Why is Utopia (Nearly) Impossible?

The hurdles we need to clear to provide sufficient food, shelter, and meaning to every child, woman and man on the planet are not as much technical as they are cultural, not as much about finances as perspectives. The goal of making the world a better place for everyone is relatively recent. Well, perhaps that isn’t entirely accurate. Really, it is just who we include when we say “everyone.” Only recently does everyone include all human inhabitants. But why stop at humans? The challenge of implementing a true utopian vision seems to hit roadblocks way before we run into the challenge of including the whole ecosphere, despite so many dreams and mythologies of a coming abundance of technology. Is there any hope left? Every step forward seems to push the realization further away over the horizon or acheivability. Moore’s law is fairly well known, even though most of us are also aware that truly understanding exponential growth is hard for the human mind to grasp. Add to that the desire to ignore the exponential externalization of impacts that we don’t want to account for, and it is hard to find a silver lining.

Practicality turns idealists into dreamers

R. Buckminster (“Bucky”) Fuller arguably came closer than anyone else in the modern era of imagining the architectural and social impacts and attempting to nudge the rest of the species in the direction of taking this question seriously, and yet we’ve hardly made any progress on his blueprints since his death in the 1983. He is most well known for his popularizing the geodesic dome. While this is a tragic underrepresentation of his true contribution to the idea of human flourishing, it seems at least partially refreshing that at least there is one idea that we can point to and say, yes, Bucky’s impact is still felt. The tragedy is that few of the core ideas are truly known or appreciated today.

Perhaps this is because the real genius that Bucky bestowed is a perspective that can’t even be recognized.

Bucky urged people to grapple with the frame through which they looked at the world. One very simple example is to realize that the sun doesn’t rise, but rather the Earth rotates into view of the sun. The fact that this seems to be a trivial observation is lost on nearly everyone. This can easily be corrected (and may be a good start for flat-earth advocates): get up early one morning and stand facing the horizon before the sun is visible. Now, try to feel that you are rotating into view of the sun at about 1,000 miles per hour, while the sun remains mostly stationary (at least relative to the horizon we are watching). If you are lucky, you may actually have a momentary thrill of feeling the movement of this living spaceship upon which we find ourselves.

Pushing a String

Another idea that he encouraged people to let go of is the notion that “the wind blows.” At first it seems obvious that the wind is blowing. And if I say otherwise, one may suspect that I’m trying to trick the mind, like asking if a tree makes a sound when no one is around to hear it fall. No, wind doesn’t blow, because it sucks. Again, you can actually experience this by shifting your perspective. Try to blow out a candle from 10 feet away, notice that the flame won’t even budge. The “wind” leaving your lips spreads out as if it is running up hill and running out of steam long before it reaches the candle. You may as well try moving a wagon by pushing a rope tied to it. The string will spread out even before it reaches the marble.

But pull the wagon by that same rope and, voila, it moves easily. This example may help you see that of you can create some kind of “drain” for a wind to be pulled toward, like an open window, the candle placed on that window sill will flicker and go out.

Consciousness sucks (like a low-pressure system)

There are many ways to think about thinking, but I rarely hear it said that thinking is like water flowing down a gradient within a river bed. A river may be rushing but it isn’t hurrying, even though it may be moving fast at some points, it is always going at precisely the exact right speed. Likewise, your thoughts follow the known tracks laid out by your prior experiences and influenced by the slope of the environment your mind is in. The neurons in your brain discharge chemicals and little bolts of electricity, and the current flows down toward some sink hole in your awareness.

But what does this have to do with the concept of an ideal community, a utopia? We have to go travel from “no where” to “now here” and we have to do it without moving (except the ‘w’, you can move the ‘w’).

Let’s go back to the last time utopia existed. In the garden of bliss, where ignorance of problems reigned where birds, beetles, lizards, fish, and deer all just lived in harmony. They still do. And we do too. We just don’t realize it. We are trying to change or fix the world. Like there is us, and the world, and we are two separate things. The separation is imagined, the greener grass is all in our heads. Abundance is abundant. Perhaps it is time to redistribute the scarcity, just so we take our minds off of the idea of wealth.

Surplus can take a slice of the scarcity pie. After all, there is only a surplus if we quantify enough and lock that in. To try to go beyond that, you can no longer simply allow what is so to be what is so.

Equal distribution can also take a slice of scarcity pie. Our concept of fairness is weirdly linked to equality. Fair is, everyone gets to drink the amount of clean water that their bodies need to stay healthy. Our concepts turn that into, fair is everyone gets the exact same amount of water, which immediately turns to scarcity when I think, wait, you got more than me.

What else sucks? Capitalism

Have you noticed? The rich getting richer isn’t a sign that our economy is broken. That aspect is the feature of our economy that is designed in. The accumulation of resources in a central pool allows for large-scale projects like roads and rockets and bitcoin mining rigs. But sucking isn’t always bad. It can get excessive when the pump continues to run past even when we should turn it off. I can’t help but think of Micky in the Wizard’s Apprentice trying to stop those labor saving mops from carrying water.

I wonder if the human species hasn’t yet found it’s mature phase yet. Could we still be in our larval stage, like a caterpillar, hungrily devouring our ecosystem, turning natures bounty into a slag-heap of plastic and sludge? If so, then maybe we are finally at the end, and all it takes is to relax, liquefy our infrastructure (thanks for the hand Hurricane Harvey) and let the imaginal cells form new structure under glass domes of connection.

The idea isn’t to end or replace capitalism, but to balance it in a dance that allows us to continue thriving.