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Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you get to just label every regime you don't like as a "utopia", say "utopianism is bad", and leave it there. After all, many people would say that the status quo today is also someone's utopia, with the important question being whose.

Societies are always and have always been creatures of intentional design. The design might be good or might be bad, but to try to cordon off via, "Designed societies are bad" just amounts to denying the design of your preferred actually-existing society.

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Thank you. This is exactly what I got from the article. I think Bernie Sanders went too far in some of his policy proposal, but I wouldn't characterize him, or progressives in general, as promoting a utopian Marxist vision. I think this kind of intellectual laziness, where people project every political position out into some cartoonish slippery slope instead of tackling the complexity and nuance of public policy, is one of the most detrimental and pervasive logical fallacies in our political discourse.

>I think Bernie Sanders went too far in some of his policy proposal, but I wouldn't characterize him, or progressives in general, as promoting a utopian Marxist vision.

Very much agreed. From the point of view of actual radical leftists (for instance, the ones I grab beer with once or twice a month), Bernie Sanders is very much a moderate, even a kind of conservative. In trying to expand the sphere of public goods back towards where it has previously been (in some places and times) and a bit past that, he's just trying to turn our market society[1] back into a market economy subservient to a democratic society.

Correspondingly, we also need to consider the degree to which, while we don't live in Friedrich von Hayek's or Milton Friedman's ideal society, their ideas now exercise far, far more influence over our society than they did at the inauguration of the Mont Pelerin Society[2]. These men plotted utopia, and to a great degree, they've achieved it, exactly insofar as the social democrats whose hegemony they wanted to destroy are now seen as unthinkable radicals dreaming of utopia.

[1] -- http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/03/q-a-with-mi...

[2] -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society

> Correspondingly, we also need to consider the degree to which, while we don't live in Friedrich von Hayek's or Milton Friedman's ideal society, their ideas now exercise far, far more influence over our society than they did at the inauguration of the Mont Pelerin Society[2].

This is very true. It's a very interesting exercise to go back and read old copies of the Congressional Reports and compare them to ones from today. Back in the 1940s, Republicans would say things as lip service to prevailing views about labor that democrats wouldn't say today. Big sweeping appeals to the public interest in the way today people make narrow pointed arguments about efficiency and cost-benefit analysis.

Surprisingly, the "American Experience" bio of George HW Bush does a workman's job of explaining this. But it was really the demise of Nelson Rockefeller that ended the Liberal and Moderate Republican as a thing. After all, he was divorced.

Topologically, the Left pulled farther and faster, and there was also a reaction to that.

Industry became fragmented, and that's much harder to organize into unions. It was different when there were a small number of large monolithic firms.

I think the best description of Sanders is "the last New Dealer".

This being said, Progressivism has a checkered past. The bleeding edge is a fickle hellcat, full of bad normative assumptions. A devout New England Abolitionist would have thought nothing of beating the Irish in his employ severely. Stuff like that.

A political order may be adopted, imposed, etc, but "society" is something humans, as social animals, develop spontaneously. Proper governance of society follows understanding of human nature and the human condition as well as the contingencies of Man's existence. It is no trivial matter, of course, and utopian ideologies have a particularly bad record with philosophical anthropology. Furthermore, Man is a moral animal. His moral perfection is not a given and must be worked out during his lifetime through effort. Utopians, sadly, often like to blame "the system". Mind you, "systems" are always the product of morally imperfect and ignorant men for morally imperfect and ignorant men. Utopians tend to think they can somehow circumvent all of that.

Add to all of this the consequentialist tendencies in the political discourse.

"Societies are always and have always been creatures of intentional design."

Why do you think that? I'd say almost the opposite, that societies are not "intentionally designed", but evolve from myriad people and "accidents" of history.

Well said. Political and intellectual elites tend to attach negative connotations to the word "utopia". Perhaps they feel that the very concept of utopia attracts undesirable attention to the bleakness of our current status quo as experienced by the average person.

I do not think it requires elite status, or elitism, to doubt the value of utopianism. Indeed, judged historically, utopianism has always been an elite preoccupation in its own right, and this remains quite true today.

But a Utopia is really adherence to some perfect Platonic form, not the sort of greasy compromise necessary to accommodate the crooked timber of humanity.

Design in general is bad, if the design overrides all other measurement and input.

Wasn't More's book a reductio anyway?

>But a Utopia is really adherence to some perfect Platonic form,

There's no such thing as a Platonic form.

Precisely.

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