Paradism is the Raëlian doctrine of a post-scarcity, fully automated, moneyless\nsociety — a civilisation in which machines perform all necessary work, material\nscarcity is abolished, and people are freed from wage-labour to think, create, and\nfulfil themselves. In the Wheel of Heaven framework it is read as the socio-economic\nshape of the Golden Age: the form Aquarian-age society takes once\nautomation is carried through to its conclusion, modelled on the world of the\nElohim, whose home planet the canon describes as already organised\nthis way. Its principal source is Claude Vorilhon (Raël)'s\nExtra-Terrestrials Took Me to Their Planet (1975), consolidated in\nMessage from the Designers (2005), where the\nclaim is put simply: machines can look after the daily chores by themselves, so\nhuman beings need no longer sell their lives to earn a living.
\nParadism belongs to the wider Aquarian-age programme the canon calls the\nNew Commandments, alongside Geniocracy,\nwhich governs, and Humanitarianism, which reforms property\nand inheritance. Where Humanitarianism restructures an economy that still runs on\nmoney and labour, Paradism describes the further horizon in which both have become\nunnecessary. The two are read as stages rather than rivals: Humanitarianism the\nnearer-term transition, Paradism the long-term destination. A separate advocacy\nbody, the Paradism movement (paradism.org), promotes the idea as a political\nproposal and is kept organisationally distinct from the Raëlian Movement, whose\nown mission remains the diffusion of the message and the building of the\nEmbassy.
\nThe core claim of Paradism is that technology has already made human toil obsolete,\nand that a society organised around this fact would free people for the work they\nwere actually made for. Vorilhon states it directly:
\n\n\n\"Science and technology can totally liberate humanity, not only from the problem\nof hunger in the world, but also from the obligation to work to live, since\nmachines can quite easily look after the daily chores by themselves, thanks to\nautomation.\"
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The argument is not for better wages or shorter hours but for the abolition of\nnecessary labour altogether. Vorilhon points to a trend he already saw underway in\n1975 — the factory where hundreds of workers had been replaced by one person\noverseeing a machine, and where, he predicts, even that one person will eventually\nbe unnecessary. The half-century since has borne out the direction of travel:\nindustrial robotics, and now artificial intelligence, have absorbed a widening\nshare of routine physical and cognitive work.
\nThe point of that liberation is a positive one. Freed from labour, human beings are\nto turn to what the source calls their true vocation:
\n\n\n\"Machines can easily do all the chores and take care of all the work, enabling\npeople to dedicate themselves to the one thing for which they were created — to\nthink, create and blossom.\"
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Paradism therefore rejects the moral elevation of work for its own sake. Vorilhon\nextends the critique to the trinity of work, family, country — the wartime Vichy\nslogan Travail, Famille, Patrie — arguing that each has been used to bind people\nto a labour they need not perform, and proposing in their place fulfilment,\nfreedom, and universal fraternity.
\nThe mechanism. What makes a post-scarcity economy conceivable, on this account,\nis the convergence of automated manufacturing, artificial intelligence, and — in the\ncorpus's forward reading — nanotechnology. If food, shelter, and everyday goods can\nbe produced on demand from common materials at negligible cost, the central economic\nproblem shifts. Production ceases to be the constraint; the remaining question is\nhow to distribute an abundance rather than how to ration a scarcity. The corpus\nframes this as a change of kind, not degree: once the machines do the producing, the\neconomic problem becomes political — how to organise the sharing of plenty — rather\nthan a matter of extracting enough from human effort.
\nThe abolition of money. The endpoint of the doctrine is a society without money.\nVorilhon distinguishes two stages. In the transitional phase, before automation is\ncomplete, differentiated reward still has a place:
\n\n\n\"Although everyone has the right to have sufficient means to live decently, those\nwho do more for their fellow human beings have the right to receive more than those\nwho do nothing for the community. This is obviously a temporary rule until human\nbeings can have robots to perform all menial labor, so that they can devote\nthemselves exclusively to their fulfillment, after having totally abolished money.\"
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Money is thus read as a rationing device for scarce goods. Where scarcity ends, the\nreason for money ends with it, and a fully realised Paradism dispenses with monetary\nexchange altogether.
\nA third way. The canon positions Paradism against the two dominant systems of the\ntwentieth century. In the \"Society and Government\" material the judgment is blunt:\ncapitalism \"enslaves people to money, benefiting a few on the backs of others,\" while\ncommunism \"places greater importance on equality than on liberty.\" Paradism claims to\nbe neither. It does not redistribute a scarcity-bound economy, as communism proposes,\nnor accept the concentration of wealth that capitalism permits; it removes scarcity\nitself through automation, which the canon presents as making both extraction and\nforced redistribution obsolete. Human contribution becomes voluntary and creative\nrather than driven by necessity.
\nTwo further specifics recur in the source. The first is the biological robot —\nVorilhon's preferred image of automated labour, a bioengineered worker rather than a\nmechanical one: \"Do everything possible to create the biological robot that will\nrelease you from all menial labor.\" The second is a matching vision of urban\nform: tall communal buildings set in open country, each capable of housing some\nfifty thousand people and equipped with everything its residents need, so that\nindividual houses do not, in the source's phrase, \"devour\" nature. Both are offered\nas concrete features of the paradise the doctrine names.
\nThe word joins paradise to the suffix -ism. Paradise descends from Old Persian\npairi-daēza, an \"enclosed garden\" or walled park, by way of Greek paradeisos; the\nSeptuagint used the same Greek word to render the gan — the garden — of\nEden, fixing the long association between \"paradise\" and the garden of\nGenesis. The suffix marks Paradism as a systematic doctrine rather than a mood or a\npicture, on the pattern of the other Raëlian coinages Geniocracy\nand Cyberparadism.
\nThe French source terms matter for the sense. Vorilhon writes of a paradis\nterrestre — a terrestrial paradise — and titles a section paradis sur Terre,\n\"paradise on Earth.\" The adjective is doing deliberate work: Paradism names a\ncondition to be built on Earth by human hands and machines, not a heaven awaited\nafter death. It is an engineering programme dressed in the oldest word for the\ngarden, not an eschatology.
\nThe framework reads Paradism as the economic face of the Golden Age\n— the age the canon expects the Elohim to help humanity reach, and\nwhich it describes as a return, on Earth, to the conditions of the creators' own\nworld. Of the several characteristics the corpus assigns to that age, Paradism\ncarries the first two: the end of material scarcity through automated, and eventually\nmolecular, manufacture, and the end of human labour through machine and\nartificial-intelligence substitution. Where the Golden Age names the whole realised\ncivilisation, Paradism names the organising principle of its economy.
\nRead in the canon's own voice, the doctrine is not a wish but a description of where\nthe Age of Aquarius is meant to arrive. The Elohim created\nhumanity scientifically and have, in the Raëlian account, already crossed this\nthreshold themselves; the New Commandments they transmit through Vorilhon are the\nprogramme for humanity to do the same. Paradism supplies that programme's\nsocio-economic content, as Geniocracy supplies its politics and Humanitarianism its\nproperty law. The full realisation is expected to follow the return of the creators\nand the transfer of advanced technological knowledge that the Embassy\nis built to receive.
\nLike the rest of the New Commandments, Paradism is read as a directional orientation\nacross the long Aquarian age — roughly the span from the mid-twentieth century to the\nfifth millennium in the corpus's chronology — rather than an overnight conversion.\nThe transitional and fully realised phases are stages along that arc: today's partial\nautomation, with its differentiated rewards, is understood as the early stretch of a\nroad whose end is the moneyless society. Whether humanity reaches that end is, in the\nwider framework, bound up with how it navigates the\nNumber of Man threshold and the choice the age presents.
\nParadism's structural features — automation as liberation, the end of scarcity, the\nwithering of money and wage-labour — recur across a long line of secular thought, and\nthe resemblances are close enough to be worth naming, even though the canon grounds\nthe idea differently from any of them.
\nThe oldest lineage is the utopian-socialist one. William Morris's News from Nowhere\n(1890) and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) both imagine post-money\ncommonwealths, as do the community experiments of Fourier and Owen and the anarchist\nabundance of Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread (1892). These share Paradism's\ndestination but not its engine: they precede the age of automation and place their\nhopes in reorganised human labour rather than in machines that make labour\nunnecessary.
\nCloser in time and mechanism is the contemporary literature on post-scarcity and\nautomation — Peter Frase's Four Futures (2016), Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew\nMcAfee's The Second Machine Age (2014), Daniel Susskind's A World Without Work\n(2020), and the post-capitalist arguments of Paul Mason and of Nick Srnicek and Alex\nWilliams. The nearest single parallel is Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury\nCommunism (2019), which likewise treats extreme automation as the infrastructure of\na liberated, abundant society; the difference lies in the theoretical frame — a\nMarxist one for Bastani, the Raëlian revelation for Paradism. Universal Basic Income,\nin the work of Philippe Van Parijs or the campaign of Andrew Yang, converges only\npartway: it is compatible with the transitional stage but keeps both money and the\nmarket, and so falls short of the fully realised doctrine. Transhumanism and the\ntechnological-singularity discourse of Nick Bostrom and Ray Kurzweil share Paradism's\ntechnological optimism while pointing it elsewhere — at the enhancement of the human\nbeing rather than the reorganisation of the economy. In popular culture, the moneyless\nStar Trek Federation, with its matter replicators standing in for nanotechnology,\nhas done more than any manifesto to make a post-scarcity future imaginable.
\nThe framework treats all of these as convergent readings of the same technological\npossibility, arrived at independently. Its own distinctive claim is not the vision of\nabundance, which it shares widely, but the account of where the vision comes from —\nthe Elohim civilisation the canon holds up as the working model — and its integration\ninto the single Aquarian-age programme of the New Commandments.
\nParadism inherits the objections that attach to post-scarcity utopianism generally,\nand it is fairer to the doctrine to state them than to pass over them.
\nThe first concerns automation and work. That machines displace particular jobs is not\nin dispute; whether they abolish the need for human work in aggregate is very much so.\nEconomic historians such as Carl Benedikt Frey (The Technology Trap, 2019) note that\npast waves of automation destroyed some occupations while creating others, and\nmainstream economists remain divided on whether the current wave is different in kind.\nParadism reads displacement as a transition cost on the way to liberation; critics\nreply that the hard questions — who owns the machines, and how the gains are shared —\nare precisely the political problems the doctrine assumes will be solved rather than\nshowing how.
\nThe second concerns money. Whether a complex economy can allocate resources without\nprices is a long-standing question in economics, sharpened in the twentieth-century\n\"socialist calculation debate.\" The canon's answer is that artificial intelligence and\ndistributed coordination can do what prices once did; that this could work at the scale\nof a planet is, on any honest account, unproven, and belongs to the speculative\nrather than the demonstrated. The same caution applies to the nanotechnology that\nunderwrites the promise of near-costless goods: universal molecular manufacturing of\nthe kind the doctrine assumes remains a hypothesis, not an achieved technology, and\nmainstream materials science has produced nothing like a general-purpose assembler.
\nFinally, Paradism's realisation is made to depend on the other New Commandments — on\nGeniocratic governance and on Humanitarian property reform — each of which carries its\nown well-rehearsed objections, treated in the Geniocracy and\nHumanitarianism entries. Read as a forecast, Paradism is\nexposed on every one of these fronts. Read as the canon presents it — a directional\norientation, a description of the destination rather than a route map — it is better\nunderstood as a normative vision of what a fully automated society could be for, and\nit is on that ground that it is most defensible.
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Le Livre qui dit la vérité. 1974.
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Les Extra-Terrestres m'ont emmené sur leur planète. 1975. The principal source articulation in \"Welcoming the Extra-Terrestrials\" material.
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Accueillir les Extra-Terrestres. 1979.
\nVorilhon, 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.)
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Message from the Designers. Tagman Press, 2005. The consolidated English-language edition; principal \"Paradise on Earth\" section and \"Society and Government\" content.
\nParadism Movement. Paradism: A New Vision for Humanity. paradism.org publications. Various publications, 2010–2025.
\nInternational Raëlian Movement. Various Paradism-related publications. Available at raelradio.net, rael.org, and other International Raëlian Movement online resources.
\nFrase, Peter. Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. Verso, 2016.
\nReich, Robert B. Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few. Knopf, 2015.
\nBrynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. W. W. Norton, 2014.
\nSusskind, Daniel. A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond. Metropolitan Books, 2020.
\nFrey, Carl Benedikt. The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation. Princeton University Press, 2019.
\nMason, Paul. PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
\nSrnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. Verso, 2015.
\nBastani, Aaron. Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. Verso, 2019.
\nBerger, Edmund. \"Fully Automated Luxury Individualist Anarchism.\" The Libertarian Ideal, March 6, 2017. https://thelibertarianideal.com/2017/03/06/fully-automated-luxury-individualist-anarchism/.
\nVan Parijs, Philippe, and Yannick Vanderborght. Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy. Harvard University Press, 2017.
\nStanding, Guy. Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen. Penguin, 2017.
\nWiderquist, Karl. A Critical Analysis of Basic Income Experiments for Researchers, Policymakers, and Citizens. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
\nYang, Andrew. The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future. Hachette, 2018.
\nBostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press, 2014.
\nMore, Max, and Natasha Vita-More, eds. The Transhumanist Reader. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
\nKurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Viking, 2005.
\nHarari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Harper, 2017.
\nVinge, Vernor. \"The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.\" NASA Vision-21 Symposium, 1993.
\nGood, I. J. \"Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine.\" Advances in Computers 6 (1965): 31-88.
\nRussell, Stuart. Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. Viking, 2019.
\nMorris, William. News from Nowhere. 1890.
\nBellamy, Edward. Looking Backward: 2000-1887. 1888.
\nFourier, Charles. Théorie de l'unité universelle. 1822.
\nOwen, Robert. A New View of Society. 1813-1816.
\nSaint-Simon, Henri de. Du système industriel. 1821-1822.
\nKropotkin, Pyotr. The Conquest of Bread. 1892.
\nManuel, Frank E., and Fritzie P. Manuel. Utopian Thought in the Western World. Harvard University Press (Belknap), 1979.
\nPlato. Republic. Various translations and editions. c. 375 BCE.
\nMore, Thomas. Utopia. 1516.
\nBacon, Francis. New Atlantis. 1627.
\nCampanella, Tommaso. Civitas Solis (The City of the Sun). 1602/1623.
\nHarrington, James. The Commonwealth of Oceana. 1656.
\nMauss, Marcel. Essai sur le don (The Gift). 1925.
\nGraeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House, 2011.
\nRoddenberry, Gene, and various authors. Star Trek (television series and films). 1966-present.
\n\"Paradism.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradism.
\n\"Post-scarcity economy.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy.
\n\"Fully Automated Luxury Communism.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Automated_Luxury_Communism.
\n\"Universal basic income.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income.
\n\"Transhumanism.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism.
\n\"Technological singularity.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity.
\n\"Utopia.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia.
\n\"Paradism Movement.\" paradism.org official website.
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