Why utopia fails

Thinking about utopias forces us to hold a mirror to who we as a society are, prompting questions about our values and our ethics.

An ideal place, or even a better place, is wildly subjective. By exploring what that could mean, we expose what afflicts us in the present and try to prescribe a remedy. I think we need to hope for and imagine a better future. Taking small, actionable steps forward can make those musings feel less like a frivolous pipe dream—and is infinitely better than backsliding. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.

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Dreamers, drifters and seekers in need of belonging, the needy and wounded, and the egomaniacal and power-thirsty are a dangerous constellation of actors for sustaining a community. But often they are the most responsive to an invitation. Additionally, for many dreamers the practicalities of farming and self-sufficiency clash with their utopian hopes for radically new ways of living, as people become pulled into the myopia of just getting by.

As Catherine Blinder wrote in , reflecting on her 14 years on a Vermont commune:. The nucleos started as groups of 12 people; now they number But if you have more than 25 people, then it is hard to create intimacy and keep connections close. Before becoming a full citizen of Damanhur, aspiring citizens go through a trial period to see if they truly feel aligned with the culture and intentions of the community.

B ut even with the best organisational acumen, intentional communities are often heavily criticised for the backward progress they tend to symbolise. In , Alcott founded Fruitlands, an experimental community in Harvard, Massachusetts. Attracting a little over a dozen people, Fruitlands failed after seven months. Jimmy Stice, a young entrepreneur from Atlanta, is working to build a sustainable town from scratch in a river valley in Panama. Nara Pais, a Brazilian IT consultant turned eco-villager, lived for a time at the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland, one of the more successful intentional communities, which has been running since and is now a model of ecological building, with solar and wind energy.

Pais explained that it took Findhorn more than two decades to overcome basic infrastructural challenges. The bottom line is that many intentional communities exist because of wealthy patrons and benefactors, and courting philanthropy and start-up capital is part of the job of charismatic founders. It had a charismatic founder who attracted donations from wealthy Brazilian elites sold on his vision of deep self-reflection, incorporating elements of monastic living.

But when the community started to evolve beyond the control and vision of its founder, he left. Today, Uniluz survives by inviting people in and charging them for weekend workshops or week-long immersions. The permanent residents often find it hard to go deeper into communal living and introspection amid this constant flux of people coming in for short-term healing or to try their hand at hippie life, even while acknowledging that spiritual tourism is a significant revenue for communities such as Uniluz.

The community also created its own currency which doubles as a kitsch souvenir sold to tourists for money. Piracanga, another spiritual community in Brazil, has also stayed financially healthy by catering to a market for spiritual voyeurs and wealthy elites who flock there to learn aura readings, breathing and meditation, conscious eating, dream interpretation, yoga, even clowning. All in all, the top revenue streams for intentional communities tend to be tourism, education workshops and trainings , crafts and artisanal goods, and agriculture.

When he did make the balance sheet publicly available, community members were shocked at their illusion of self-sufficiency. The Shakers, one of the more successful communities in US history, numbered more than 6, at their midth-century height.

Their success owed to a religious philosophy of hard work, honesty and frugality, which made them good farmers and artisans — that famous furniture! But ultimately, even with their artisanal viability, their practice of celibacy — procreation was forbidden to members of the community — undermined their sustainability. Today, the last Shaker village in Maine has a population of two.

In contrast, the Amish — whose families produce, on average, five children — number more than , Shunning excludes those who have transgressed community rules from commercial dealings and common social interactions eating meals, exchanging gifts with Amish members.

H istory shows that a lot of fundamentally religious 18th- and 19th-century social experiments in the US were built on practices of self-denial, repression and perfectionism that became exhausting for people to sustain, no matter the zeal of community members. Communities are just fractals of society. Meanwhile, at Damanhur, conflicts are cleverly allowed to escalate into a playful battle that serves to exorcise community tensions and animosities.

Utopianisms are those ideas put into practice. This is where the trouble begins. Thomas More coined the neologism utopia for his work that launched the modern genre for a good reason.

Thus, the dark mirror of utopias are dystopias— failed social experiments, repressive political regimes, and overbearing economic systems that result from utopian dreams put into practice. There is no best way to live because there is so much variation in how people want to live. Therefore, there is no best society, only multiple variations on a handful of themes as dictated by our nature.

For example, utopias are especially vulnerable when a social theory based on collective ownership, communal work, authoritarian rule, and a command-and-control economy collides with our natural-born desire for autonomy, individual freedom, and choice. Moreover, the natural differences in ability, interests, and preferences within any group of people leads to inequalities of outcomes and imperfect living and working conditions that utopias committed to equality of outcome cannot tolerate.

We had tried every conceivable form of organisation and government. We had a world in miniature. We had enacted the French revolution over again with despairing hearts instead of corpses as a result. Most of these 19th-century utopian experiments were relatively harmless because, without large numbers of members, they lacked political and economic power. But add those factors, and utopian dreamers can turn into dystopian murderers.

More writes, in his book Utopia, about a society that is perfect in practically ever sense. The people all work an equal amount and everything they need for survival is provided. Most importantly is that everyone living in this perfect society is happy and content with their everyday lives. In this society everybody supports everyone. The community is only as strong as its weakest link. For society to progress everyone must work together. Opponents of the Utopian system, however, feel that the strong.

In his novel, More explains that a utopia is anything but perfect. More focused on the human imperfections, and deteriorating government. Many works of literature also portrayed the same ideas regarding. Modern society is far from perfect, and even further from fair. This reality is perhaps why the portrayal of utopian worlds has captivated audiences for decades.

This essay will attempt to examine the ways in which the concept of utopia has been portrayed on screen, notably within the genre of science fiction SF.

Prior to critically evaluating its links to film, we should start by defining utopia. Utopia is about how we would live and what kind of world we would live in if we could do just that. What is a Utopian Society?