The Utopia Experiment | Book Review

Shabbir Haider
Jul 23, 2017 · 3 min read

There’s glory in victory. And a return to humility in defeat.

Everyone struggles for victory. Some win. Most lose. Which makes humility a necessary virtue: a tool for survival.

Dylan Evans’ The Utopia Experiment is a story of failure. And a note on humility.

It’s a story of us; the most of us who go about our lives faceless and voiceless and yet dream to have a face and a voice because this is what the true essence of being human is. Dylan can be any one of us, who have not won, and perhaps may not win. And Dylan’s experiment is a reminder that even if we fail, our aspirations and our dreams are always valid. Reason why his failure does not disappoint. But strangely inspires one to boldly take on the dream, and live it, even if for a few days.

The book employs a non-linear timeline, shuttling back and forth between the years 2006 and 2013, to describe the life of a philosopher working in the field of high-tech robotics who quit it all to start a 18 months long social experiment, only to end up in a psychiatric hospital in the middle of it.

Book Cover

The experiment, called The Utopia Experiment, is aimed at studying a group of people who are living a fictional scenario: a world which has been shattered by a global collapse, bereft of modern technology and creature comforts. The site of the experiment is a remote field in the Scottish Highland.

Dylan provides an account of his experience at the site, the initial days of euphoria at having pulled it off for real (by selling off his house, giving up his job and cutting off all ties with his colleague in industry and academia) followed by a gradual decline of enthusiasm due to continuous failure to learn the basics of living it out in the wild.

The narrative and the events in the book is highly colored by Dylan being a bipolar: The first person view of the ups and downs which the brain chemical imbalance brings to life, and the havoc is may often cause, comes out in the simply worded narrative.

Equally apparent is the honesty with which Dylan seems to have recorded his narrative. He presents himself as flawed, unsure and prone to indecision. One gets to have a peek inside the inner working of Dylan’s mind as he goes about with the experiment and past it into his stint as a professor. The fact that Dylan has matured to the point of accepting his flaws unabashedly, is refreshing.

Not many of us will be a part of such an experiment. However, the trails and tribulations of Dylan makes one live it and realize, with Dylan, how the modern life, despite the many evil which it has gathered, continues to be a victory. In the last chapter, in a distilled wisdom of sorts, Dylan talks about how we are often do not acknowledge the incredible pleasures life the modern life has afforded us: from the unassuming toothpaste to the ability to listen to the finest music at the click of a button: a luxury not even the kings could afford back in the days. We have much to be thankful to, and much to contribute towards the relentless development of life on earth.

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