Your Small Utopia
So you want to build a small utopia.
So you want to build a small utopia. You are tired of the bullshit, and given that this is summer, you think it’s finally time to create a new society. Your localized revolution might as well begin as a holiday. Maybe you are able to get time off of your job, or failing to have one of those, perhaps you are just mentally prepared to spend a little bit more money than you otherwise would. Even opening a gap in the capitalist hegemony requires a starting investment of some kind. Utopias need cold beer, and your friends’ homebrewing adventures can only provide so much.
But after the initial investment, the rest, you could do yourself. You are not so deluded to think that building a small utopia will be no work. It’s sweat equity, or at least that’s how you talk about it. If you can just get a hold of enough raw materials initially, you can learn the skills and do the work. You could probably terraform Mars if you try really hard and not worry about screwing up once or twice or thrice. You can make a tiny, temporary utopia on the farm or in the woods or on a boat or in the desert. You just have to be willing to do it.
Unfortunately, the problem is not whether you are willing to do it—the problem is everyone else. What separates a utopia from a hermit’s cabin is the presence of “everyone else”. You want to have a social scene, enough people to make it fun, to make decisions, to have a good party, and to lend some unskilled hands when you need to raise the spars of your geodesic dome out of the reach of your tallest step ladder. You need to have the people who are not quite as willingly along for the ride who get every bit as much of the benefit, otherwise you aren’t building a new society, you’re just building a clubhouse.
There are plenty of clubhouses out there. There are for-profit ones like cruise ships and country clubs, in which expensive dues go to fund workers of the lowest wages possible to increase the luxury of those who have the right color of plastic card. And then there are non-profit clubs like activism groups, homeowners’ associations, poker nights, and bake sales, at which there is a certain barrier for entry coupled with a specific task that defines those that participate as participants. But then there are utopias, which stand aside from these more mundane fraternal leagues of specialized benevolence.
The small utopia is not necessarily permanent, but while it exists, it displays every indication that it is a full-fledged alternative to everyday society. This is not to say that it is self-sufficient. Inviolate sustainability is for small islands and Biospheres—those who have no choice or are trying to prove a point. Even the International Space Station gets regular deliveries. The key factor of a small utopia is that you don’t commute there. You are a resident, even if only temporarily. The small utopia is less a biological or political exercise than a couch cushion fort. You set up the walls, and then that is where you are. Eventually you bust out and go eat lunch, but when you are in the couch fort, you could probably stay in there forever. And when you are surrounded in cushions, separated from the outside world, there is no question of where it is that you are not.
But you must have other people with you, or you are just buried in soft things. You must try to get along with others, and make decisions with them, and care about their happiness and comfort just as much as your own. But they will not necessarily care about you. You will hope that they do, and set up systems of discussion and decision-making to encourage them to do so, and you will give them reading material and speeches. And it won’t really matter. Because people are other people, and as wonderful as they are and as convincing as your pamphlets may be, they cannot be the same as you. These are the problems that you bring with you into your small utopia—the existentialist truth of every society, hardwired into your sandboxed, homebrewed, consensus-based mini-truth.
You will build it anyway. You will erect shade made out of tarps and bamboo, and construct water recyclers from black trash bags and gravel and cloth. You will play music and listen to it too, run off of solar or composted biogas or gasoline or bicycle, or simply acoustic, in the dark, in the cold, in the night. You will cook and eat and wash dishes with a new sense of what is sanitary and what is not, because while the cheese isn’t cold any longer it still looks delicious and you’ve had nothing but undercooked vegan grains for two days. But you’ll start to hate cheese because it needs refrigeration, just like you prefer warm whiskey over warm beer, avoid food requiring multiple pans, stoves that require special fuel, and any sort of synthetic high-performance tent that can’t be fixed with a couple of framing nails and a hammer. Or some scrap metal and a hammer. Or just a hammer.
You’ll make jokes about fixing the social problems of your small utopia with a hammer. But the point is that you have to live with them. You’ll eventually leave the utopia, pack up your scrap wood and whichever of your personal possessions remain, and return to the society that you left, or move on to a different one. You’ll have lost money, time, and patience. But while you were there, you learned a few things. Not too many things—small utopias are not educational institutions. You didn’t succeed, not exactly. That is not what small utopias are for. But you were there, for a little while. You built it. You were in it. And that is why you go.
