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Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

DFW put it nicely in "Authority and American Usage", and it's stuck with me as a pithy counterpoint to this kind of teleology.

Describing pinker's thoughts on linguistic descriptivism:

Steven Pinker's 1994 "The Language Instinct" is a good and fairly literate example of this second kind of Descriptivist argument, which, like the Gove-et-al. version, tends to deploy a Jr.-high-filmstrip SCIENCE: POINTING THE WAY TO A BRIGHTER TOMORROW-type tone...

I think it's a lot closer to the truth to say that humans tend to be human throughout history, for both good and ill, and that this alone is why neither anyone's idea of utopia nor dystopia will ever really happen. We're always somewhere in the middle.

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We've already had plenty of dystopias: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, North Korea today... As for a utopia? Nobody can agree on what that would look like. When somebody claims to have a plan for a utopia, my first question is: "for whom?"

How does any ideological utopia work without excluding anyone? I have yet to see a satisfactory answer. The paradox of tolerance would suggest that utopias are impossible, at least with human beings.

> How does any ideological utopia work without excluding anyone?

https://www.amazon.com/Polystate-Thought-Experiment-Distribu...

I suspect your dystopias have in common that they all had utopian visions. Instead of focusing on real problems and making gradual progress they kept talking about building heaven on earth. Apparently they just needed to tear down existing institutions and kill a few people first...

Instead of focusing on real problems and making gradual progress

That's a protopia [0], not a utopia. A utopia is a radical, top-down, planned society based on some ideology.

[0] http://kk.org/thetechnium/protopia/

don't count modern day China out.

supposedly they're maintaining 120,000 person concentration camps for their stubborn ethnic minorities in the western region.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/25/at-least-12000...

That's a very good point. We should interpret as a red flag the rhetoric around "harmony" put out by the communist party.

Pinker is most certainly Whiggist in his historical outlook.

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