Utopia For Realists, And How Can We Get There
Right, then. Let me introduce you to my current love affair with Utopia For Realists.
The beautiful oranje cover suggests its Dutch connection. Rutger Bregman- historian and philosopher- first published his blueprint to solve some of humanity’s greatest problems back in 2014 in Netherlands, originally crowd-funded by independent journalists and rose to critical acclaim with this bestseller.
Now translated to English by Elizabeth Manton, this has made his ideas more accessible to the English-speaking masses and open for a bigger discussion and debate.
In the 300 odd pages of the book, he breaks down global and regional statistics, experiments and policies and rests his case for a realistic utopia. Universal Basic Income and how it works. President Nixon’s Basic Income Bill? Free money to everyone? How does it work and what does it cost us? He doesn’t argue based on ideas or ideologies but on economics and statistics. And experiments- not just thought experiments, actual social experiments and their results.
He makes the case for a Fifteen-Hour Workweek and its implications. Well, Bertrand Russell had once argued about it too. But here we have solid argument in the current century.
As he explains it- We live in a time of unprecedented upheaval, when technology and so-called progress have made us richer but more uncertain than ever before. We have questions about the future, society, work, happiness, family and money, and yet no political party of the right or left is providing us with answers. So, too, does the time seem to be coming to an end when we looked to economists to help us define the qualities necessary to create a successful society.
We need a new movement.
Here is a piece written by Rutger for The Guardian- a sneak peek, if you will, into this revolutionary yet achievable utopia. Read about Daughin, in Canada, with a complete eradication of poverty for 4 years, the evidence of which lie in boxes in an attic.
If you’re a fan of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, Yanis Varoufakis’s Why the Weak Must Suffer, Owen Jones’s The Establishment, read this book.
Read it, even if you’re not and we can have a discussion. Globally.
Every milestone of civilization- end of slavery, beginning of democracy- was once considered a utopian fantasy. Yet, those are now very real.
