"Utopia", from the Greek "ou topos" (=no-where) was a name first used in 1516 by Sir Thomas More, for an imaginary island where the perfect society existed, where life was a sort of Christian communism blended with private property and governed entirely by reason, instead of the greed and selfishness that prevailed in the world.
It was never tried in the real world, because it advocated too much government control with too little individual freedom.
Previous imaginary ideal societies had been described by other famous minds like Plato, in his "Republic", over 2000 years before More and many others.
Monasticism tried to institute perfect communities run by religious rules. Many other solutions were proposed by other famous thinkers: "The Sun City" by Tommaso Campanella, "The New Atlantis" by Francis Bacon, to mention just two.
Communities were organized also in USA, based on the best ideas available. They were expected to succeed without fail, because they were populated only by members who shared the ideals and were willing to accept sacrifices.
Examples: the Harmony Society, about 1805, in Pennsylvania; Nashoba, 1826, Memphis, Tennessee; Brook Farm, West Roxbury, Mass.; Oneida, 1835, Putney, VT; the Amana Society, in Iowa; the Hutterites, in USA and Canada; the Bruderhof Movement, in several countries; the promising Anarchist Collectives, around 1930, in Spain; the Shakers, the Mennonites, and many other societies.
In spite of the careful choice of participants, most communities failed into oblivion, and hardly any succeeded as intended.
Even when virtuous behavior was directed by benevolent rulers, the result was oppression, suffocation of individuality, worse limitations than in the conventional world. No matter how lofty the intentions, serious problems were caused by the unsuspected shortcomings of the adopted systems.
The loftier the
inspiration, the lower the results; the more love-rule, the more cruel the
consequences.
The more the missionaries believed in their remedies, the more intolerant they
were of criticism.
Failures were blamed on the victims, not on the leaders.
As in present politics, the leaders sought more power and money to implement
their policies, which caused more victims and disasters.
Where guiltless sexual promiscuity was adopted, the expectations were killed by glutted fulfillment, and all degraded in hostile frustration.
Religious fervor mutated into boredom or destructive fanaticism, harmony into petty or murderous conflicts, love into promiscuity or jealousy, cooperation into fights...
Most who joined those
communities were seeking realization of the ideals of love, brotherhood,
liberty, religion, justice and equality they were convinced normal society was
too corrupted to pursue.
However, what looked like unwillingness by the normal society was simply
adaptation to the failures of all trials.
Today's liberals and leftists are the heirs of the above described utopians..
For most people, it is impossible to believe that liberty, justice, equality, love cannot be implemented directly, without the disastrous side effects caused by the faulty knowledge, false premises, untested methods and sheer incompetence which persist unabated.
Those and other lofty
ideals are just misleading designations for realities we misunderstand.
But we
believe that we understand.
Jean de la Bruyere's (1645-1696) observation: "The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth" is probably the most fitting warning for those who think that merely legislating or working for liberty, justice, equality etc. offers what they hope.
Many, if not most, lofty ideals are like labels of elixirs on bottles containing anything from placebos to poisons.
It is hard for a
believer to think that one can obtain the opposite when working for something
right and noble.
But it is almost a natural law that politics based on good intentions alone
tends to transform the best ideals into disasters.
We know why love
cannot happen by legislation, even if there are still bright-eyed do-gooders who
vote for the socialist mirages.
Legislated love has a stubborn tendency toward
the opposite result.
The same happens with justice, most likely because we expect it from the law rather than from self discipline and competent training.
Law only gives us an appearance of justice. The experts in "justice", like lawyers, legislators, politicians or law enforcement officers, know why the "courts of justice" are only "courts of law".
That is, the pretense
of justice is eliminated, for laws are similar to the rules of a game; and the
game in question is called justice.
This game is a designated "reality", frozen within the limits designated by the
rules, as in every game.
Evolution stops there,
prisoner of a network of rules, whose paralyzing function is entrusted to
judges, incompetent juries, and to a self-conscious Supreme Court.
Laws are obsolesced by the changing reality of life, which evolves continuously
without decrees or approvals, unlike the games of justice.
Only unbiased education can offer reliable results, as a painstaking evolution toward the life goal, which prudently escapes our trapping definitions.
We already know,
consciously or not, that the "pursuit of happiness" as such is impossible.
Happiness cannot be pursued directly: it can only be the result of successfully
striving for tangible goals or their combinations, like knowledge, power,
wealth, love.
Even in such cases, happiness vanishes if one dwells on success, without continuing toward further goals... The pursuits are frustrated by concentrating or believing in their labels.
This realization is too complicated for the simple believers, who are probably the majority of the voters. They are, therefore, the ones who vote us into serious troubles.
Probably, the most
obvious "ideal" is sexual pleasure, because of our unmistakable perception of
it, in spite of the different interpretations by man and woman, religions,
psychologies, cultures and times.
That proves that nature only demands reproduction from us: sex is nature's
inducement for our reproduction. Other goals and pleasures
for us are futile.
Justice, equality or rights in sexuality are so patently unreal, that expecting or legislating them in sex is not only absurd, but it makes sex intercourse in the name of justice, equality and human rights virtually impossible.
The obvious fact is that sex has laws of its own that go back to a dark mythology of human feelings, and to biologic mysteries. But also our most important ideals are merely labels of realities with their own laws that we know or understand only partially.
Therefore, those who want to build a society based on "justice", "equality", "love" and other ideals in the leftist interpretation are the dangerous members of our society, because they presume to legislate rules based on a knowledge they don't even know not to have...
They are like someone who claims the right to perform brain surgery who is unaware that he doesn't know how to do it. Brain surgery by someone who knows he doesn't know it is not as bad, no matter how bad by itself...
We should work and evolve within our possibilities toward our higher goals, not have them destroyed by those who irresponsibly give the task of instant solutions to the incompetence of a government who should remain limited to the traditional roles of defense, police, public works and roads.
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