Utopia Show Quotes

Show the sun with a lantern.

Since he was very young he had known that in certain ways he was unlike anyone else he knew. For a child the consciousness of such difference is very painful, since, having done nothing yet and being incapable of doing anything, he cannot justify it. The reliable and affectionate presence of adults who are also, in their own way, different, is the only reassurance such a child can have; and Shevek had not had it. His father had indeed been utterly reliable and affectionate. Whatever Shevek was and whatever he did, Palat approved and was loyal. But Palat had not had this curse of difference. He was like the others, like all the others to whom community came so easy. He loved Shevek, but he could not show him what freedom is, that recognition of each person's solitude which alone transcends it.

When everything was fine And the notion of sin had vanished And the earth was ready In universal peace To consume and rejoice Without creeds and utopias, I, for unknown reasons, Surrounded by the books Of prophets and theologians, Of philosophers, poets, Searched for an answer, Scowling, grimacing, Waking up at night, muttering at dawn. What oppressed me so much Was a bit shameful. Talking of it aloud Would show neither tact nor prudence. It might even seem an outrage Against the health of mankind. . .

No dreaming may stand still, for this bodes no good. But if it becomes a dreaming ahead, then its cause appears quite differently and excitingly alive. The dim and weakening features, which may be characteristic of mere yearning, disappears; and then yearning can show what it really is able to accomplish.

This better world—that is the world I’m fighting for from inside the whale, this world I want to be birthed into. A world that is kinder, more generous, more just. A world that takes care of the marginalized, the poor, the sick. Where wealth and resources are redistributed, where reparations are made for the harms of history, where stolen land is given back. Where the environment is cared for and respected, and all species are cared for and respected. Where conflicts are dealt with in gentleness. Where people take care of each other and feel empowered to be their truest selves. Where anger is allowed and joy is allowed and fun is allowed and quietness is allowed and loudness is allowed and being wrong is allowed and everything, everything, everything is rooted in love. And maybe that’s an unattainable utopia.But I’ve found a few smaller versions of this world—in the ground rules Liv and I set on the bus en route to meeting my family; in the grace Cara showed me when I came out to her; in the patience with which Zu mentored me. I’m not naïve enough to think we’ll reach this utopia in my lifetime or possibly ever, but I’m also not faithless enough to think that the direction in which I strive doesn’t matter, that these smaller versions of the world aren’t leading us there.

Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.

Anybody who forays outside the “Overton window” faces a rocky road. He or she will quickly be branded as “unrealistic” or “unreasonable” by the media, the fearsome gatekeepers of the window. Television, for example, offers little time or space to present fundamentally different opinions. Instead, talk shows feed us an endless merry-go-round of the same people saying the same things. And yet, despite all this, a society can change completely in a few decades. The Overton window can shift. A classic strategy for achieving this is to proclaim ideas so shocking and subversive that anything less radical suddenly sounds sensible. In other words, to make the radical reasonable, you merely have to stretch the bounds of the radical.

I know there’s a reality I never understood As I wander in Utopia But I find a courage In your aura I know there’s a world Better than this Both for you and me And I’ll show it Because I believe in miracles

Why are we so confused about what police really do? The obvious reason is that in the popular culture of the last fifty years or so, police have become almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture. It has come to the point that it's not at all unusual for a citizen in a contemporary industrialized democracy to spend several hours a day reading books, watching movies, or viewing TV shows that invite them to look at the world from a police point of view, and to vicariously participate in their exploits. And these imaginary police do, indeed, spend almost all of their time fighting violent crime, or dealing with its consequences.

Literature has always been related to utopia, so when the utopia loses meaning, so does literature. What I was trying to do, and perhaps what all writers try to do-- what on earth do I know?-- was to combat fiction with fiction. What I ought to do was affirm what existed, affirm the state of things as they are, in other words, revel in the world outside instead of searching for a way out, for in that way I could undoubtedly have a better life, but I couldn't do it, I couldn't, something had congealed inside me, a conviction was rooted inside me, and although it was essentialist, that is, outmoded and, furthermore, romantic, I could not get past it, for the simple reason that it had not only been thought but also experienced, in these sudden states of clear-sightedness that everyone must know, where for a few seconds you catch sight of another world from the one you were in only a moment earlier, where the world seems to step forward and show itself for a brief glimpse before reverting and leaving everything as before...

utopia is equal love, equal love between people of equal value, although value is an approximation for the word I want. Why is it so difficult? Assortative mating shows there has to be some drive in nature to bring equals together in the toils of love, so why even in the most enlightened and beautifully launched unions are we afraid we hear the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity? It has to be cultural. In fact the closest thing to a religion I have is that this has to be cultural. I could do practically anything while he was asleep and not bother him. I wrote in my journal, washed dishes in slow motion if we hadn’t gotten around to them. I was emotional a lot, privately. I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.

History is cyclical in nature, the evidence shows us. What is today, was before. What was yesterday, will be tomorrow. We need to learn from our mistakes, so that instead of travelling endlessly in a repetitious cycle, we move in an upward spiral toward perfection and utopia.

Initially, Jesus preached neither himself nor the church, but the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is the realization of a fundamental utopia of the human heart, the total transfiguration of this world, free from all that alienates human beings, free from pain, sin, divisions, and death. He came and announced: “The time has come, the kingdom of God is close at hand!” He not only promised this new reality but already began to realize it, showing that it is possible in the world. He therefore did not come to alienate human beings and carry them off to another world. He came to confirm the good news: This sinister world has a final destiny that is good, human, and divine.

Carson began to understand that what he sought was an escape from the hubris of humanity, from the endless discontent of those who believed in one utopia or another in spite of the fact that history showed utopian thinking to lead inevitably to disaster and often to mass murder on an industrial scale. But of course there could be no escape from the overweening pride and arrogance of the species.

Schelling's God is the totality of Nature struggling towards consciousness, and Man is as far as the struggle has got, with the animals not too far behind, vegetables somewhat lagging, and rocks nowhere as yet. Do we believe this? Does it matter? Think of it as a poem or a painting. Art doesn't have to be true like a theorem. It can be true in other ways. This truth says there is a meaning to it all, and Man is where the meaning begins to show.

BIG (by Gary Ross & Anne Spielberg, 1988) A boy who suddenly wakes up to find he is a full-grown man promises to be a fun comedic fantasy. But what if you write a fantasy not set in some far-off, bizarre world but in a world an average kid would recognize? What if you send him to a real boy’s utopia, a toy company, and let him go out with a pretty, sexy woman? And what if the story isn’t just about a boy getting big physically but one that shows the ideal blend of man and boy for living a happy adult life?

There is little doubt, Denmark is becoming a two-tier country. More and more Danes who can afford it are turning to private health care—850,000 at the latest count—and poll after poll shows that, though they have the largest per capita public sector in the world, the Danes’ satisfaction levels with their welfare state are in rapid decline. It is probably true that they have especially high expectations given the amount of money they contribute to it, but in one survey by management consultants Accenture only 22 percent of Danes thought their public sector did a good job.

Sitting next to a woman at a dinner party recently, she had explained how stifling she found the attitude in her hometown. 'On the [Danish] west coast, anyone who even slightly broke with convention, or or showed that they had any ambition, was frowned upon,' she told me. 'People really didn't like it. Everyone knew your business, everyone had an opinion about what you should be doing. I had to get away. I came to Copenhagen as soon as I could, and don't often go back.' It is common to have such feelings about one's hometown, I suppose, but they do often seem to be particularly keenly felt by people from Jutland.

I knew that my auditioning for a hearing role would probably shock some casting directors or producers. It might make them uncomfortable, but was necessary. A role was written for a hearing character because creators and writers likely hadn’t even imagined the possibility of having a Deaf character in their story. Just by showing up, I might stretch the boundaries of their imagination a little bit, push them outside the box, make them consider adding different dimensions to the role. In the end I might not get the job, but at the very least I’d plant an idea in their heads to consider including Deaf characters in that or a future production.

You might suppose that this would merely inject a note of pietism and make us then avoid the real issues—or, indeed, to attempt a theocratic takeover bid. But to think in either of those ways would only show how deeply we have been conditioned by the Enlightenment split between religion and politics. What happens if we reintegrate them? As with specifically Christian work, so with political work done in Jesus’s name: confessing Jesus as the ascended and coming Lord frees us up from needing to pretend that this or that program or leader has the key to utopia (if only we would elect him or her). Equally, it frees up our corporate life from the despair that comes when we realize that once again our political systems let us down. The ascension and appearing of Jesus constitute a radical challenge to the entire thought structure of the Enlightenment (and of course several other movements). And since our present Western politics is very much the creation of the Enlightenment, we should think seriously about the ways in which, as thinking Christians, we can and should bring that challenge to bear. I know this is giving a huge hostage to fortune, raising questions to which I certainly don’t know the answers, but I do know that unless I point all this out one might easily get the impression that these ancient doctrines are of theoretical or abstract interest only. They aren’t. People who believe that Jesus is already Lord and that he will appear again as judge of the world are called and equipped (to put it mildly) to think and act quite differently in the world from those who don’t.

Cruising the picturesque streets of his beloved Pinehaven, Carson began to understand that what he sought was an escape from the hubris of humanity, from the endless discontent of those who believed in one utopia or another in spite of the fact that history showed utopian thinking to lead inevitably to disaster and often to mass murder on an industrial scale. But of course there could be no escape from the overweening pride and arrogance of the species. You could withdraw, remake your life with a small circle of friends who didn’t wish to silence and punish their fellow countrymen with whom they disagreed, who knew the grievous threat to peace that arose from contempt for others, from an inflated self-esteem that became vainglory. But there was no town remote enough, no fortress walls high enough to protect you from mad ideas with mass appeal

Progress was real progress only when it evolved naturally and thoughtfully from the history of human experience and accumulated wisdom. When it was imposed in contempt for that experience and wisdom, then progress was in fact radical destruction. ...Carson began to understand that what he sought was an escape from the hubris of humanity, from the endless discontent of those who believed in one utopia or another in spite of the fact that history showed utopian thinking to lead inevitably to disaster and often to mass murder on an industrial scale. But of course there could be no escape from the overweening pride and arrogance of the species. You could withdraw, remake your life with a small circle of friends who didn’t wish to silence and punish their fellow countrymen with whom they disagreed, who knew the grievous threat to peace that arose from contempt for others, from an inflated self-esteem that became vainglory. But there was no town remote enough, no fortress walls high enough to protect you from mad ideas with mass appeal.

History shows us we need labels to help define our place. For hundreds of years, people have categorized others as less so they could feel like more. Color, gender, class, religion, physical handicaps, sexual orientation, and pedigree are just a few ways in which one group is divided from another. For every person who stands superior, another must be inferior. But what does it say of us as a human race when we push others down for our own needs? Does it accomplish the intended goal or simply give rise to a pattern of behavior that can never be broken? What if we all stood equal in one another’s eyes and felt pride at our reflection? I speak of utopia and chance being ridiculed, but sitting in a village thousands of miles from everything, I will roll the dice. For one day only, maybe we could put aside our differences and come together in our sameness. For one day, we could see that past all the variations, we are all the same with similar hopes, dreams, fears, strengths, and weaknesses. For one day, we could stand together, not apart, and treat others as we would hope to be treated.

Franklin D. Roosevelt became the architect of the American welfare state. However, Roosevelt was concerned that the institution he was fostering would not live long, since it might destroy the spirit of self-reliance. Two years into his presidency, he held a speech to Congress praising the expansion of welfare programs. During the same speech the president warned that many of the individuals who had lost their jobs during the Great Depression still remained unemployed. “The burden on the Federal Government has grown with great rapidity,” he said, adding that one reason was that many had become dependent on various forms of public handouts. With foresight Roosevelt explained: “When humane considerations are concerned, Americans give them precedence. The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America.”1 In today’s political climate, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s view on public benefits would seem quite harsh, far from politically correct. Hillary

Not only does it matter politically how we rank the vices, but freedom demands that as a matter of liberal policy we must learn to endure enormous differences in the relative importance that various individuals and groups attach to the vices. There is a vast gulf between the seven deadly sins, with their emphasis on pride and self-indulgence, and putting cruelty first. These choice are not casual or due merely to the variety of our purely personal dispositions and emotional inclinations. These different ranking orders are parts of very dissimilar systems of values. Some may be extremely old, for the structure of beliefs does not alter nearly as quickly as the more tangible conditions of life. In fact, they do not die at all; they just accumulate one on top of the other. Europe has always had a tradition of traditions, as our demographic and religious history makes amply clear. It is no use looking back to some imaginary classical or medieval utopia of moral and political unanimity, not to mention the horror of planning one for the future. Thinking about the vices has, indeed, the effect of showing precisely to what extent ours is a culture of many subcultures, of layer upon layer of ancient religious and class rituals, ethnic inheritance of sensibility and manners, and ideological residues whose original purpose has by now been utterly forgotten. With this in view, liberal democracy becomes more a recipe for survival than a project for the perfectibility of mankind.

Sometimes I feel impatient about how much ableism has forced us to emphasize accessibility to get people to pay even a modicum of attention to it. Collective access is revolutionary because disabled people of color (and disabled people in general) choosing each other is revolutionary. And, in many ways access should not be a revolutionary concept. It is the routine, every day part of the work. It is only the first step in movement building. People talk about access as the outcome, not the process, as if having spaces be accessible is enough to get us all free. Disabled people are so much more than our access needs; we can’t have a movement without safety and access, and yet there is so much more still waiting for us collectively once we build this skillset of negotiating access needs with each other. Tonight I am taking time to appreciate and enjoy access as a communication of our deepest desires. When my new friend makes their house wheelchair accessible so I can come over, a whole new level of safety and trust opens up. When a love takes initiative to reach out to event organizers to make sure my buds and I can fully participate, that’s thoughtfulness, and also political commitment in practice. When I eat dinner with dear ones and they know which spoon or cup to grab, that’s attunement. When I can ask a friend to move my body, it’s because I know they want me to be comfortable out in the world. When I can do the impairment-related parts of my routine around someone, that’s intimacy, a gift of letting each other into our most private worlds. Feeling thankful for access—and interdependence—as an opportunity for us to show up for one another, and also for crip spaces that give us a taste of what can take place when we have each other. I am so hungry for us to be together. I am so ready for what is around the corner. —STACEY PARK

There followed, however, the devastating experience of the Communist Party’s purge of the anarchists on Stalin’s orders. Thousands of Orwell’s comrades were simply murdered or thrown into prison, tortured and executed. He himself was lucky to escape with his life. Almost as illuminating, to him, was the difficulty he found, on his return to England, in getting his account of these terrible events published. Neither Victor Gollancz, in the Left Book Club, nor Kingsley Martin, in the New Statesman – the two principal institutions whereby progressive opinion in Britain was kept informed – would allow him to tell the truth. He was forced to turn elsewhere. Orwell had always put experience before theory, and these events proved how right he had been. Theory taught that the left, when exercising power, would behave justly and respect truth. Experience showed him that the left was capable of a degree of injustice and cruelty of a kind hitherto almost unknown, rivalled only by the monstrous crimes of the German Nazis, and that it would eagerly suppress truth in the cause of the higher truth it upheld. Experience, confirmed by what happened in the Second World War, where all values and loyalties became confused, also taught him that, in the event, human beings mattered more than abstract ideas; it was something he had always felt in his bones. Orwell never wholly abandoned his belief that a better society could be created by the force of ideas, and in this sense he remained an intellectual. But the axis of his attack shifted from existing, traditional and capitalist society to the fraudulent utopias with which intellectuals like Lenin had sought to replace it. His two greatest books, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), were essentially critiques of realized abstractions, of the totalitarian control over mind and body which an embodied utopia demanded, and (as he put it) ‘of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable’.

Everywhere power has to be seen in order to give the impression that it sees. But this is not the case. It doesn't see anything. It is like a woman walled up in a 'peepshow'. It is separated from society by a two-way mirror. And it turns slowly, undresses slowly, adopting the lewdest poses, little suspecting that the other is watching and masturbating in secret. The metro. A man gets on - by his glances, gestures and movements, he carves out a space for himself and protects it. From that space, he sets his actions to those of the neighbouring, approximate molecules. He becomes the centre of a physical pressure, sniffs out hostile vibrations and emanations, or friendly ones, on the verge of panic. He joins up with others out of fear. He innervates his whole body with a calculated indifference, wraps himself in a superficial reverie, created only to keep others at a distance. He deciphers nothing, protects himself from the crossfire of everyone's gazes and sets his own as a backhand down the line, staring at a particular face at the back of the carriage until the very lightness of his stare stirs the other in his sleep. When the train accelerates or brakes, all the bodies are thrown in the same direction, like the shoals of fish which change direction simultaneously. The marvellous underwater lethargy of the metro, the self-defence of the capillary systems, the cruel play of vague thoughts - all while waiting for the stop at Faidherbe-Chaligny. The crucial thing is not to have sweeping views of the future, but to know where to plant your primal scene. The danger for us is that we'll keep running up against the wall of the Revolution. For this is the source of our misery: our phobias, our prohibitions, our phantasies, our utopias are imbedded in the nineteenth century, where their foundations were laid down. We have to put an end to this historical coagulation. Beyond it, all is permitted. It will perhaps be the adventure of the end of the century to dissolve the wall of the Revolution and to plunge on beyond it, towards the marvels of form and spirit.

Maybe nostalgia is itself the problem. A Democrat I met in Macon during a conversation we had about the local enthusiasm for Trump told me that “people want to go back to Mayberry”, the setting of the beloved old Andy Griffith Show. (As it happens, the actual model for Mayberry, Mount Airy, a bedraggled town in North Carolina, has gone all in on the Trump revolution, as the Washington Post recently reported.) Maybe it’s also true, as my liberal friends believe, that what people in this part of the country secretly long to go back to are the days when the Klan was riding high or when Quantrill was terrorizing the people of neighboring Kansas, or when Dred Scott was losing his famous court case. For sure, there is a streak of that ugly sentiment in the Trump phenomenon. But I want to suggest something different: that the nostalgic urge does not necessarily have to be a reactionary one. There is nothing un-progressive about wanting your town to thrive, about recognizing that it isn’t thriving today, about figuring out that the mid-century, liberal way worked better. For me, at least, that is how nostalgia unfolds. When I drive around this part of the country, I always do so with a WPA guidebook in hand, the better to help me locate the architectural achievements of the Roosevelt years. I used to patronize a list of restaurants supposedly favored by Harry Truman (they are slowly disappearing). And these days, as I pass Trump sign after Trump sign, I wonder what has made so many of Truman’s people cast their lot with this blustering would-be caudillo. Maybe what I’m pining for is a liberal Magic Kingdom, a non-racist midwest where things function again. For a countryside dotted with small towns where the business district has reasonable job-creating businesses in it, taverns too. For a state where the giant chain stores haven’t succeeded in putting everyone out of business. For an economy where workers can form unions and buy new cars every couple of years, where farmers enjoy the protection of the laws, and where corporate management has not been permitted to use every trick available to them to drive down wages and play desperate cities off one against the other. Maybe it’s just an impossible utopia, a shimmering Mayberry dream. But somehow I don’t think so.

another showed him back in Berlin, reviewing a throng of grateful Germans from the balcony of the German chancery. He had led Germany to military glory against all odds. The Third Reich built by his Nazis seemed invincible. Yet the restless erstwhile artist and miracle-working warlord was not finished. In fact, the most ambitious act of Nazi world building was yet to come. In Mein Kampf Hitler had made it abundantly clear that the long-term plan of National Socialism was the elimination of the Jews and the enslavement of the Slavs. Both goals were contingent on the conquest of the Soviet Union. Since a large percentage of European Jewry lived within her borders and those of Poland, a war in the east was necessary. Poland had now fallen, and German military forces were already sweeping through the country rounding up its Jewish citizenry. But the Soviet Union—the heart of “Jewish-Bolshevism”—remained untouched. To overcome the Aryans’ greatest racial enemy and subdue the Slavs, a full-scale invasion was necessary. As 1941 opened, then, Hitler prepared for what came to be known as Operation Barbarossa. Bringing Nazi ideology to fulfillment, it proved to be the greatest invasion in history. Hitler before the Eiffel Tower Hitler’s plans for the invasion of Russia were laid out in a series of meetings and reports during the spring. They were defined by a combination of utopian vision and nihilistic contempt. Gathering his generals before him on March 30, the leader declared that the coming struggle was not merely one of army against army but of culture against culture. It would be a “clash of two ideologies,” he explained. The Communists and Nazis had erected their states on the ruins of Christendom. Both Christianity, with its principle of charity, and humanism, with its celebration of autonomous individual dignity, were bankrupt. Wars in the past, he observed, had accommodated such values. But mercy and chivalry were now dead. Between opposing armies, he declared “we must forget the notion” of sympathy.150 The coming conflict will be “a war of annihilation.”151 Hitler’s generals got the message. One, Erich Hoepner (d. 1944), subsequently declared to his men with a combination of Darwinian objectivity and Nietzschean ruthlessness: The war against Russia is an essential phase in the German nation’s struggle for existence. It is the ancient struggle of the Germanic peoples against Slavdom, the defense of European culture against the Muscovite-Asiatic tide, the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. That struggle must have as its aim the shattering of present-day Russia and therefore be waged with unprecedented hardness.

the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, communism had its own politics of inevitability: nature permits technology; technology brings social change; social change causes revolution; revolution enacts utopia. When this turned out not to be true, the European and American politicians of inevitability were triumphant. Europeans busied themselves completing the creation of the European Union in 1992. Americans reasoned that the failure of the communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after the end of communism, and so raised a millennial generation without history. The American politics of inevitability, like all such stories, resisted facts. The fates of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus after 1991 showed well enough that the fall of one system did not create a blank slate on which nature generated markets and markets generated rights. Iraq in 2003 might have confirmed this lesson, had the initiators of America’s illegal war reflected upon its disastrous consequences. The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States in 2010 magnified the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of voters. As economic inequality grew, time horizons shrank, and fewer Americans believed that the future held a better version of the present. Lacking a functional state that assured basic social goods taken for granted elsewhere—education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave, vacations—Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future. The collapse of the politics of inevitability ushers in another experience of time: the politics of eternity. Whereas inevitability promises a better future for everyone, eternity places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past. Within inevitability, no one is responsible because we all know that the details will sort themselves out for the better; within eternity, no one is responsible because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do. Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom.

We are in the business of living, and the show must go on.

The whole history of my Utopia has the same amusing sadness. I was always rushing out of my architectural study with plans for a new turret only to find it sitting up there in the sunlight, shining, and a thousand years old. For me, in the ancient and partly in the modern sense, God answered the prayer, "Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings." Without vanity, I really think there was a moment when I could have invented the marriage vow (as an institution) out of my own head; but I discovered, with a sigh, that it had been invented already. But, since it would be too long a business to show how, fact by fact and inch by inch, my own conception of Utopia was only answered in the New Jerusalem, I will take this one case of the matter of marriage as indicating the converging drift, I may say the converging crash of all the rest.

She had aged more than four years. She had never had very good teeth, and now had lost two, just back of the upper eyeteeth, so that the gaps showed when she smiled. Her skin no longer had the fine taut surface of youth, and her hair, pulled back neatly was dull. Shevek saw clearly that Takver had lost her young grace, and looked a plain, tired woman near the middle of her life. He saw this more clearly than anyone else could have seen it. He saw everything about Takver in a way that no one else could have seen it, from the standpoint of years of intimacy and years of longing. He saw her as she was.

Genesis 3–11 makes it clear that humanity failed miserably. Free will in the hands of imperfect beings comes with that risk. But the incident at Babel, foolish and self-willed as it was, shows us that there’s an Edenic yearning in the human heart, a desire for utopia and a sense of divine presence. But God would not trade his own version of Eden for humanity’s. He punished the nations with disinheritance. He would create a new people as his own portion. That inheritance was begun in covenant with Abraham and passed on through his family.

Unlike in other utopian novels, the forces of evil here are not omnipotent; Nabokov shows us their frailty as well. They are ridiculous and can be defeated, and this does not lessen the tragedy- the waste.

North Korea is not irrational, and nothing shows this better than its continuing survival against all odds. North Korea is essentially a political living fossil, a relic of an era long gone.

He loved Shevek, but he could not show him what freedom is, that recognition of each person's solitude which alone transcends it.

A critique of bureaucracy fit for the times would have to show how all these threads—financialization, violence, technology, the fusion of public and private—knit together into a single, self-sustaining web.

Economists sometimes distinguish between three types of goods: private goods, which can be purchased by individuals through the market; club goods, which can only be purchased by a group through some organization like a corporation; and public goods, which can only be purchased by whole communities through the state. This is a very helpful terminological distinction, but it should not be allowed to obscure one very important point. As the example of security guards shows, in many cases the good that is purchased is identical; it’s just that the way it is purchased differs. Rich people pay their security guards personally. Condo owners pay fees to a condo association, which then pays security guards. Citizens pay taxes to the state, which then pays the police. Exactly the same economic transaction is taking place, but it is organized in a different way. So if you ask whether security should be a private good, a club good, or a public good, the answer will be—it depends. Sometimes it is more efficient to deliver security services through the market; sometimes it will be more efficient to deliver them through the state. From the standpoint of society, the goal should be to choose the delivery system that works best in each case.

In a world that’s getting ever richer, where cows produce more milk and robots produce more stuff, there’s more room for friends, family, community service, science, art, sports, and all the other things that make life worthwhile. But there’s also more room for bullshit. As long as we continue to be obsessed with work, work, and more work (even as useful activities are further automated or outsourced), the number of superfluous jobs will only continue to grow. Much like the number of managers in the developed world, which has grown over the last thirty years without making us a dime richer. On the contrary, studies show that countries with more managers are actually less productive and innovative.15 In a survey of 12,000 professionals by the Harvard Business Review, half said they felt their job had no “meaning and significance,” and an equal number were unable to relate to their company’s mission.16 Another recent poll revealed that as many as 37% of British workers think they have a bullshit job.17

Because my life would amount to nothing! It’s just gonna be pleasure without purpose! Okay, so you said that one of the things that would be in my version of a utopian world would be the termination of the gender and racial gap in STEM. You are right. That would be a part of a utopia! However, entering the simulation would not change the gap in real life, so I would merely be living in a whimsical illusion, not a pragmatic and realistic view of how things actually are. Plus, going into the simulation would sort of imply that I surrender to the racial and gender stereotypes. By entering the simulation and not choosing to face my fears of being stereotyped based on race and gender, I am merely showing that I am too scared to live in the world as it truly is and too scared to make a change in the real world. “You also said that fame for intellectual discoveries was part of my version of a utopia, and that is also true, but if I made all of my discoveries in the fantasy world, then my goal to be well-known in the world for intellectual discoveries would technically not be accomplished, because no one in real life would know my name. Some programmed beings would, but I would just be another human being in the real world. I wouldn’t be contributing to anything in real life!” Dad nodded in interest. “You’d rather be helpful than happy.” “Absolutely!

So Disney merely has to stoop down to pick up reality as it is. 'Built-in spectacle', as Guy Debord would say. But we are no longer in the society of the spectacle, which has itself become a spectacular concept. It is no longer the contagion of spectacle which alters reality, it is the contagion of the virtual which obliterates the spectacle. With its diverting, distancing effects, Disneyland still represented spectacle and folklore, but with Disneyworld and its tentacular extension, we are dealing with a generalized metastasis, with a cloning of the world and of our mental universe, not in the imaginary register, but in the viral and the virtual. We are becoming not alienated, passive spectators, but interactive extras, the meek, freeze-dried extras in this immense reality show. This is no longer the spectacular logic of alienation, but a spectral logic of disembodiment; not a fantastic logic of diversion, but a corpuscular logic of transfusion, transubstantiation of each of our cells. An undertaking of radical deterrence of the world, then, but from the inside this time, not from outside, as we saw in what is now the almost nostalgic world of capitalist reality. In virtual reality the extra is no longer either an actor or a spectator; he is off-stage, he is a transparent operator. And Disney wins on yet another level. Not content with obliterating the real by turning it into a 3-D, but depthless, virtual image, it obliterates time by synchronizing all periods, all cultures in the same tracking shot, by setting them alongside each other in the same scenario. In this way, it inaugurates real time — time as a single point, one-dimensional time, a thing which is also without depth: neither present, past nor future, but the immediate synchrony of all places and all times in the same timeless virtuality. The lapsing or collapsing of time: this is the real fourth dimension . The dimension of the virtual, of real time, the dimension which, far from superadding itself to the three dimensions of real space, obliterates them all. So it has been suggested that in a century or a millennium, the old 'swords and sandals' epics will be seen as actual Roman films, dating from the Roman period, as true documentaries on Antiquity; that the Paul Getty Museum at Malibu, a pastiche of a villa from Pompeii, will be confused anachronistically with a villa from the third century B.C. (as will the works inside: Rembrandt and Fra Angelico will all be jumbled together in the same flattening of time); and that the commemoration of the French Revolution at Los Angeles in 1989 will be confused retrospectively with the real event. Disney achieves the de facto realization of this timeless Utopia by producing all events, past or future, on simultaneous screens, remorselessly mixing all the sequences as they would — or will — appear to a civilization other than our own. But this is already our civilization. It is already increasingly difficult for us to imagine the real, to imagine History, the depth of time, three-dimensional space - just as difficult as it once was, starting out from the real world, to imagine the virtual one or the fourth dimension.

Heart’s deviation Let us travel from now to then, from today to tomorrow, Let us fulfill our desires and wishes in a row, Because they lie sequenced in the order only you and I know, And you can see them all over my face while I see them appearing on your beautiful brow, Let me take you into the clouds and get wet, Let me take you there where I first saw you and then our hearts met, Because in that place everything is still wet, Although there are no clouds and the sky is clear, I wonder from where it could such a cover of wetness get, Let me take you there and together discover its secret, Let us know what no one else knows about it, Because the place is mysteriously always wet and it is beyond my wit, Or it could be it is just my false impression of it, Let me then make a confession, that since you left nothing has returned, Let me reveal to you the world that appears deceptively wet as it is actually the world that has endlessly burned, Because when from the distance you see fields of burned desires and wishes turned to ash, they look like wet surfaces where everything is frozen in stillness and unturned, And it is from ash covered places like these life has all its ploys learned, Let me take you away from here too, somewhere far, very far, where burning is not required, Let us travel there where heart’s find whatever they have wished for and desired, Because they say utopia is somewhere where human feelings are never by desperate moments mired, And in this outlandish possibility let us seek each other and never feel tired, Let me love you behind the clouds and beyond the blue sky, Let us go there where everything burns: the sun, the stars, the universe, and everything that flies by, Because there, maybe when you see them burning in the fire of eternity and cry, You might realise why few places appear to be always wet long after their fires die, Let me look at your face, your eyes; and understand you a bit more, Let me see you in reality’s dress and then let me your every sentiment explore, Because when we realise what burning feels like it is then your true soul peeps from your skin’s every pore, Then let me kiss you and see if you too ever felt wet, and feel the corner of your heart where all your feelings you store, Let me let you explore me in the same ways, Let me let you experience the wetness of my soul, that has burned endlessly for nights and days, Because only then you might be able to see what you could never feel because you knew not how to deal with heart’s ways, As it is with all of us, in the beginning we let our minds dictate the darkness of our nights and the brightness of our days, Let me cover you with my desires and their fires and everything that you wish to feel, Let me show you how human lives turn and spin on the fate’s wheel, Because sometimes what appears to be the reality is actually not real, Maybe it will be the misadventure of our hearts but then if you look at the world and the universe even real sometimes seems unreal, Let me introduce you to the world where everything is real because there is no fake dimension, Let us then live in this romantic moment this romantic sensation, Because in the miscellany of my feelings, desires, and endless wishes, your feelings appear to be my heart’s only native creation, So let me, my love Irma, make you feel what true impenitence feels like when you do not obey your mind but you follow your heart’s every selfless deviation!

War-time Japan was an unbelievable utopia; a certain empty beauty pervaded it throughout. This was not the beauty of human truth. So long as ew forget to think, we can easily find in this sight an unsurpassable show of nonchalance and magnificence. Even with the unceasing fear of bombings, people were always nonchalant just so long as they didn't think and needed only to gave entranced. I too was one of those fools. In all innocence, I was playing with the war,

things happen—and I’m still not convinced there is—but if there is, it’s to make you appreciate the good things that much more. A sick, twisted ploy of the universe. A real bed always feels more comfortable after weeks on a tour bus bunk. A shower is heaven after a sweaty, grimy festival show in the summer heat. Forever feels like utopia after so many years of never. Never living. Never breathing. Never knowing if I’d wake up to see tomorrow.

And no amount of “deconstruction” helps here: the ultimate formof idolatry is the deconstructive purifying of this Other, so that all thatremains of the Other is its place, the pure form of Otherness as theMessianic Promise. It is here that we encounter the limit of decon-struction: as Derrida himself has realized in the last two decades, themore radical a deconstruction is, the more it has to rely on its inher-ent undeconstructible condition of deconstruction, the messianicpromise of Justice.This promise is the true Derridean object of belief,and Derrida’s ultimate ethical axiom is that this belief is irreducible,“undeconstructible.” Thus Derrida can indulge in all kinds of para-doxes, claiming, among other things, that it is only atheists who trulypray—precisely by refusing to address God as a positive entity, theysilently address the pure Messianic Otherness. Here one should em-phasize the gap which separates Derrida from the Hegelian tradition:It would be too easy to show that, measured by the failure to establishliberal democracy, the gap between fact and ideal essence does notshow up only in . . . so-called primitive forms of government, theoc-racy and military dictatorship....But this failure and this gap alsocharacterize,a prioriand by definition,all democracies, including theoldest and most stable of so-called Western democracies. At stake hereis the very concept of democracy as concept of a promise that can onlyarise in such a diastema(failure, inadequation, disjunction, disadjust-ment, being “out of joint”).That is why we always propose to speak ofa democracy to come,not of a futuredemocracy in the future present, noteven of a regulating idea, in the Kantian sense, or of a utopia—at leastto the extent that their inaccessibility would still retain the temporalform of a future present,of a future modality of the living present.15Here we have the difference between Hegel and Derrida at its purest:Derrida accepts Hegel’s fundamental lesson that one cannot assert theinnocent ideal against its distorted realization.This holds not only fordemocracy, but also for religion—the gap which separates the idealconcept from its actualization is already inherent to the concept itself:just as Derrida claims that “God already contradicts Himself,” that anypositive conceptual determination of the divine as a pure messianicpromise already betrays it, one should also say that “democracy already139 contradicts itself.” It is also against this background that Derrida elab-orates the mutual implication of religion and radical evil:16radical evil(politically: “totalitarianism”) emerges when religious faith or reason(or democracy itself) is posited in the mode of future present. Against Hegel, however, Derrida insists on the irreducible excess inthe ideal concept which cannot be reduced to the dialectic betweenthe ideal and its actualization: the messianic structure of “to come,”the excess of an abyss which can never be actualized in its determinatecontent. Hegel’s own position here is more intricate than it may ap-pear: his point is not that, through gradual dialectical progress, onecan master the gap between the concept and its actualization, andachieve the concept’s full self-transparency (“Absolute Knowing”).Rather, to put it in speculative terms, his point is to assert a “pure”contradiction which is no longer the contradiction between theundeconstructible pure Otherness and its failed actualizations/determinations, but the thoroughly immanent “contradiction” whichprecedes any Otherness.

I'll Be There For You These words are etched on our hearts. but they're so much more than just words, they're a complete emotion. But it's all just an illusion, a utopia, for which we long. we trade in drinking coffee on a couch, with drinking at a bar. we utter more words to Alexa and Siri, than to people face to face. we can never have six people in one room without anyone looking at their phones. we trade in memories with pictures. we actively look for reasons to not be around people. a Chandler is considered too mean and sarcastic, Ross has too much baggage, who has the energy to deal with that. Phoebe is too quirky to handle. Rachel, that spoilt and entitled bitch. no way. Joey is the fuck boy that will cause you nothing but pain, and Monica with her OCD, that's way too high maintenance. no, we don't say these things when we watch the show, we say these about people around us who bear similar characteristics. we adore these characters, we envy their friendship, their bond, their love. we long for nothing else, yet when confronted with them in real life, we belittle, avoid, cut-off, ignore. we don't want to disturb the utopia, are terrified of bursting the bubble, because if we start recognizing the flaws in our fantasies, we'll be forced to recognize our own. we love to live an à la carte life, wherein we pick and choose the qualities and personalities of a person that we wish to see, and the ones that may simply be brushed away. Generation after generation, will watch that show and call it their utopia, and each will give up hope of ever attaining that, alas! It was a different time! what we long for doesn't require a time machine to achieve, it doesn't need for mobile phones to not exist, or for less bars to exist, or to live away from your parents. it's only as complicated as we try to make it, when it can be as simple as, I'll be there for you, 'cause you're there for me too

I'll Be There For You These words are etched on our hearts. but they're so much more than just words, they're a complete emotion. But it's all just an illusion, a utopia, for which we long. we trade in drinking coffee on a couch, with drinking at a bar. we utter more words to Alexa and Siri, than to people face to face. we can never have six people in one room without anyone looking at their phones. we trade in memories with pictures. we actively look for reasons to not be around people. a Chandler is considered too mean and sarcastic, Ross has too much baggage, who has the energy to deal with that. Phoebe is too quirky to handle. Rachel, that spoilt and entitled bitch. no way. Joey is the fuck boy that will cause you nothing but pain, and Monica with her OCD, that's way too high maintenance. no, we don't say these things when we watch the show, we say these about people around us who bear similar characteristics. we adore these characters, we envy their friendship, their bond, their love. we long for nothing else, yet when confronted with them in real life, we belittle, avoid, cut-off, ignore. we don't want to disturb the utopia, are terrified of bursting the bubble, because if we start recognizing the flaws in our fantasies, we'll be forced to recognize our own. we love to live an à la carte life, wherein we pick and choose the qualities and personalities of a person that we wish to see, and the ones that may simply be brushed away. Generation after generation, will watch that show and call it their utopia, and each will give up hope of ever attaining that, alas! It was a different time! what we long for doesn't require a time machine to achieve, it doesn't need for mobile phones to not exist, or for less bars to exist, or to live away from your parents. it's only as complicated as we try to make it, when it can be as simple as, "I'll be there for you, 'cause you're there for me too

I'll Be There For You" These words are etched on our hearts. but they're so much more than just words, they're a complete emotion. But it's all just an illusion, a utopia, for which we long. we trade in drinking coffee on a couch, with drinking at a bar. we utter more words to Alexa and Siri, than to people face to face. we can never have six people in one room without anyone looking at their phones. we trade in memories with pictures. we actively look for reasons to not be around people. a Chandler is considered too mean and sarcastic, Ross has too much baggage, who has the energy to deal with that. Phoebe is too quirky to handle. Rachel, that spoilt and entitled bitch. no way. Joey is the fuck boy that will cause you nothing but pain, and Monica with her OCD, that's way too high maintenance. no, we don't say these things when we watch the show, we say these about people around us who bear similar characteristics. we adore these characters, we envy their friendship, their bond, their love. we long for nothing else, yet when confronted with them in real life, we belittle, avoid, cut-off, ignore. we don't want to disturb the utopia, are terrified of bursting the bubble, because if we start recognizing the flaws in our fantasies, we'll be forced to recognize our own. we love to live an à la carte life, wherein we pick and choose the qualities and personalities of a person that we wish to see, and the ones that may simply be brushed away. Generation after generation, will watch that show and call it their utopia, and each will give up hope of ever attaining that, alas! It was a different time! what we long for doesn't require a time machine to achieve, it doesn't need for mobile phones to not exist, or for less bars to exist, or to live away from your parents. it's only as complicated as we try to make it, when it can be as simple as, "I'll be there for you, 'cause you're there for me too

Here’s the truth: What I want you to take from this is that you have all the power of your brain available to you now. The utopia that each of these movies and TV shows depicts is already possible for you. While we use all of our brain, some people use their brain better than others. Just as most people use 100 percent of their body, there are some bodies that are faster, stronger, more flexible, and more energized than others. The key is to learn how to use your brain as efficiently and effectively as you possibly can—and by the end of this book, you’ll have the tools to do so. New belief: I am learning to use my whole brain in the best way possible.

If the man is only a man, his rule will be resisted. The utopia would ravel at the seams and show itself as a costume covering naked greed.

It’s not a gang. It’s a promise. You just promise to love trans girls above all else. The idea—although maybe not the practice—is that a girl could be your worst enemy, the girl you wouldn’t piss on to put out a fire, but if she’s trans, you’re gonna offer her your bed, you’re gonna share your last hormone shot.” “That sounds like some kind of trans girl utopia.” I’m so rattled, it’s not even sarcastic. She laughs. “Please. You’ve met a trans woman before, right? Do you think the words trans women and utopia ever go together in the same sentence? Even when we’re not starved for hormones, we’re still bitches. Crabs in a barrel. Fucking utopia, my ass.” She glances at me. My nervousness must show plainly. I can’t tell if I’m safe or not. “Here’s what it is,” she says, a little more gently. “We aim high, trying to love one another, and then we take what we can get. We settle for looking out for one another. And even if we don’t all love one another, we mostly all respect one another.” After a pause she says, “I remember how I used to be before the contagion. Embarrassed to be seen with another trans woman, for fear that her transness would reveal my transness and we’d both get clocked. T4t is an ideal, I guess, and we fall short of it most of the time. But that’s better than before. All it took was the end of the world to make that happen.

I’ve been through hell, sat with pain, and still showed up with heart. That’s not weakness. That’s what surviving like a fucking warrior looks like.