Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes

There’s nothing I hate quite so much as a utopia. The very idea to me is like the screeching and grinding of machinery as it tears itself apart. It’s like the emptiness of somebody remarking on the beauty of the snow just at the moment I’ve begun to think of shoveling out my car, and of the inevitable difficulty I’ll have in finding a parking space once I attempt to drive somewhere.

Utopias aren’t just impossible. They aren’t just silly fantasies or harmless games for children. They are actively bad and I will tell you why. Utopias are bad because they are an extension of one’s will projected out to encompass everything. We imagine things ordered perfectly to suit ourselves and then we say that everyone will find this order just as pleasing. We will all be happy if the game is played exactly as I wish. We will all be much happier if I am made more happy. If only I were god, I’d set things right for everyone.

This is not the way that things should be. The spice of life is in its variety, its many flavors. Conflict, argument, disorder, carelessness, and selfishness! These are our pleasures and I reject a world that tries to do without them. I would no more enjoy a world where no one argued than I would an endless march through a glorious snow covered landscape. It would be cold. It would be lonely. It would be boring and I would eventually die from cold, and from fatigue, and from exposure.

When someone looks out a window who loves the winter and says how pretty it is the winter will eventually change and lead to summer. Then my friend will become irritable and languid and I will come alive and say how lovely it is, how I don’t mind the heat at all, how I wish it would go on forever. Wouldn’t it be lovely if it was always summer? For me, perhaps. This is the problem with utopias. They imagine that we are all so much alike that we can find the one single way to order things such that we all will be happy. Well, I won’t be happy if everybody else is happy. I’ll be bored and look to start arguments so I can show off my wit and my sarcasm and my intelligence. I’ll go rooting about to find hypocrisy and shallowness and when I find them I’ll hold them up in triumph as your utopia breaks and falls away, back into nothingness.

I like the world we have. I’d like to make it better, a world where more people were more free to pursue their messy, shallow, selfish careless lives. I want a real world with real people in it and I don’t think real people would ever populate Utopia.