anti utopia and utopians

Four reasons to reject utopianism

1. the world is too complex for a utopia to be realized as conceived. It's just not gonna be what you expect. 

2. it's better to target specific ills than to target an entire society. The risks and stakes of larger targeting are vastly higher than targeting something specific and local. The smaller your target, the less complexity.  Even systemic problems should probably be solved as specifically and locally as possible -- if possible.

3. the world is too complex to get to utopia from here. So it's unwise to sacrifice the now for the sake of a future that will probably never arrive. 

When the system is so bad that there's nothing left to lose, then revolution makes sense, but don't expect utopia out of it. In the social world, actions often engender a greater and opposite reaction, and revolutions are often won by superior weaponry, not the ideal outcome since the weapons that won the revolution will likely be turned on the public that lost revolutionary conflict, the regime having won through force not through consensus. 

4. technology and social evolution change the conditions of the world such that what might seem a utopia from the perspective of current conditions, or the current means to achieve utopia, become irrelevant. There is nothing quite so depressing as reading the urban plans of the past, even of the recent past like a few decades ago. They are not just irrelevant to today, they would now be considered counterproductive, even destructive. At best, laughable, maybe. 

5. most important of all, utopia is a contradictory state. People like problem-solving. It's engaging and engagement is more rewarding than mere happiness. If happiness were the goal of life, no one would have children. Utopia is a kind of lame, abstract and stupid. When you're engaged, you forget all about happiness. What is more engaging than a problem to solve? In other words, there's no such thing as utopia. Can life be better? Yes. So again, the small targets are the ones worth pursuing, like lessening inequalities -- not eliminating them, but ameliorating the worst of it. Expect the future to have complaints. Justifiable complaints. That's good. Something to solve, and roles for people to solve them. (But amongst all the complaints it's all too easy to forget about the oblivious obvious -- the 99% of life that actually works.)

6. utopianism is a cheap way out, rather than facing and solving problems that might have solutions.  Solutions can be difficult and require complex understandings that require hard work. The utopian too easily blames it on an impossible system and opts for a simplistic fantasy dream -- problem solved, no work, no understanding, no learning of how things work and why they fail. This kind of simplicity btw, is a recipe for failure. It's a lot like god-of-the-gaps or conspiracy theories' cui bono + post hoc ergo propter hoc, one simple answer to every event. The elites did it, whoever they are. Utopia will fix it all.