“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of utopias.”
~Oscar Wilde
At this time, when we are going backwards, and the wolves at the door have formed packs and coalitions behind common banner. When when the wolf pack would seem to be in ascendancy, we need to think about utopia more than ever.
As we dare to imagine the future, we do so with a peculiar habit:
we cautiously ask ourselves what the future will be like on the basis of current trends;
we seldom ask the one big philosophically-minded question...
What should the future be like?
We proceed, viewing the future as something to be deduced,
rather than bolder and more direct thinking.
We must learn to view the future as something to be imagined – and thereby at least in part, summoned into being.
To think in a Utopian way is a prime political act. It involves a refusal to be limited by our current obsession with the boundaries of here and now in order to focus on the world as it could and should be in order to maximize the flourishing and minimize the suffering of humanity.
George Orwell was a Utopian thinker, he never meant for his writing to be a "road map", but rather a warning. The trouble with our current world is actually quite simple. We are bombarded every moment of every day with messages that proclaim the future will not be good and we must just learn to live with that. There is nothing we can do, so just accept defeat.
This is not so.
There are solutions to every problem.
No jigsaw puzzle is "impossible" to assemble.
The future is bleak only if we accept a bleak future.
What we need is to imagine the world as we would have it.
Imagine the world as a just place, a free place.
A world where the technology we have already developed to terraform Mars is applied in reverse (instead of creating greenhouse gases, we remove them) to bring our greenhouse gas levels back down to what they were before the industrial revolution.
(For instance).
The bottom line is that we all have a utopian side to our brains,
which we are normally careful to disguise, for fear of humiliation.
Yet, our visions are what carve out the space in which later patient and real development can occur!
We must all be committed to Utopian Thinking and the envisaging of the world as it should be.
