Utopia? Forget About It. Time for ‘Untopia.’

Striving for the perfect society has been the cause of great misery. We should embrace our imperfections.

 

I am not an expert, a professor, a professional, or in any other way superior in knowledge or intelligence. I am a denizen of the modern world, where destinies are decided by ancient religions, the economic infrastructure, and indecipherable, futuristic sciences. Some of the most influential people in my daily life—the president, various CEOs, myriad artists—I will, most likely, never meet. Every hour of every day the media accost me with dangers, enemies, and ever-mounting specters of death.

I am powerless in the face of these forces. I lust after, vote for, and labor under people I will never know. This is a destiny I share with billions of my sisters and brothers, worldwide. We pretend to decide, but secretly we know that the important decisions are made for us by powers so great that they could eradicate any one and any number of us from history.

And so, in an attempt to reach out into the void of the billions who share my fate, I wrote a book, Folding the Red Into the Black, which says that the world we live in is unconcerned with our predicaments; that it is a world that lies to us—and if we see past the lies it might demote, debilitate, imprison, or simply kill us. Our greatest treasure, human happiness, is not valued by the systems that govern us unless that happiness puts money or power in their pockets.