On Utopias

"Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie marche vers les utopies."

The idea of Utopia has, along with mankind, journeyed around the world and across all time periods. The term, first coined by Sir Thomas More in 1516, is apposite to the seemingly constant yet constantly fluctuating idea of perfection. It begs the question: what is perfection? Is it achievable? Have the ideological clashes between the past and present not given us any indication as to the feasibility of such a condition?

Yay or nay, it is undeniable that any mention of a potential Utopia is always coupled with the hopes and beliefs of the time. For this reason, it is essentially impossible to study Utopias in the conventional manner. In studying any conceived Utopia, books and historical accounts serve no real value to those who have not experienced, first-hand, the lifestyle that was coupled with the ideas behind said Utopia. The entire idea — or dream rather — is a projection of what would be considered perfect as compared to what the dreamer is experiencing in life, at the time of his or her dream. And so it follows that if a Utopia is a perfect world that is relative to the state of perfection in the current world, then a Utopia is beauty in the face of chaos, because there is always chaos in our world.

This idea of beautiful emergence is nothing new, in fact. Following the idea of beauty in the face of chaos, the Phoenix — a mythical creature from Greek Mythology — can be considered a prime symbol of a Utopia. It arises from the ashes of its predecessor and thus follows a beautiful infinite loop, in the process creating a circle of its own life.

Let us carry out a thought experiment. The first step is to envision a Utopia, your Utopia. Once done, proceed to describe how your Utopia functions and list some general characteristics of it. It is most likely a safe bet to say that in your Utopia, uniformity is prevalent. You must have used words such as "everybody," "none," or "no one" to describe it. One of the characteristics of your Utopia might have been that "there would be no crime." Think of every point on the circle as being a human who has not committed a single crime and thus as a protector of the community. Each human is holding hands with his or her fellow human and thus eventually encloses the circle. From the perspective of the humans making up the circumference it is unfair that they are keeping out all the crime while everybody else reaps the benefits.

To remedy the issue, imagine that each human making up the circumference is switched every day with someone who was previously enjoying the circle's provided security, done equally so that nobody stays on the circumference longer than anybody else. Even still, all it takes is a slight movement by one of the points on the circle to threaten the integrity of the entire system. Any slight deviation in position by any one member will call for two possible courses of action. The first allows us to maintain the perfect circle by letting go of the deviated member entirely — excluding them from the circle as a whole. This is essentially the style of the Dystopias represented in George Orwell's 1984 or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The other option is to do whatever is needed to maintain a firm connection with the deviated human. This would result in a shape that is not a circle and therefore no longer representative of the uniform Utopia that you had envisioned. When looking at the situation at a macroscopic level we can spot the inherent flaws and conclude that a Utopia is impossible.

However, if we widen the scope a great deal, we can come to the realization that Earth itself is a Utopia.

The blue planet, the only planet hosting life, was literally conceived in the chaos of space. Against all odds, two specs of cosmic dust, under the mystical force of gravity, came into contact with one another, and set in place a virtuous cycle of the creation of a planet. And if one thing can be said for sure it is that today, Earth exists, and without a doubt, tomorrow it will too. This alone represents a Utopia — therefore Earth is a Utopia. However, it does not follow that the configuration of our civilization represents the Utopian qualities of Earth. Earth is adaptable to change; it has experienced numerous Ice Ages and yet still exists today. Our civilization, however, goes into a state of emergency whenever large sums of money are lost from banks and other corporations. Even if we continue on our path of exposing the Earth to unhealthy amounts of carbon dioxide emissions, Earth itself will live on while we humans die off. Therefore Earth can truly be considered a Utopia, but for us to experience the qualities of such a world we need to mimic our lives around it and not expect the qualities of the Earth to morph and align with our own agendas.

This is probably why most humans feel at peace when around nature — it is innately a result of beauty emerging from chaos, and that is something we cannot experience through the lifestyles promoted by our governments. Ultimately, Utopias are possible but their rarity is mimicked by the rarity of planets hosting life, of which we know only one: Earth. For this reason it is wise for us to become subservient to the nature of our planet and live in accordance with the way it functions. Currently, the problem is that the circumference of the Utopia has been built and maintained but we humans choose to live outside of it and try to make the circle rebuild itself around wherever we want to be. The error in this ambition is the failure to recognize that the formation of such a perfect circumference is rarer than anything we can imagine. A paradigm shift in lifestyle is needed, one that would ensure that we stay within the area of the Earth's symbolic Utopian circle.

"Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie marche vers les utopies."