SCHOLAR ISLAND

"Utopia ‘the city of the world….a place where the past and future come together, where good finally triumphs over evil……

"The idea of the apocalypse has accompanied utopian thought since its first beginnings, pursuing it like a shadow, like a reverse side that cannot be left behind; without catastrophe, no millennium, without apocalypse, no paradise. The idea of the end of the world is simply a negative utopia."

"Without the Utopians of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked….Utopia is the principal of all progress and the essay into a better future."

"Utopians have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters."

"My greatest content would be utterly to desert all human society. I would retire with you & our child to a solitary island in the sea, would build a boat, & shut upon my retreat the floodgates of the world."

"There are, as it happens, far more interesting uses of the word 'utopia' in the Marxist tradition. One of the greatest of English Marxist revolutionaries, William Morris, produced an unforgettable work of utopia in News from Nowhere, which unlike almost every other utopian work actually showed in detail how the process of political change had come about. When it comes to the everyday use of the word, however, it should be said that Marx shows not the slightest interest in a future free of suffering, death, loss, failure, breakdown, conflict, tragedy or even labour. In fact he doesn't show much interest in the future at all. It is a notorious fact about his work that he has very little to say in detail about what a socialist or communist society would look like, His critics may therefore accuse him of unpardonable vagueness; but they can hardly do that and at the same time accuse him of drawing up utopian blueprints. It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures. In The German Ideology, he rejects the idea of communism as "an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself."...."

"I come as the possessor of the book of Destiny to banish political and moral darkness and to erect the theory of universal harmony upon the ruins of the uncertain sciences."

"(Utopia) has no place in the history of political philosophy: in the history of prose fiction it has a very high place indeed."

"Mrs Hargreaves had dedicated her life to helping the poor. it was her sense of commitment that gave her the energy to work endless hours, day after day, as a member of the town council. I was surprised by the activities she could squeeze into a single day. The Juvenile Court and the Public Assistance Committee took most of her time. She also worked with local orphanages and shelters for women. Her idea of Utopia was England with the worst abuses against the poor left our. "Socialism,' she'd say, 'means no more wars, no more want, no more wickedness.' Homeless children and the condition of the old saddened her most. What she couldn't understand was why a supposedly all-merciful God didn't do something about it. 'Either 'e don't exist, or'e don't care,' she concluded."

"You are immature, Woodruff. All socialists are. You are sensible of the past only in so far as you want to change the present. You think the past can be chopped up like a piece of meat; that you can measure it; that everything is know; that there is no mystery. The past is not a clearly discernible rung on a ladder leading towards some future Utopia. Your vision of the future is not based on the past, but on odd things going on in your head."

"If a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus."

"Aelius Aristides, a famous Greek orator who visited Rome during the reign of the pious Antoninus, declared that the Roman Empire was utopia itself. Peace and prosperity without precedent had been established through the agency of the Romans who had brought the art of government to its highest point. Under a monarchy without tyranny, the subjects of the emperor enjoyed social and judicial equality, the major benefits of democracy, yet hey were spared the disadvantages and inconvenience of political participation. Consequently, the whole world was in holiday in this golden age. Civilization had been brought to remote places; the whole traverse of the sun was Roman property. people everywhere clung to Rome, and the very thought of secession was abhorrent to them. as he looked about the city of Rome, Aristides concluded that those who lived in the imperial capital were the most fortunate of all. Rome was huge; its size and even its name symbolized the strength of the empire. Everything in the world could be seen in this great metropolis, and thus its inhabitants (like the later Bostonians) had no need to travel."

"….But history also teaches us that man is stupid and wicked, is afraid to see things in a wide perspective and generally prefers the local squabbles which he calls his interests to his true interests which he calls Utopias.’

"Many of the worst genocidal and human rights excesses of the last century were perpetrated under the guise of creating a more perfect society."

"It may seem incredible that there could still today be large numbers of people who harbor nostalgia for societies of this type, wholesale or piecemeal. The long tradition, going back two and a half millennia, of utopian ideas-of writings that are astoundingly similar, down to the smallest detail, in their prescriptions for the Ideal City-confirms this truth: the totalitarian temptation lurking beneath the demon mask of the Good, is a constant of the human mind. it has always been in conflict with our aspirations for liberty, and it always will be."

"The totalitarian phenomenon is not to be understood without making an allowance for the thesis that some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny; either to exercise it themselves or-much more mysteriously-to submit to it."

"Some religious attempts at utopia are authoritarian, led by a charismatic leader, by elders, by rigid rules that crate outcasts, but the secular utopias have mostly been committed to liberty, democracy, and shared power. The widespread disdain for revolution and utopia takes as its object lesson the Soviet-style attempts at coercive utopias, in which the original ideals of leveling and sharing go deeply awry, the achievement critiqued in George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 and other dystopian novels. Many fail to notice that it is not the ideals, the ends, but the coercive and authoritarian means that poison paradise. There are utopias whose ideals pointedly include freedom from coercion and dispersal of power to the many. Most utopian visions nowadays include many worlds, many versions, rather than a coercive one true way. The anthropologist David Graeber writes, "Stalinists and their ilk did not kill because the dreamed great dreams-actually, Stalinists were famous for being rather short on imagination-but because they mistook their dreams for scientific certainties. This led them to feel they had a right to impose their visions through a machinery of violence." there are plenty of failed revolutions and revolutions such as the French Revolution that lapse into bloodbaths-and yet when the revolution was over, France would never be dominated by an absolutist monarchy again; ordinary French people had more rights, and people around the world had an enlarged sense of the possible. all revolutions fail because they set their sights heaven-high, but none of them fail to do something, and many increase the amount of liberty, justice, and hope for their heirs."

"Those lower down the order believed that the Illuminati wanted a one-world government to prevent future wars. Initiates who reached Minerval, the second degree, learned Weishaupt's revolutionary goals:

"Don't let ideologues try to create heaven on earth, because they'll deprive us of freedom and make things worse."

""What has always made a hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his heaven."

"Then their minds developed a piteous faculty; that of perceiving stupidity and being unable to tolerate it. Insignificant things saddened them: newspaper advertisements, a burgher's profile, an inane comment overheard by chance....They felt upon their shoulders the weight of the entire world."

".....Abu Nasr al-Farabi (c 878-950). His book, Opinions of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City, was a utopian tract on Islamic lines written six centuries before Thomas More reinvented the genre for the West. Al-Farabi had started life, appropriately for someone interested in human perfection and paradise, as a gardener. He was said to have studied by night in a Damascus vineyard and survived on a frugal diet of sweet basil and lambs' hearts. His conclusions about the perfect life read as startlingly modern: happiness, he declared, was the ultimate goal of life and it was best achieved in the society of a small city-state. There were no supernatural phenomena, and mystical union with God was 'old women's talk'. Everything was ascertainable by reason. However, many people were incapable of finding happiness through reason and needed symbols-images and ideas communicated by prophets through revelations."

"The kind of oppression that threatens democratic peoples does not in any way resemble what preceded it......I want to imagine what aspect despotism could take on in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of men, similar to one another and equal, who gyrate unceasingly in order to obtain small and vulgar pleasures for themselves with which they fill their souls. Each one of them, isolated at some remove from the others, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his personal friends constitute the entire human species for him: as for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he is right next to them, but he doesn't see them; he touches them and doesn't feel them; he exists only within and for himself, and although he still has a family, one may at the least say he no longer has a country. Above all these men rises an immense tutelary power that alone assures their enjoyment and watches over their fate. it is absolute, elaborate, regular, calculating, and mild. it would be like paternal power, if-like it-its goal was to prepare men for virile maturity; but, on the contrary, it seeks only to limit them irrevocably to childhood; it likes its citizens to be happy, as long as they dream of nothing other than being happy."

"The private umbrella is Father's favorite figure to illustrate the old way when everybody lived for himself and his family."

*The hero is anyone who has ever longed for escape to a better life. The time is tomorrow. The place is a Utopian America. This is the backdrop for Edward Bellamy's prophetic novel about a young Boston gentleman who is mysteriously transported from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century-from a world of war and want to a world of peace and plenty. Translated into more than twenty languages, and the most widely read novel of its time, Looking Backward is more than a brilliant visionary's view of the future. It is a blueprint of the "perfect society," a guidebook that stimulated some of the greatest thinkers of our age, John Dewey, Charles Beard, and Edward Weeks, in separate surveys conducted in 1935, listed Edward Bellamy's novel as the most influential work written by an American in the preceding fifty years."

"Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply.....We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description., demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, "How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?"

"utopias and Antiutopias" address, 13 Feb ,1977, To Les Anglicistes, Lille, France (repr. in A Moving Target, 1982)

"A state of mind is utopian when it is incongruous with the state of reality within which it occurs....(Utopias) tend to shatter, either partially or wholly, the order of things prevailing at the time."

"I shall speak of....how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another....Of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next.....Of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin."

"Another type of slave is the working-class foreigner who rather than live in wretched poverty at home, volunteers for slavery in Utopia."

"Imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature....and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears-would you agree to be the architect on such conditions."

"From Washington Owen went on tour, speaking in several cities and spending four days intensively debating with the 82-year-old Thomas Jefferson. The founding father declared himself convinced by the principles, but wondered how they might be practically implemented. Owen himself, like many a new arrival in the New World, had no doubts; he was fired up with enthusiasm and sketching grandiose plans for settlements. He imagined self-regulating and self-sufficient utopias, communities that would leave behind the flaws of the Old World. He added the businesslike touch of expecting them to be run with the efficiency of a good textile mill, and at a profit. He firmly believed this system would catch on and take over the world (an astonishing ambition, but less fantastic than that of his French contemporary Charles Fourier who believed his utopian communities in the United States would eventually result in a realignment of the planets.).

"What is a concentration camp, after all, but an attempt by Utopians to dispose of those elements which do not fit in."

"It is to be feared that we have not yet done with communal utopias. Association (in communes and artisanal cooperatives) will long be, for a certain class of preachers and idlers, a pretext for agitation and an instrument of charlatanism. Considering the ambitions they give rise to, the envy disguised as devotion to a cause, the instincts of domination which they arouse and serve, they will for a long time yet remain one of the vexatious preoccupations which obstruct understanding of the the revolution."

"Our ulterior aim is nothing less than Heaven on Earth,-the conversion of this globe, now exhaling pestilential vapors and possessed by unnatural climates, into the abode of beauty and health, and the restitution to humanity of the Divine Image, now so long lost and forgotten."

"The great love for mankind of the future gives birth to a great hatred for the People: the Passion for organizing an earthly paradise becomes a passion for destruction."

"We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket."

"It was a time when the air was full of reform.....Madmen, madwomen, men with beards; Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-Day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians and Philosopher,-all came successively to the top, and seized their moment, if not their hour, wherein to chide, or pray, or preach or protest."

"No war....private dwellings, easy & rapid & cheap transit....Small cities, small farms & establishments. Cheap & Universal power, universal education & lots of common sense. Over populating prevented by law.....Few very rich men but richly endowed colleges etc. Little manual labor, much mental work, little sickness, no contagion, no drink, lust, or tobacco. Scientific Research the great pursuit & ultimate end. Air ships et al. No smokers, Christian like gov't control of all great universe affairs. Climate changed & moderated & regulated. Thousands of comfort giving devices.....Fools have died out. People live long. Doctors understand every secret of disease & body.....Common sense & golden rule run everything. All voters, male & female, are educated. Why don't women devote themselves to quiet scientific research like Biology, chemistry or medicine? It is lady like, not boisterous requires brains & when not married will make a decent aim in life which most old maids lack."

"The Utopia of a modern dreamer must needs differ in one fundamental aspect from the Nowheres and Utopias men planned before Darwin quickened the thought of the world. Those were all perfect and static States, a balance of happiness won for ever against the forces of unrest and disorder that inhere in things. One beheld a healthy and simple generation enjoying the fruits of the earth in an atmosphere of virtue and happiness, to be followed by other virtuous happy, and entirely similar generations until the Gods grew weary. Change and development were damned back by invincible dams for ever. But the Modern Utopia must be not static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful sage leading to a long ascent of stages."

"At Macy's in Manhattan they were quite clear about their Edenic objectives; all kinds of rare tropical fruit and vegetables were sold 'irrespective of season', foreshadowing the situation a century later when every supermarket aspires to an Eternal Spring in the fruit and veg department. The copywriting whizz and publishing maverick, Elbert Hubbard, who came from a staunchly Protestant background, made the connection absolutely plain: 'When I want to hear really good sermons nowadays, we attend a weekly lunch of the ad club, and listen to a man who deals in ways and means and is intent upon bringing about paradise, here and now.' At Tiffany's on New York's Union Square, they built the new store on top of a Puritan church. 'Real jewels will be sold there instead of bogus ones,' remarked one diarist waspishly. The earthly paradise was on order, and due for delivery any day."

"We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian: and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian."

"There is no disagreement on this: Human beings are unfinished. Theologians and Marxists can shake hands on this one. God has a plan, Marx had a plan. Those plans are called utopia: only there will human beings be completely finished. God's garden needs a lot of weeding and Marx's utopia proved to be Wal-Mart, but never mind: The utopian urge is there and it isn't going away."

"There is always something otherworldly about utopias. The very word utopia can mean both a good (eu-) place (topos) and no (u-) place."

"It is commonly assumed that utopian thinking is a characteristic of movements of the radical Left and that, therefore, such thinking pretty much disappeared with the collapse of communism. Yet re-reading Leszek Kolakowski's seminal Main Currents of Marxism-published between 1968 and 1976 as three separate volumes and now re-issued in a magnificent single-volume edition with a new preface and epilogue-leads one to revisit that assumption. Utopianism did not perish with communism. It seems to have found a new home-on the neoconservative Right. Like Marx, the neoconservative thinkers who rose to prominence in the late 20th century see history as a progressive movement culminating in a species-wide economic and political system. They believe a universal civilization is set to replace-or better, can be made to replace-the diverse cultures and regimes of the past. But (again like Marx) they believe that this transformation can only come about through revolutionary upheavals, likely involving large-scale violence.

To be sure, the universal system that neoconservatives believe is coming into being is not communism but an idealized version of American "democratic capitalism." Yet like communism, such a universal system presupposes a transformation of human society that has no precedent in history. Along with Marx and his communist disciples in the 20th century, neoconservatives are wedded to a project that can be known in advance to be unachievable. The neoconservative vision of a world of universal "democratic capitalism" is an unrealizable vision that has already led to disaster in Iraq, and if pursued further could produce major disorders in the international system."

John Gray (book review of Leszek Kolakowski in The American Interest Mag,Summer 2006

"the disappearance of utopia brings about a static sense of affairs in which man becomes no more than a thing. We would then be faced with the greatest paradox imaginable, namely, that man, who has achieved the highest degree of rational mastery of existence, left without any ideals, becomes a mere creature of impulse."

"(The 1939 World's Fair) was the Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Revelation of the American religion. Not the basic meat-and-potatoes but the ecstatic closing vision. The fair laid out the end of days, and having studied the fair, I think we will see that we are adrift, at least in part, because we are no longer marching toward utopia: We no longer can, because we are in it."

"Second, there has been a loss of utopian élan. If you go back and think about America's big World's Fairs or if you read about Bell Labs in its heyday or Silicon Valley in the 1980s or 1990s, you see people in the grip of utopian visions. They imagine absurdly perfect worlds. They feel as though they have the power to begin the world anew. These were delusions, but inspiring delusions.

This utopianism is almost nowhere to be found today. Stephenson and Thiel point out that science fiction is moribund; the new work is dystopian, not inspiring. Thiel argues that the environmentalist ethos has undermined the faith in gee-whiz technological wizardry. Legal institutions and the cable TV culture dampen enthusiasm by punishing failure so remorselessly. NASA's early failures were seen as steps along the way to a glorious future. Deepwater Horizon's failure demoralized the whole nation."

"We have achieved utopia, our utopia, a utopia not of perfection but of comfort; and so the future disappeared. It simply vanished. It had to.

....Today, by dint of achieving the utopian future, we have lost our faith and see nothing."

"If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it."

"Monturiol's passion for science was no accident of talent or circumstance; it sprang from deep within his past as a social revolutionary. All the utopian socialists, from Saint-Simon to Cabet, celebrated the beneficence of technological progress. Just as Cabet argued that the railroads would bring in democracy and haul out the aristocracy, so Monturiol now came to believe that he had conceived of an even more liberational technology, one that would spread democracy across the seas. The submarine would serve as the pilot vessel on humankind's journey toward utopia. (This kind of thinking, by the way, is alive and well as we speak: The gurus who trumpet the democratic virtues of the Internet, for example, attribute to the electronic web the same kind of power that Cabet ascribed to the railroad network.)

But it was Alexander von Humboldt who provided Monturiol with the sturdiest intellectual foundations for his project in revolutionary science. Thanks to Humboldt's mesmerizing vision of cosmic progress, the Catalan revolutionary came to believe that the path to social justice was a side road along the highway of scientific progress and that utopia had more to gain from the scientific education of humankind than it did from piecemeal political reforms."

Monturiol's Dream: The Extraordinary Story of the Submarine Inventor Who Wanted To Save The World

"Great is the enterprise of submarine navigation; for it sustains the life of the man isolated from Nature, without participating in Her benign influence....Because, far from the sun and the atmosphere, far from the fields and meadows, it solves the problem of living in the midst of chaos."

"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."

"Our citizens....will prepare wheat-meal or barley-meal for baking or kneading. They will serve splendid cakes and loaves on rushes or fresh leaves, and will sit down to feast with their children....They will have a few luxuries. Salt, of course, and olive oil and cheese, and different kinds of vegetables from which to make various country dishes. And we must give them some dessert, figs and peas and beans, and myrtle berries and acorns to roast at the fire as they sip their wine. So they will lead a peaceful and healthy life, and probably die at a ripe old age, bequeathing a similar way of life to their children."

"We are at a curious juncture in the history of human insanity; in the name of realism, men are quite mad, and precisely what they call utopian is now the condition of human survival."

"The Icarians who lived only in the mind of Etienne Cabet, or the Freelanders who dwelt within the imagination of a dry little economist, have had more influence upon the lives of our contemporaries than the Etruscan people who once dwelt in Italy, although the Etruscans belong to what we call the real world, and the Freelanders and Icarians inhabited-nowhere."

"In the production of consumer’s goods and their distribution to give universal economic security, they (Incas) succeeded more completely than any nation before or since."

"Knowledge will turn out so regularly to be a knowledge of mainly unpleasant facts that the Utopists will be compelled in mere self-defense to take refuge either in deliberate ignorance of what is known, or else in the comfortable darkness beyond the fringes of recorded history."

"I don’t wish to defend everything that has been done in the name of Utopia. But I think many of the attacks misconceive its nature and function. As I have tried to suggest, utopia is not mainly about providing detailed blueprints for social reconstruction. Its concern with ends is about making us think about possible worlds. It is about inventing and imagining worlds for our contemplation and delight. It opens up our minds to the possibilities of the human condition."

"It is no longer enough to point out what we don’t like, we have to work out ‘What sort of society do we want?"

"The first arresting fact about the Utopians is that they were practical enough to try putting their ideas to the test of fact. Owing to the greater opportunities offered by a New Country, many of these trials were made in the United States. The familiar names of Brookfarm, New Hope, New Harmony, New Enterprise, record these efforts, and the personalities of Hawthorne, Horace Greeley, Ripley, Albert Brisbane, Henry James Sr., adorn a movement of ideas which continue to live, though in much modified form, in the modern world. Contrary to usual belief, the actual settlements did not all come to an end from incompetence or quarrels or unworkability. Some even grew rich and became the object of their nonsocialized neighbors’ envy….."

"War to the death should be instantly proclaimed against (the machines)…..Let us go back to the primeval condition of the human race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy and that are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage."

"Strangely, though the word Freedom is sometimes included in the description of utopia-indeed, one nineteenth-century utopia was called Freeland-the pervasive character of all utopias is their Totalitarian absolutism, the reduction of variety and choice, and the effort to escape from such natural conditions or historical traditions as would support variety and make choice possible. These uniformities and compulsions constitute utopia’s inner tie to the megamachine."

"In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, Politics’ Kropotkinesque cooperative, science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not…..as though men were to be adopted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man’s Final End, the unitive knowledge of the eminent Tao or Logos. The Transcendent Godhead or Brahman."

"Man is an animal who can conceive of an "Utopia," and nowhere has this impulse been more evident than among those who settled the Americas. Indeed, the search for "Utopia" may have been the hunger that led to the discovery of these shores.

The very word "Utopia" is partisan, on the one hand, it is an epithet-a term of derision. The "Utopian" is the impractical , the useless, the visionary, the dreamlike, the unrealistic. But at the same time, utopian thinking also implies a criticism of the status quo. In some societies, the description of Utopia has been the one legitimate means of pointing out the failure of an existing state of affairs."

"I don't wish to defend everything that has been done in the name of utopia. But I think that many of the attacks misconceive its nature and function. As I have tried to suggest, utopia is not mainly about providing detailed blueprints for social reconstruction. Its concern with ends is about making us think about possible worlds. It is about inventing and imagining worlds for our contemplation and delight. It opens up our minds to the possibilities of the human condition.

It is this that we most seem to need at the present time. There are doomsters enough-though they have their part to play, like the prophets of old, warning and admonishing. There are also our latter-day millenarians, somewhat jaded in their outlook on the world, and rather prepared to settle for a quiet life and the idle ticking-over of the engine of history. Without wishing to bang the inspiration drum too loudly, this hardly seems enough."

"Paradoxically, a society of simple tools that allows men to achieve purposes with energy fully under their own control is now difficult to understand."

"Without the Utopians of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first City…..Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future."

"Utopia has long been another name for the unreal and the impossible. We have set utopia over against the world. As a matter of fact, it is our utopias that make this world tolerable to us; the cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live."

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at……"

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia, said Oscar Wilde, is not worth glancing at. A noble sentiment, and a good thrust at the Gradgrinds and utilitarians. Bear in mind, however, that Utopia itself was a tyranny and that much of the talk about the analgesic and conflict-free ideal is likewise more menacing than it may appear. These Ultimates and Absolutes are attempts at Perfection, which is-so to speak-a latently Absolutist idea. (You should scan Brian Victoria's excellent book Zen at War, which, written as it is by a Buddhist priest, exposes the dire role played by Zen obedience and discipline in the formation of pre-war Japanese Imperialism.)"

"….This world needs Utopias as it needs fairy stories. It does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making consciously for some definite goal. And a Utopia, however strange or fanciful, is the only possible beacon upon the uncharted seas of the distant future."

"men (and women) are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they’re straying ….men (and women) when they belong to a living, organized, believing community….not when they’re escaping to some wild west."

"When the magnetic center, the Purpose, the clear vision and the Will are there, one by one the individuals are drawn into the magic circle."

"If our modern world should be able to recapture this power, the earth’s natural resources and web of life would not be irrevocably wasted within the Twentieth century…..True democracy founded in neighborhoods and reaching over the world become the realized heaven on earth. And living peace, not just an interlude between wars, would be born and would last through the ages."

"The chief obstacle to thinking straight in this situation is the word "Romantic". It means so many things that some have concluded it means nothing. Unfortunately, partisan use likes double meanings, and calling a man romantic can be made to suggest that his ideas are either foolish or dangerous. Romantic is thus a fitting parallel to Utopian, few critics being able to admit that just as romanticism is a constant tendency in human beings which a certain epoch happened to value, so Utopia is simply the country at which mankind is perpetually landing when it carries out some premeditated plan. A world with airplanes is Leonardo’s Utopia…."

"Utopia, in other words, is the secret destination of the invisible, all-embracing megamachine: the same destination that Teilhard de Chardin pictured in cosmic terms, and a strangely euphoric mood, as the Omega point….."

"TV is sometimes accused of encouraging fantasies. Its real problem, though, is that it encourages-enforces, almost-a brute realism. It is anti-Utopian in the extreme. We’re discouraged from thinking that, except for a few new products, there might be a better way of doing things."

"The disappearance of utopia brings about a static state of affairs in which man himself becomes no more than a thing. We would then be faced with the greatest paradox imaginable….After a long, torturous, but heroic development, just at the highest stage of awareness, when history is ceasing to be blind fate, and is becoming more and more man’s own creation, with the relinquishment of utopia, man would lose his will to shape history and therewith his ability to understand it."

"In all other places, regardless of the prosperity of the country, unless the individual takes care of his own needs, starvation will be his fate. Thus self-preservation has priority over the common good. Here….no one ever lacks anything. There is no begrudging the distribution of goods, poverty and begging are unknown, although possessing nothing, all men are rich. For who is richer than he who lives a happy and tranquil life free from the anxieties of job holding and domestic troubles.?"

"Teetering here on the fulcrum of destiny stands our own bemused species. The future of the universe hinges on what we do next. If we take up the sacred fire, and stride forth into space as the torchbearers of Life, this universe will be aborning. If we carry the green fire-brand from star to star, and ignite around each a conflagration of vitality, we can trigger a Universal metamorphosis. Because of us, the barren dusts of a million billion worlds will coil up into the pulsing magic forms of animate matter. Because of us, landscapes of radiation blasted waste, will be miraculously transmuted: Slag will become soil, grass will sprout, flowers will bloom, and forests will spring up in once sterile places. Ice, hard as iron, will melt and trickle into pools where starfish, anemones, and seashells dwell-a whole frozen universe will thaw and transmogrify, from howling desolation to blossoming paradise. Dust into Life; the very Alchemy of God.

ed note: This is the greatest:..."I am completely awed, and I don't awe easily, by the author's command of a dozen engineering disciplines and his amazing knowledge of scientific and technical literature."

"Something’s missing….A light has gone out. The world stripped of anticipation turns cold and gray."

"Utopias now appear much more realizable than we had previously thought. We now find ourselves before a much more agonizing question: how to prevent their realization.....perhaps a new age is commencing where intellectuals and the cultivated class will dream of the means to to prevent Utopias and return to a non-utopian society, less perfect and more free."

"The prophecies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought....the nightmare of total organization has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us just around the corner."

"We are told that the function of evolution is to perfect the species. Man adapts and mutates constantly, discarding characteristics that hinder his survival, and assimilating those that strengthen it. Given that premise, the human race could evolve into the much-heralded Superman: a living God.

Look around, And think again. Are we seeing the survival of the fittest? Or could it be the survival of the unfittest? What do you see? The decline of intelligence year after year, accompanied by the radical increase of numbers.

Do we still operate under the Divine Right of kings? Do people at the top still call the shots? Or did the idealism of rule absolutely collapse, favoring only those who find ways to profit from the Dystopia? As bottom-feeders set the agenda, everyone is reduced to being treated no better than the lowest rung by a dumbed-down, idiot-proofed nanny state. It's not that the lunatics are running the asylum, but with democracy's deification of Victimhood, lunatics are coddled and subsidized, and the productive are their slaves.

It is said that the state, the system, the rich inflict on these Victims a hideously poor self-esteem. But could it be that these Victims are actually enjoying a self-esteem propelled to majestic heights unjustified by capability or accomplishment? In the Dystopia, delusions are accommodated, and the humiliation of ineptitude remains a thing of the past. The Dystopia motivates all to wear the thorned crowns of Victimhood, delusion and ineptitude.

The feelings and emotion of Victimhood slay logic and reason, winning every battle of the Dystopia. Hysteria is Dystopia's tyrannical God.

People who recognize the rise of the Dystopia often lack the detachment to accommodate perspective. These individuals believe that if enough people were aware of the Dystopia, then the vermin would disappear, and the downward course of the Dystopia would somehow reverse itself. But the Dystopia is so vast and all-encompassing, it pervades every aspect of modern life. With the Dystopia, the only cure is fatal to all of us.

Hating the Dystopia solves no problems, and doesn't get you anywhere but the insane asylum. One must love the Dystopia. That's right. Love it. Dystopia is your friend. Savor the suffering, take pleasure in the misfortune of others. Become the proverbial one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. As the world crumbles around us, understand that the streets are paved with gold."

See article: "Toward a practical Utopianism" by Tsvi Bisk ,The Futurist May-June 2002

"Human society cannot conduct itself rationally without a clear idea of where it wants to go. (Clear ideas would be a better term, because Neo-Utopianism should be pluralistic in order to avoid the totalitarian, know-it-all temptation that has doomed utopian experiments in the past.) We must have a vision of the kind of future we want in order to make rational decisions on a daily basis. Having a vision and being a realistic visionary are absolute necessities for functioning as a rational human being."

"There is a socio-psychological price to be paid for the death of utopianism. Observe the number of people in the modern world who seem to float through life rudderless, without a clear view of their own value as human beings. They are so confused about the complexities of modern life that they shut off their cognitive, rational faculties and try to fill the subsequent spiritual vacuum by going shopping, taking drugs, getting involved in cults, getting religiously "saved," getting "into" New Age fads, and so on."

"Anti-utopianism continues to suffuse our culture. Conventional as well as scholarly opinion posits that utopia spells concentration camps and that utopians secretly dream of being prison guards. Robert Conquest, a leading chronicler of the Soviet terror, is lauded by Gertrude Himmelfarb for telling the truth about "totalitarianism and utopianism" in his latest book Reflections on a ravaged Century. And the final chapter of The Soviet Tragedy, by Martin Malia, another leading Soviet historian, is tellingly entitled ‘The Perverse Logic of Utopia," Indeed, we now think of utopian idealism as little more than prelude to totalitarian murder. At best, an expression of utopian convictions will call forth a sneer from historians and social scientists. In the nineteenth century the anticipation of a future society of peace and equality was common; now it is almost extinct. Today few imagine that society can be fundamentally improved, and those who do are seen as at best deluded, at worst threatening."

"The monarchy had gone, southern cities now had gas lighting, telephones, and electric trams, but in the Northeast, the home of Brazil's first cycle of sugar wealth, little had changed. Landowners were authoritarian patriarchs, some of them despots, and most of the population lived in extreme poverty, worsened by a devastating drought in 1877. Thousands emigrated to the Amazon, where the rubber boom was in full swing, or to the south. Those who stayed, starved.

The Conselheiro talked about the need for a better life in the here and now. He protested by tearing down the public notices announcing tax increases. The Church declared him a subversive, while the state governor wanted him locked up in a mental asylum. As thousands abandoned their homes to follow the preacher, landowners feared a labor shortage. In 1893 the band was attacked by soldiers and the Counselor realized he must find a sanctuary. Like an Old Testament prophet, he led his followers on a five-week march into the sertao until they came to an isolated valley surrounded by five mountain ranges. Within two years, the city of Canudos founded by the Counselor and his followers had become one of the largest town in Bahia, boasting 20,000 inhabitants, two churches, and a thriving economy which even exported goatskins to Europe.

Visitors reported in wonder, "there are neither rich or poor, the land belongs to all, there is no hunger or misery, no money, no police or thieves, no locks on doors, no brothels, no alcohol, everyone is happy in a big brotherhood." A five-hour working day left time for prayers and leisure. There were schools for the children. The Counselor had modeled Canudos on Thomas More's Utopia, which he had read.

But there was no place for Utopia in the Brazilian Northwest. By offering the example of a successful but egalitarian society, Canudos threatened the existing system of exploitation, hunger, ignorance, and wealth for the few. Like Palmares before it, Canudos had to be destroyed, before the example could spread. In Rio de Janeiro, the capital, Canudos was used as an excuse by the military to attack the remaining monarchists. The Counselor and his followers were portrayed as a bunch of dangerous fanatics, plotting to overthrow the republic and restore the monarchy, helped by foreign military advisers.

Yet the apparently easy task of wiping out a backlands rebellion turned instead into the Brazilian army's second biggest and bloodiest campaign since the war against Paraguay, twenty years earlier. The men and women of Canudos resisted with improvised guerrilla tactics and rustic weapons, harassing the soldiers as they approached the town through the canyons and hills. It took four military expeditions over a year to overrun Utopia, costing the lives of nearly ten thousand men."

"But let us not adopt these exclusive entertainments which close up a small number of people in melancholy fashion in a gloomy cavern, which keep them fearful and immobile in silence and inaction…..No, happy peoples, these are not your festivals. It is in the open air, under the sky, that you ought to gather and give yourselves to the sweet sentiment of your happiness….Let the sun illuminate your innocent entertainments; you will constitute one yourselves, the worthiest it can illuminate….What will be shown in them? Nothing, if you please….plant a stake crowned with flowers in the middle of a square; gather the people together there, and you will have a festival. Do better yet; let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves; make them actors themselves; do it so that each sees and loves himself in the others so that all will be better united."

"...the imperceptible ant-like piling up of quarters and streets, brick by brick, from generation to generation, will give way to titanic construction of city-villages, with map and compass in hand. Around this compass will be formed....the parties of the future.....Architecture will again be filled with the spirit of mass feeling and moods....Mankind will educate itself plastically, will become accustomed to looking at the world as submissive clay for sculpting the most perfect forms of life.....man will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers.....rebuilding the earth, if not in his own image, then at least according to his own taste.....More than that, man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest. he will make it his business to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost precision, purposefulness and economy in his work, his walk, his play. He will try to master first the semiconscious and then the subconscious processes in his own organism. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. all the arts-literature, drama, painting, music and architecture-will lend this process beautiful form....Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise."

What would a society or culture be like that was actually based on the teachings of the Bible? C.S. Lewis described it this way:

"All the same, the New Testament , without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like. Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat. Everyone is to work with his own hands, and what is more, every one's work is to produce something good: there will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them. And there is to be no "swank"* or "side,"** no putting on airs. To that extent a Christian society would be what we now call Leftist. On the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience-obedience (and outward marks of respect) from all of us to properly appointed magistrates, from children to parents, and (I am afraid this is going to be very unpopular) from wives to husbands. Thirdly, it is to be a cheerful society: full of singing and rejoicing, and regarding worry or anxiety as wrong. Courtesy is one of the Christian virtues; and the New Testament hates what it calls "busybodies."

If there were such a society in existence and you or I visited it, I think we should come away with a curious impression. We should feel that its economic life was very socialistic and, in that sense," advanced," but that its family life and its code of manners were rather old-fashioned-perhaps even ceremonious and aristocratic. Each of us would like some bits of it, but I am afraid very few of us would like the whole thing. That is just what you would expect if Christianity is the total plan for the human machine. We have all departed from that total plan in different ways, and each of us wants to make out that his own modification of the original plan is the plan itself. You will find this again and again about anything that is really Christian: Everyone is attracted by bits of it and wants to pick out those bits and leave the rest. That is why we do not get much further: and that is why people who are fighting for quite opposite things can say they are fighting for Christianity."

"That's the way the slave dealers used to do it," he screamed at Lebkicher. "We don't want that here." He replaced Lebkicher on the spot, then ordered every house torn down. Hershey didn't want the town to feel cookie-cutter or industrial; he was building a community to be as pure and as wholesome as the chocolate that would be its foundation. And although aspects of the town were unabashedly commercial, Hershey never compromised on quality, beauty or character. he provided his residents with every amenity imaginable: indoor plumbing and electricity, a bank and a department store, new schools and entertainment.

His love of greenery was evident throughout. Every home had a tidy front lawn and a spacious backyard, and Hershey ordered trees, bushes and flowers planted along each street. The median that ran the length of Chocolate Avenue was so lavishly landscaped that it looked to all who entered the town as though they were driving through a garden. Having lived in both the city and the countryside, Hershey had developed a strong belief that urban life was unhealthy and morally debilitating. he felt that fresh air, unspoiled land and recreation were indispensable to a salutary existence, and set out to sculpt a reality from this philosophy. Hershey left wide-open space-150 acres-for an enormous park at the center of town, equipped initially with a band shell, a boathouse, and a baseball diamond. He also planned five eighteen-hole golf courses, a twenty three-acre public garden inspired by the gardens of Versailles and a zoo that even today serves as a nature preserve for seventy-five species of North American wildlife. Outside the gates of the factory, Hershey ordered landscapers to erect a giant display of ornamental shrubs, spelling Hershey Cocoa in ten-foot-high letters. Visible for miles, the sign still welcomes the town's steady throng of tourists."

"A big man physically, he thought big. His plan for Niagara Falls would have dwarfed the cataract. He foresaw a city of sixty million-almost the entire population of the United States at that time-housed in twenty-four thousand gigantic apartment houses, each twenty-five stories high, each accommodating twenty-five hundred tenants, all feeding on Niagara's "unlimited power" and "free from all the annoyances of housekeeping." Like so many others of his time, Gillette* was obsessed and elated by the prospect of so much power locked up within those waters. "Here is a power," he wrote, "which, if brought under control, is capable of keeping in continuous operation every manufacturing industry for centuries to come, and, in addition, supply all the lighting facilities, run all the elevators, and furnish the power necessary for the transportation system of the great central city."

Gillette's great central city was designed as a vast rectangle, 135 miles long and 45 miles wide. There was nothing vague in his grandiloquence. He had worked it all out to the foot and drawn up detailed plans showing cross-sections of apartment buildings, floor plans of typical apartments and a bird's-eye diagram of the city itself. Seen from the air, Metropolis would resemble nothing so much as a giant beehive-hexagonal high-rises, surrounded by star-shaped lawns and flower borders, each building exactly six hundred feet in diameter, each with its 250-foot dining-room. He went so far as to detail the materials-steel, firebrick, and glazed tile of various colors. There would, he said fifteen thousand miles of avenues, "every foot of which would be a continuous change of beauty."

Metropolis would be "the heart of a vast machine to which more than a thousand miles of arteries of steel, the raw material of production, would find its way, there to be transformed in the mammoth mills and work-shops, into the life-giving elements that would sustain and electrify the mighty brain of the whole, which would be the combined intelligence of the entire population working in unisons, but each and every individual working in his own channel of inclination." Metropolis" would make London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and New York look like the work of ignorant savages in comparison."

Money would not be needed in Metropolis. Each citizen would work for a given number of hours a week. Elitism would not exist. The citizens would select what they needed, without money and without the price tag, from a variety of emporiums where goods "all of the highest grade and quality" would be arranged "in attractive display," the products of "the highest developed intelligence."

"...He was the author of The Human drift, dedicated to "all mankind," in which he laid out his capitalistic, socialist, globalizationist thesis that the world should be organized into one huge corporation, with everyone on the planet a stockholder. This, he believed, would lead to grater efficiency as well as allow everyone to work a shorter work-week.

His motto was "United Intelligence and Material Equality." His vision included the population of North America all living in one giant city with forty thousand beehive like apartment buildings, each containing thousands of homes and gardens. The city, Metropolis, would be conveniently situated next to Niagara Falls, which would provide hydroelectric power. For a time Gillette served as the president of the corporation that was to take over the world and fuse all human economic activity into one big company."

"In rural Massachusetts, in 1844, a confederacy of utopian-bohemian artists established a communal farm that they named Fruitlands. They flatly stated that they had no interest in money or in work as an end in itself; they wanted only to grow enough to feed themselves so they could turn their energies to more important pursuits-namely, poetry, painting, nature and romantic love. The founder of the new community, Bronson Alcott, announced that the mission of the new farmers was "to be and not to do." He and his fellow members subscribed to a set of ambitious ideals characteristic of bohemian communities both before and after theirs: they wore no cotton clothes (for cotton supported the institution of slavery), consumed no animals or dairy products and kept to a peculiarly strict vegetarian diet, eating only those things that grew high up in the air and shunning carrots and potatoes because they pointed down into the ground, rather than aspiring to Heaven in the manner of apples and pears.

Predictably, the community did not last long. The farmers' reluctance to engage with practicalities formed the, after their first summer at Fruitlands, to wage an urgent battle merely to keep body and soul together-which did not afford them much leisure to read Home and Petrarch, as they had planned. Emerson, who had met Alcott in Boston a few years before the founding of the farm, recalled of the commune's members, "Their whole doctrine was spiritual, but they always ended up saying, 'Could you please send us some more money?" Just six months after Fruitland's high-minded inauguration, the community dispersed in acrimony and despair, adding a new chapter to the familiar bohemian tale of idealism gone sour thanks to an unbending refusal to submit to even minimal bourgeois disciplines."

"And yet if every desire were satisfied as soon as it arose how would men occupy their lives, how would they pass the time? Imagine this race transported to a Utopia where everything grows of its own accord and turkeys fly around ready-roasted, where lovers, find one another without any delay and keep one another without any difficulty: in such a place some men would die of boredom or hang themselves, some would fight and kill one another, and thus they would create for themselves more suffering than nature inflicts on them as it is."

While the word is taken from the title of Sir Thomas Mores' sixteenth-century Utopia, the more general meaning is that a "utopia" is a society in which man has reached such perfection that he is able to build a social system based on justice, reason, and solidarity. The beginning and the basis of this vision lie in the Messianic concept of the Old Testament prophets. The essential idea of this concept is that man, after losing his primary and pre-individual unity with nature and his fellow man (as symbolically expressed in the story of the Fall and the expulsion from Paradise), begins to make his own history. His act of disobedience was his first act of freedom. He becomes aware of himself as a separate individual, and of his separation from nature and from all other men. Such awareness is the beginning of history; but history has an aim and a goal: that man, driven by the longing for renewed union with nature and with man, will develop his human faculties of love and reason so fully that eventually he attains a new union, a new harmony with nature and with man. he then will no longer feel separate, alone, and isolated, but will experience his at-onement with the world in which he lives; and he will feel himself truly at home and no longer a stranger in his world. The prophetic idea is that man makes his own history-neither God nor the Messiah changes nature or "saves" him. He himself grows, unfolds, and becomes what he potentially is; this new state of society is called the "messianic time."

'The messianic period is characterized by the end of conflict and fighting between man and man and between man and nature, by universal peace and justice, and by the end of nationalism. As Micah put it (Micah 4:3-5):

The Messianic concept was a historical one: the brotherhood of man is to be achieved by man's own efforts to attain enlightenment within historical times."

"Generosity is another important and nearly universal feature of counterculture. Abraham opened up his tents to feed the poor. The Zen bodhisattva lives a life of service, without succumbing to the self-righteousness of the charitable. Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound generated support for boundary-defying artists in early-twentieth-century Paris. Countercultures tend to value humanity over property, and many love nothing as much as giving stuff away for free. Other countercultures express their generosity through the Promethean impulse to democratically share technological innovation and discovery, ideas, visions and artwork. The famous hacker slogan "Information wants to be free" is very much a core countercultural concept."

"our race has long been titillated by images of a "lost civilization" beneath the sea. Some say it is legend, some say it is genetic memory, a few say there is small difference. Their common mistake is their relegation of this "vanished" utopia to ancient history. deep consciousness is hardly bound by the constraints of linear time. Atlantis is in our future, not our past."

"On the other hand, Atlantis may figure both in our future and our past. Surely we harbor pleasant cellular memories of dolphin like romps in warm prehistoric seas, of gently froggy transformation in the security of water-filled womb. Lost utopias."

"If global warming melts the polar ice caps, as some predict, we will have little choice in our resumption of an aquatic life-style'
-Tom Robbins

"A feeling for the despair following the defeat of Frederick V can be found in one of the most moving works to emerge from the Rosicrucian aftermath. While hopes were high, even while in prison, the pansophist Tommaso Campanella could write about the "city of the sun." Now darkness had fallen. One response to the confusion was the Bohemian philosopher, educator, and scientist John Commenius' work The Labyrinth of the World. Like many who responded to the Rosicrucian call, Comenius, known as the "teacher of nations" and "father of general education," had believed that a new dawn of enlightenment and universal regeneration was at hand. But instead of walking the broad avenues of science and true Christian faith, Comenius found himself circling in a labyrinth of illusion and deceit-literally, as he was forced to flee bohemia and spend the rest of his life in exile. The Labyrinth of the World, which depicts a society in which "everything is wrong." and in which "all the sciences of man lead to nothing." may be the first example of a "dystopia" in modern literature. It is certainly a heartbreaking response to the end of the Rosicrucian dream.

"The anxiety that society was being undermined, that men and women were being dragged down into a pit of weakness, sloth and ennui, became the dark counterpoint to the Perfect Human aspirations of the Enlightenment. When this anxiety flowed into the race fears of the late nineteenth century, a man such as John Harvey Kellogg was there at the conjunction. Laziness and dependence, the products of consumer culture's addiction to novelty and luxury, were to be combated with a healthy Puritan diet:. Cornflakes, granola, soya milk, peanut butter and nut-based artificial meats were all Kellogg discoveries, all promoted with a deep conviction that diet was the key to unlock the gates of paradise. Racial enfeeblement would be defeated with improved breakfast habits and the Race Betterment League. Ironically, in the hands of his entrepreneurial brother, Will, Kellogg's cornflakes would be part of an important forward step in this debilitating consumer culture; branded products.

Sylvester Graham, fire-and-brimstone preacher and dietary guru of the 1840s, introduced another brand, his Graham Cracker, the antidote to over-sumptuous food and moral infirmities. 'Millions of children,' Graham announced, would 'soon unite in one dark and mighty confluence of ignorance and immorality and crime, which will overflow the wholesome restraints of society, and seep away the barriers of civil law, and sap the foundations of our Republican institutions.' Austere wheat crackers were the answer."

"Throughout most of history thoughtful men have taken a rather grim view of man's life on earth. The Greeks went so far as to suggest that any considerable happiness, success or achievement in a man's life might well foretell disaster. Gilbert Murray wrote: "It is a bad look-out for anyone in Greek poetry when he is called a 'happy man.'[ And the good news of the gospel was by no means good news for life on this earth. "Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward."

Then in the eighteenth century there emerged a spectacularly different view of man's condition. People came to believe that man's life on this earth need not be grim; on the contrary, it might be perfect if only man used his powers of reason to good effect.

The rationalism, optimism and millennialism of the Enlightenment spread into every area of of intellectual life like waves from a thrown rock. it was widely believed that man was treading an onward and upward path that would take him inevitably to the perfect society. A little more good will, rationality, science and material progress were all that were needed to speed him to Utopia.

Though it is now easy to laugh at such naïveté, the good consequences were considerable. Much of the best that the Western world has accomplished in education, in human welfare, in science and in the creation of civil institutions compatible with justice and decency was accomplished under the spell of those beliefs."

"If John Brown couldn't achieve utopia with guns, Orson Fowler would through books. Fowler readers woke up in the morning and bathed themselves according to the precepts of Fowler's Water Cure Library, after tending to a garden raised from seed packets sold by Fowler's Broadway store, they then ate a virtuous breakfast of porridge and cold water from The Economy of Food: Or, What Shall We Eat ("Without exception, both rich and poor in America eat extravagantly of animal food.....Every family should eat beans and peas."), then they could go to the job they'd been phrenologically directed toward by the Fowler & Wells career guide Choice of Pursuits, and comport themselves brilliantly thanks to their Fowler Manual of Business and Guide to Success. After jotting a few business meeting notes in Fowler shorthand learned from his Phonographic Teacher, they could go to lunch on food prepared from the Hydro-pathic Cook-Book, perhaps while perusing a volume of poetry or a novel from Fowler's press. Then, once their day was done, they could work out in a Fowler-approved gymnasium, and finally arrive back home to the gigantic octagonal mansion they had built in accordance with Fowler's blueprints in Home for All: Or a New, Cheap, Convenient, and Superior Mode of Building.

This last book left Fowler's most visible legacy. Scattered across the United States to this day are a motley collection of half-baked gingerbread Victorians built by Fowler's disciples. They go by local nicknames like the Bandbox, the Inkwell, or-less imaginatively-the Octagon House. They are the living remnants of a vision that seized Fowler as he prepared to build his own family mansion in upstate New York in the 1840s. "In looking about for some general plan," he wrote, "I said to myself, "Why not take our pattern from NATURE? Her forms are mostly SPHERICAL....What should we think of a square apple, or right-angled eggs?" Building a truly spherical house with all the walls bent like a barrel, he reasoned would be beyond the skills of most local carpenters. But an octagon-why, that should be hardly any trouble at all....{"

"It's hard to imagine a combination of beliefs more likely to whip up small-town residents into a scandalized froth: Perfectionists were run out of towns and endured decades of pulpit attacks and bigamy persecutions. They shrugged these off and diligently built up businesses in lumber and blacksmithing; meanwhile, their children were raised by the community, instead of by parents; they had both open marriages and open parenting. These children, visiting doctors marveled, grew up remarkably robust and healthy. The Perfectionists had, in short, created precisely the sort of society that Paine's old friend John "Walking" Stewart had envisioned decades before. If there was ever a community not for everyone, Oneida was surely it. And yet, Foote mused, those who were there did seem happy. Since he'd first read Common Sense, Foote had come to see the wisdom of the exact inverse of Paine's great proverb: he realized that a long habit of not thinking a thing right gives it a superficial appearance of being wrong. Upon careful thought, he could not find anything actually wrong with Oneida.

And so Foote came to this startling conclusion: "Freedom of affection, and even sexual promiscuity, do not necessarily degrade or demoralize women or generate diseases." He had seen no degradation at Oneida. No, he decided: it was legal codes and bans on condoms that were the source of that. It was the Anthony Comstocks of the world who were degrading women. If women were granted control of their bodies, Foote announced, there would be no need of Mr. Comstock and chivalrous efforts on behalf of their honor:....

"Some conservatives are utopianists , but their utopia lies in the past rather than the future. In their view, history has been one long, doleful decline from a golden age set in age of Adam. Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Jefferson, Disraeli, Margaret Thatcher; or more or less anyone you care to mention. This is to treat the past as a land of fetish, rather as some utopian thinkers do with the future. . The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does. But there are also conservatives who reject this myth of the Fall on the grounds that every age has been just as dreadful as every other. The good news for them is that things are not getting worse; the bad news is that this is because they cannot deteriorate any further. What governs history is human nature, which is (a) in a state of shocking disrepair and (b) absolutely unalterable. The greatest folly-indeed, cruelty-is to dangle before men and women ideals that they are constitutionally incapable of achieving. Radicals jut end up making people; loathe themselves. They plunge them into guilt and despair in the act of cheering them on to higher things.."

"Probably the major fallacy that guided the entire sixties epoch from idealism to lunacy was utopianism-Ginsberg's hallucination that he could "seize power of the universe and become the next consciousness," As a totalizing philosophy, utopianism is authoritarian in essence."

"I have always rather admired the vagabond kingdom and its nomadic people. Any country that can officially exist in fifteen different locations must be respected for its determination and its political creativity."

"Capolan (named after its founder, Mikal Capolan) is a fully fledged community with non-dogmatic religious beliefs, generous political philosophies, and heroes (like Atta Dijjo, who made himself into a human bridge to save his fellows, and was fondly known as Atta Boy). It has traditions, rituals of marriage and death, music, and a language (which relies on pitch changes and conjunctive adnouns). It also has a history: In 1348 fleeing from the devastation of the Black Death, a small group of Germanic villagers met with a band of aesthetes who had recently been cast out of Egypt. The results of that encounter were the olive-skinned children of Capolan. Thirty-one years later, after being chased out of their secluded Hungarian valley by Moravian mercenaries, the Capolanians moved to Thorn and Danzig, then back down the border of the Holy Roman Empire to a new home on the Adriatic. For over one hundred years they remained secure, until the church decreed the corruptives, and drove them into the Ottoman domain of Montenegro. The Capolanians lasted a mere two years there before accusations of frog tampering (they were blamed for a rainfall of amphibians in the spring of 1675) had them sailing off to Armenia. In 1698, they began a twenty-year journey that ended by the shores of the China Sea. By 1815, the spiritual rejuvenation they'd undergone seemed to be waning, and they unanimously agreed to retrace their steps westward to Southern France and Catalonia. With the conflict of World War I imminent, the Capolanians repaired to a deserted park zoo near Zurich, where they sat out the conflict in relative peace. Upon the cessation of fighting, the Wuttenberg Congress offered Capolan territory near Regunsturg, but they declined, preferring to leave en masse for New Mexico in the United States, where they built harps and bred Brahma chickens. At the end of WWII they returned to Europe and , after years of existential pressure, the Moving Council of Elders agreed to remove Capolan from the world map altogether in 1967.

As a stateless state, Capolan applied for membership to the United Nations in 1999. The Capolanians question the assumption that a nation's existence is determined by territory, and are asking for a ruling that gives a group or individual the right to be recognized in other than economic or military terms. The UN is still debating the issue."

"like a thousand world's fair cities. Estero will manifest one great panorama of architectural beauty.....Here is to exist the climax, the crowning glory, of civilization's greatest cosmopolitan center and capital.....which shall loudly call to all the world for millions of progressive minds and hearts to leave the turmoil of the great time of trouble, and make their homes in the Guiding Star City."

"Human society is based on want. Life is based on want. Wild-eyed visionaries may dream of a world without need. Cloud-cuckoo-land. It can't be done."

"The construction of the city will be of such a character as to provide for a combination of street elevation, placing various kinds of traffic upon different surfaces; as for instance, heavy team traffic upon the ground surface, a light driving upon a plane distinct from either, and all railroad travel upon distinct planes, dividing even the freight and passenger traffic by separate elevations. There will be no dumping of sewage into the streams, bay or Gulf. A moveable and continuous earth closet will carry the 'debris' and offal of the city to a place thirty or more miles distant, where it will be transformed to fertilization and restored to the land surface to be absorbed by vegetable growth. There will be no smudge or smoke. Power by which machinery will be moved will be by the utilization of the electromagnetic currents of the earth and air, independently of steam application to so called 'dynmos.' Motors will take the place of motion derived from steam pressure. The city will be constructed on the most magnificent scale, without the use of so called money. These things can be done easily once the people know the force of co-operation and united life, and understand the great principles of utilization and economy."

"The West Edmonton Mall in Canada contains 11 department stores within its 5.2 million square feet of heaven, along with 800 other shopping outlets, a 360-room hotel, an ice rink, and recreations of Bourbon Street in New Orleans and the boulevards of nineteenth-century Paris. Shoppers can also visit one of 20 movie theatres, or sit and admire the Siberian tiger, the penguins and the robotic submarines. In a final touch that brings a sense of historical completion to the entire cornucopia, the lake boasts a full size replica of Christopher Columbus's ship, the Santa Maria.

Reviewing what this fantastic display might add up to, Margaret Crawford wrote: 'This implausible, seemingly random, collection of images has been assembled with an explicit purpose: to support the mall's claim to contain the entire world within its walls.' The cabinet, the universe in one place, God's creation under our thumb-the Mall has illustrious forbears and perhaps no peers, except a few of the world's larger museums. For shoppers this kind of crass perfection obviously worked: West Edmonton was soon generating annual profits of over $3,000 per square metre-double that of other malls."

"The twentieth century was a mass graveyard of idealistic, utopian projects for what was called in the eighteenth century the "perfectibility of man," We are living now in the aftermath of the horrifying consequences of politically designed Good Lives; of the most militant and coercive blueprints of what people should be and want and do with their lives. And it is not incidental that the languages of so-called mental health-of who is sane and who is mad- were so easily co-opt able by fascists and communists alike. As ways of symbolically organizing who we should listen to and why, who should speak and who should be shut up and shut out, mental health becomes political morality by other means. Orwell's 1984 is our touchstone for the significance, political and otherwise, of the battle for the final definition of sanity. It is an important implication of 1984 that sanity and its definitions would not be so manipulable if they could be more freely and openly considered, if there were plans and guidelines for sanity that could be compared and contrasted. By keeping the debate so exclusively about madness, the mind doctors of the twentieth century, like the psychologists and moralists of the nineteenth century, have kept us (and themselves) in the dark about sanity. Designs for a good life, of which the whole notion of sanity must form a part, have been let to political theorists; and descriptions of the bad life, of a life lived in thrall to one of the many modern pathologies, have been left to neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists, the master of modern mental health."

"Sensible men will understand that there will never be a time when mankind is not in imminent danger. Cruelty violence and brutality will be held in leash only by unresting effort-if held in leash at all. Sloth, indulgence, smugness, torpor begotten of ease and flabbiness begotten of security will always lurk in wait. rigidity, emptiness of spirit, narrow conventionality and stuffed-shirtism are diseases that may attack any society. No society will ever solve the issue of the individual versus the organization. No society will ever discover how to become civilized without running the risk of becoming over civilized. No society will ever resolve the tension between equality and excellence."

"Why did the Twentieth Century produce so many-and such vivid-dystopias, works of fiction depicting not an ideal future but a future as terrible as could be imagined."

""Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Our world is different. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth."

"a naive belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication that rests on a stubborn refusal to acknowledge its downside."

"Do we still operate under the Divine Right of kings? Do people at the top still call the shots? or did the idealism of rule absolutely collapse, favoring only those who find ways to profit from the Dystopia? As bottom-feeders set the agenda, everyone is reduced to being treated no better than the lowest rung by a dumbed-down, idiot-proofed nanny state. it's not that the lunatics are running the asylum, but with democracy's deification of Victimhood, lunatics are coddled and subsidized, and the productive are their slaves.

It is said that the state, the system, the rich inflict on these Victims a hideously poor self-esteem. But could it be that these Victims are actually enjoying a self-esteem. But could it be that these Victims are actually enjoying a self-esteem. but could it be that these Victims are actually enjoying a self-esteem propelled to majestic heights unjustified by capability or accomplishment? In the dystopia, delusions are accommodated, and the humiliation of ineptitude remains a thing of the past. The Dystopia motivates all to wear the thorned crowns of Victimhood, delusion and ineptitude."

The feeling and emotion of victimhood slay logic and reason, winning every battle for the Dystopia. Hysteria is dystopia's tyrannical god.

People who recognize he rise of the Dystopia often lack the detachment to accommodate perspective. These individuals believe that if enough people were aware of the Dystopia, then the vermin would disappear, and the downward course of the Dystopia would somehow reverse itself. But the Dystopia is so vast and all-encompassing, it pervades every aspect of modern life. With the dystopia, the only cure is fatal to all of us."

"A new report raises the specter of a 'dystopian future for much of humanity."

Book: "Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516-1700

Book: "Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape" by James Howard Kunstler

Book: "The Great Delusion: A mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth." by Steven Stoll

Book: "Transhumanist dreams and dystopian Nightmares: The Promise and Peril of Genetic Engineering" by Maxwell J. Hehlman

Book: "The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America" by Carl J. Guarneri

Book: "Usonia, New York: Building a Community with Frank Lloyd Wright" by Rolad Reisley

Book: "Mantariol's Dream: The Extraordinary Story of the Submarine Inventor Who Wanted to Save the World." Mathew Stewart

Book: "Spaced Out" Crash Pads, Hippie Communes, Infinity Machines, and other Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties" Alastair Gordon

Book: "Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy" by Timothy O. Benson et. al.

Book: "UTOPIA: The Search for the ideal society in the Western World" by Roland Schaer et.al.

Book: "The ABC-CLIO World History Companion to Utopian Movements" by Johanna Drucker

Book: "The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps...by Marshall T. Savage

Book: "Dreamworld And Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West" by Susan Buck-Morss

Book: "The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece, from Utopia to Crisis and Collapse" by Paul Cartledge

Book: "Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City" by Greg Grandin

Book: "At the Tomb Of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay" by John Gimlette

Book: "Impossible Worlds: The Architecture of Perfection" by Alex Stetter, et al, eds

Book: "Seeds Of The Kingdom: Utopian Communities in the Americas" by Anna L. Peterson

Book: "Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn's Holy Experiment" by Kevin Kenny

Book: "The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America" by Don Lattin

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