Utopia/Quotes

Widely spaced earth-sheltered towns offer sweeping views over the plains. High-speed trains link the communities. Food is grown in the region. Bikeways are everywhere. Nonpolluting hydrogen powers all vehicles. Sunlight and wind generate the hydrogen. Note the earth-covered bridges, the continuous window bands, the wind machines across the farmlands. In this new America, everything is reused, recycled, conserved.

—Malcolm Wells

Look around you at the gifts of God, the clear sky, the pure air, the tender grass, the birds; nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, only we, are godless and foolish, and we don't understand that life is a paradise, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

Utopia would be boring. What's there to write about? "It's a nice day. It's another nice day. It's another nice day...

—Peter F. Hamilton

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache... Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

—George Orwell

Citizens, do you picture the future to yourselves? The streets of cities inundated with light, green branches on the thresholds, nations sisters, men just, old men blessing children, the past loving the present, thinkers entirely at liberty, believers on terms of full equality, for religion heaven, God the direct priest, human conscience become an altar, no more hatreds, the fraternity of the workshop and the school, for sole penalty and recompense fame, work for all, right for all, peace over all, no more bloodshed, no more wars, happy mothers!

Courage, and onward! Citizens, whither are we going? To science made government, to the force of things become the sole public force, to the natural law, having in itself its sanction and its penalty and promulgating itself by evidence, to a dawn of truth corresponding to a dawn of day. We are advancing to the union of peoples; we are advancing to the unity of man. No more fictions; no more parasites. The real governed by the true, that is the goal. This is the gestation of the nineteenth century.

Citizens, whatever happens to-day, through our defeat as well as through our victory, it is a revolution that we are about to create. And what is the revolution that we shall cause? I have just told you, the Revolution of the True. From a political point of view, there is but a single principle; the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty. Where two or three of these sovereignties are combined, the state begins. But in that association there is no abdication. Each sovereignty concedes a certain quantity of itself, for the purpose of forming the common right. This quantity is the same for all of us. This identity of concession which each makes to all, is called Equality. Common right is nothing else than the protection of all beaming on the right of each. This protection of all over each is called Fraternity. If liberty is the summit, equality is the base. Equality, citizens, is not wholly a surface vegetation, a society of great blades of grass and tiny oaks; a proximity of jealousies which render each other null and void; legally speaking, it is all aptitudes possessed of the same opportunity; politically, it is all votes possessed of the same weight; religiously, it is all consciences possessed of the same right.

Light! light! everything comes from light, and to it everything returns. Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy. Then, there will be nothing more like the history of old, we shall no longer, as to-day, have to fear a conquest, an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations, arms in hand, an interruption of civilization depending on a marriage of kings, a dismemberment because of the failure of a dynasty, a combat of two religions meeting face to face, like two bucks in the dark, on the bridge of the infinite; we shall no longer have to fear famine, farming out, prostitution arising from distress, misery from the failure of work and the scaffold and the sword, and battles and the ruffianism of chance in the forest of events. One might almost say: There will be no more events. We shall be happy. The human race will accomplish its law, as the terrestrial globe accomplishes its law; harmony will be re-established between the soul and the star; the soul will gravitate around the truth, as the planet around the light.

—Enjolras, Les Miserables

More generally, a Utopia is an ideal of how a particular author would engineer human institutions so as to achieve his ideal good society in the future. The concept predates the word, and the speaker mentioned Plato's Republic, that well-known and often admired early example of such a mental construct, without mentioning that just like More's Utopia, Plato's dream is a typical totalitarian project for a racist eugenistic sexist slaver caste system, ruled by philosophers like Plato imagined himself, maintained by a police state, oppressing producers, and exploiting slaves -- the ever similar totalitarian project that all black magic minds conceive, from the priests of ancient Egypt to the modern socialists. I noticed it in my essay on Black Magic, but the well-anterior and well-documented book by Shafarevich, Socialism, develops this topic fully.
It is no surprise that all Utopias end up, in one way or the other, becoming some variant of totalitarian socialist dystopia, and that utopian has thus been used as a derisive term to mock people who propose absurd grand changes to society. Indeed, the very idea that one man, or a committee of men, could engineer a whole society, thereby subjecting all men, present and future, to his alleged social genius, is intrinsically totalitarian; it is the symptom of an extraordinary hubris in its proponent, and an extraordinary spite for the rest of mankind, as marvelously denounced by Bastiat in The Law. Such mental constructions are deeply ignorant of the dynamic nature of society, as an emergent phenomenon that arises out of the individual behaviour of myriads of participants, who cannot be compelled magically by statements of the rulers, but only by a superior violent force that follows laws of its own. Hayek systematically developed the theme of society as an emerging order, and how presumptuous constructivists are in their belief they can engineer something that is vastly more complex than they can fathom in its use of information for dynamic adjustment.
Does that mean that there is nothing to be saved from the concept of Utopia? No. By relaxing one or the other amongst the constraints that define a Utopia stricto sensu, several different concepts can be found the pursuit of each of which is not intrinsically absurd, but a valid endeavour. Utopia is about wondering how to engineer a whole society to make it good. Instead, we could study the nature of man and human societies, without the hubris of whole-society engineering, and based on the knowledge of what social rules lead to what consequences, derive conclusions about how to make society a better place.

—From Utopia to Extropia by Cybernethics/Cybernéthique