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Le Livre qui dit la vérité. 1974.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Les Extra-Terrestres m'ont emmené sur leur planète. 1975. The principal source articulation in "Welcoming the Extra-Terrestrials" material.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Accueillir les Extra-Terrestres. 1979.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Geniocracy: Government of the People, for the People, by the Geniuses. Nova Distribution, 2008. (English-language edition of the 1977 French original La Géniocratie.)

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Message from the Designers. Tagman Press, 2005. The consolidated English-language edition; principal "Paradise on Earth" section and "Society and Government" content.

Paradism organizational engagement

Paradism Movement. Paradism: A New Vision for Humanity. paradism.org publications. Various publications, 2010–2025.

International Raëlian Movement. Various Paradism-related publications. Available at raelradio.net, rael.org, and other International Raëlian Movement online resources.

Contemporary post-scarcity economics

Frase, Peter. Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. Verso, 2016.

Reich, Robert B. Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few. Knopf, 2015.

Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. W. W. Norton, 2014.

Susskind, Daniel. A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond. Metropolitan Books, 2020.

Frey, Carl Benedikt. The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation. Princeton University Press, 2019.

Mason, Paul. PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. Verso, 2015.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism

Bastani, Aaron. Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. Verso, 2019.

Berger, Edmund. "Fully Automated Luxury Individualist Anarchism." The Libertarian Ideal, March 6, 2017. https://thelibertarianideal.com/2017/03/06/fully-automated-luxury-individualist-anarchism/.

Universal Basic Income

Van Parijs, Philippe, and Yannick Vanderborght. Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy. Harvard University Press, 2017.

Standing, Guy. Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen. Penguin, 2017.

Widerquist, Karl. A Critical Analysis of Basic Income Experiments for Researchers, Policymakers, and Citizens. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Yang, Andrew. The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future. Hachette, 2018.

Transhumanism

Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press, 2014.

More, Max, and Natasha Vita-More, eds. The Transhumanist Reader. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Viking, 2005.

Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Harper, 2017.

Technological singularity discourse

Vinge, Vernor. "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era." NASA Vision-21 Symposium, 1993.

Good, I. J. "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine." Advances in Computers 6 (1965): 31-88.

Russell, Stuart. Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. Viking, 2019.

Nineteenth-and-twentieth-century utopian socialist traditions

Morris, William. News from Nowhere. 1890.

Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward: 2000-1887. 1888.

Fourier, Charles. Théorie de l'unité universelle. 1822.

Owen, Robert. A New View of Society. 1813-1816.

Saint-Simon, Henri de. Du système industriel. 1821-1822.

Kropotkin, Pyotr. The Conquest of Bread. 1892.

Manuel, Frank E., and Fritzie P. Manuel. Utopian Thought in the Western World. Harvard University Press (Belknap), 1979.

Classical and Renaissance utopian traditions

Plato. Republic. Various translations and editions. c. 375 BCE.

More, Thomas. Utopia. 1516.

Bacon, Francis. New Atlantis. 1627.

Campanella, Tommaso. Civitas Solis (The City of the Sun). 1602/1623.

Harrington, James. The Commonwealth of Oceana. 1656.

Indigenous and gift-economy traditions

Mauss, Marcel. Essai sur le don (The Gift). 1925.

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House, 2011.

Star Trek Federation popular-cultural engagement

Roddenberry, Gene, and various authors. Star Trek (television series and films). 1966-present.

Web resources

"Paradism." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradism.

"Post-scarcity economy." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy.

"Fully Automated Luxury Communism." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Automated_Luxury_Communism.

"Universal basic income." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income.

"Transhumanism." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism.

"Technological singularity." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity.

"Utopia." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia.

"Paradism Movement." paradism.org official website.

Paradism. (2026). Wheel of Heaven. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/paradism/

"Paradism." Wheel of Heaven, 2026, https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/paradism/.

"Paradism." Wheel of Heaven, 2026. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/paradism/.

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