The Utopia Fallacy

Warnings From Oz, The Community & The World State

Image by CDD20 from Pixabay

A well-executed utopian story tends to linger in one's mind a long, long time after the last page or final credits.

Unlike dystopian fiction--where the problems of a broken world scream from the forefront, utopias appear idyllic. People go about their lives in some form of serene harmony. Many of the issues plaguing such worlds are forgotten or pushed so far distant as to not matter.

And yet, this tranquility is only ever surface deep; never is all perfect or good or well in these societies.

But to know this, one must be willing to see the subtleties of these worlds for what they are. To bring about change, one is not fighting direct oppression or apathy or fear, they are fighting the bedrock of an entire society who happen to enjoy their lives en masse.

Good utopian fiction leaves the reader or viewer asking, 'How?', 'What if...?', and more importantly, 'What next?'. What becomes of such a deliriously oblivious society, when the curtain falls away?

The Idea of "Utopia"

Unlike the infamous 2015 photo of a certain dress of maybe a certain pair of colors, a somewhat underground debate rages among philosophers and creatives about whether or not a utopian world even exists. These questions can be summed as:

Aren't utopian worlds just more complex, glossy dystopian ones with the cancer deep inside rather than on the surface?

The question is a good one and strikes at the heart of this post. You can decide for yourself. At this point, I only offer: if you dig deep enough, you'll understand the debate more fully.

As an English word, utopia dates to 1516. It is the invention and title of English philosopher Sir Thomas More's seminal book. The idea is far, far older. Plato's Republic lays the groundwork roughly 1,900 years earlier. Fiction followed More's philosophy as early 1623 with Tommaso Campanella's The City of the Sun and 1627's New Atlantis by Sir Francis Bacon (published posthumously).

We, humans, have envisioned our utopias for millennia.

Primed to Hope

From a very young age, we are primed to hope for this pastoral type of world. Our caregivers could, and some do, prep us for much worse. Promoting hope for an ideal world is more than justified considering the alternatives... and current reality.

For many, this exploration likely started with a young girl in a bleak, gray Kansas whisked off to the colorful land of Oz. Younger generations might have started with a more indirectly utopian story like WALL∙E.

In middle school, titles such as The Dream Catcher (Monica Hughes), The Giver (Lois Lowry), Feed (M.T. Anderson), or Uglies (Scott Westerfeld) give us a look at so-called utopian societies. Likely, the most studied work of utopian literature in high school and beyond -- as a contrast to Orwell's 1984 -- is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Most religions message the same thing. Our obviously broken world is to one day be abandoned for a heavenly utopia or turned into one by an all-powerful deity.

Deeper Threads

You know when you snap off that irritating stray thread on your t-shirt sleeve? It's fine for a while. Then another one dangles down sometime later that needs snapping off, too. One day you notice a slight hole in the seam along where those threads you've been tugging away at were.

All utopias work the same way.

A rather weak man hides behind the curtain. Humanity rests comfortably in artificial oblivion as the world rots. Only dreams reveal the power of human emotion in a pharmacologically-blunted populace. Buried history and controlled information conceal atrocities. Constant entertainment and pleasure create a nigh-impenetrable haze over reality. Problems which threaten a disturbance are dealt with quietly and severely to ensure the continuation of the ideal.

But someone always keeps pulling on a thread.

Lowry's The Giver is often referred to as dystopian. I refute that. As lived by the majority of citizens, The Community provides an ideal life. Not until Jonas learns of his world's history and becomes convinced of its wrongness does the dystopic element come into being. (Three, disconnected anthology volumes helped earn the dystopian label.)

Similar arguments can be made about each of the works I've mentioned. Each presents a society free of direct oppression where more-or-less everyone is pleased with how things run. These societies, as accepted by their people, meet the criteria for a utopia. Yet each possesses contradictions, flaws, secrets, and means of discrete control to allow such a society to function.

Thus the questions: Are they truly utopias? Can there truly be a utopia? If no one pulls the thread, does it matter?

Our World Ordered

No one in the know will accuse Hajime Isayama's Attack on Titan of being a utopic work. When the remnants of humanity must live inside walled cities to prevent being eaten by mindless, humanoid 'titans', we're on the dystopian end of the spectrum.

While not idyllic, life inside the walls is far from a George Miller hellscape. Don't venture outside of them, and you don't have to worry about being gobbled up.

Yet, in striving to create their ideal world, humanity only succeeds in making things much, much, much worse.

When I talk about the Utopia Fallacy, this is what I mean.

Like a Baskin-Robbins of the mind, idealized worlds come in various flavors -- some expected and plain, some of them quite distasteful but nevertheless there.

On the vanilla side, let's call them, progressive globalists might view the unification of governments under something like the United Nations with a unified system of laws, courts, currencies, etc. as utopian. Others might take an isolationist bent, à la North Korea, and create a utopia unto themselves.

On the ghost pepper with lavender mint side, militant accelerationists would see utopia as additional pressure put on societal structures they view as untenable and/or undesirable to the point of collapse. At this point, society could be "appropriately" rebuilt. Essentially: create a dystopia to create a utopia.

For lack of a universal term, ascensionists or heavenly aspirants might wish to ignore the present world almost completely in favor of a promised, eternal utopia. (Stuart Hamblen's song "This Ole House" (1954) is a good example.)

No degree in or advanced study of philosophy or politics is required to understand the problems with each of these. Reminder: micro-utopias have been tried before. None worked out well. A good many documentaries, books, research papers, and personal testimonies attest to this. Reference Jonestown, Guyana as the poster child for failed utopias.

Plain Speak

Utopias are a wonderful, imaginative ideal. But, all they can ever be is dreamlike and an ideal.

Don't misunderstand, human beings are easily deluded and distracted. As discussed above, a host of groups believe they've a way to reach utopia. But a supposed utopia can't form without the whole, or all but the smallest fraction of the whole, being deluded and distracted into accepting a very particular way of life and train of thought.

Nothing is farther from the truth in 2025 than the unity required for the formation of a utopia. Like Isayama's fictional walled garden of Paradis, many of those attempting change purport or believe themselves to be doing so to create a better world... for someone. The results are much the same.

If we want a safer, healthier world, we must first throw out the magical thinking of utopic creation and the delusion of utopic resurrection (e.g. America was better in the '50s, Germany or Italy in the '30s and early '40s, or Russia under Lenin / Stalin). We must embrace the reality of change and seek compromise at a new and perhaps unprecedented scale. Doing these will not create a utopia by any stretch, but this will give us a better option in working with others than the equivalent of international dick-measuring and thinly-veiled ideologies of ethnic supremacy.

To not do so, well, we've been warned.