Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

In fact, for most of history, and with very great many minds throughout history agreeing to that, it would be your objection that would be considered bizarre.

You don't have to believe in a specific creator or any specific religious mythology to agree with such a statement as "this world is fallen". Even as atheist like e.g. Emil Cioran could agree with such a statement. But even if someone actually believes e.g. in the Christian god, it's almost irrelevant as to the validity of their belief that "this world is fallen".

It's just a way of seeing the world -- as permanently imperfect and with fatal flaws in its construction. In fact most of our history and even personal lives agrees with this observation as well: we are ignorant of most things, we age, we get ill, we suffer, we kill each other, we are petty, and so on. And in the end, we just die, along with everybody we knew and loved. All that in an indifferent universe, that could e.g. wipe thousands of us out tomorrow with an earthquake, a tsunami, and so on. Or something of our own making, like a nuclear war.

These things can be summed up in "this world is fallen", and there's nothing bizarre or unconnected about it.

One might disagree and see progress etc, and even be optimistic that everything will prevail, or even see no issue with death and illness and the ills of old age, and so on. But in the main there's nothing much bizarre in saying that "this world is fallen" -- e.g. that things are incomplete, broken, and more often than not disappointing.

Or for a slightly different approach, GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/130/pg130.html, even if you disagree with his arguments, I suspect if you give a read you'll enjoy his delightful prose.

> But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. But this which is true even of inanimate things is in a quite special and terrible sense true of all human things. An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old. It is the custom in passing romance and journalism to talk of men suffering under old tyrannies. But, as a fact, men have almost always suffered under new tyrannies; under tyrannies that had been public liberties hardly twenty years before. [...]

> This startling swiftness with which popular systems turn oppressive is the third fact for which we shall ask our perfect theory of progress to allow. It must always be on the look out for every privilege being abused, for every working right becoming a wrong. In this matter I am entirely on the side of the revolutionists. They are really right to be always suspecting human institutions; they are right not to put their trust in princes nor in any child of man. The chieftain chosen to be the friend of the people becomes the enemy of the people; the newspaper started to tell the truth now exists to prevent the truth being told. Here, I say, I felt that I was really at last on the side of the revolutionary. And then I caught my breath again: for I remembered that I was once again on the side of the orthodox.

> Christianity spoke again and said: "I have always maintained that men were naturally backsliders; that human virtue tended of its own nature to rust or to rot; I have always said that human beings as such go wrong, especially happy human beings, especially proud and prosperous human beings. This eternal revolution, this suspicion sustained through centuries, you (being a vague modern) call the doctrine of progress. If you were a philosopher you would call it, as I do, the doctrine of original sin. You may call it the cosmic advance as much as you like; I call it what it is—the Fall."

> "Es ist unmöglich, dass ein Mensch ohne Religion seines Lebens froh werde."

> "It‘s impossible for a human to enjoy his life without religion."

I actually think there's a lot of value to be found in religion; the problem comes when it gets infused with a political or national identity and becomes a rallying call instead of a subject of contemplation. The red flags I saw in the article were 1) the hosting organization has a political agenda, and 2) it felt like the author tried to hide the roots of his ideas. It's possible he was just trying to avoid being judged based on his faith, which, yeah. But I've also seen people with an agenda try to propagate their religious or political ideas in a spoonful-of-sugar fashion; obscuring them within content that doesn't advertise itself as such, in hopes that it travels further. I've developed a heightened sense for that sort of thing over the years.

As for the distinction itself, I was prompted to look it up on Merriam-Webster:

dys· to· pia | \ (ˌ)dis-ˈtō-pē-ə \

Definition of dystopia

1 : an imagined world or society in which people lead wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives

2 : ANTI-UTOPIA sense 2

So... the primary definition actually undercuts his thesis, while the second definition lines up. I mean it's an interesting subject of contemplation - dystopia's relationship with utopia - but he took an argumentative approach rather than a contemplative one, which I think squandered the topic a little.

That is, using labels that previously widely used defined patterns resulting in real human-killing -- to, instead, describe a pattern that a person finds unfitting to his/her policy views.

In other words, misplaced naming calling, in a way, stealing the valor from the real victims of the true dystopian past events.

"... It is important to keep dystopia in its place, and in perspective.

There are and have been real dystopias in the world, and imaginary ones help illustrate how utopian visions can endanger decent regimes and communities.

Not every call for a border wall or “Medicare for all” is dystopian; one (or the other) may be a stupid idea, but it is not summoning 1984. ..."

At what point do you consider the listening process sufficient for conclusions to be drawn, or any other action to be taken? If all you do is gather data and you never analyze or act upon it, what use is it?

You are talking about people being shunned and gossiped about like it is on par with being kidnapped by armed government agents and confined in a cell. Like going to jail or being killed and getting cancelled on twitter are close enough to the same thing that the same philosophical framework applies.

I'd suggest you back up and re-evaluate how you got here.

While I agree with the rest, this is just naive. You cant convince those who are don't debate in good faith. You can defeat them or you can convince third parties, but trying to convince these is lost cause.

You cant change them, you can only change environment so that they cant cause much harm.

Then convince the offenders. Preaching to those who are already outraged or the uninvolved just fans their emotions too and moves further and further away from reasoned discourse.

>because trial by public opinion and media isn't a judicial process

This has indeed been a problem in the US for decades where anyone accused of any crime has their face plastered on the evening news for ratings. Never is there a retraction when released or upon acquittal. Not that it would do any good as the damage is irreparable.

Now that it's starting to happen to powerful people, the issue is finally being raised. I'm going to guess the eventual resolution will be some lawsuit system that makes publishing accusations of the powerful financially impossible while keeping open season on ordinary people.

Taken metaphorically, a utopia is a idealized state of affairs where perfection (optimality) is reached. This state of affairs is imaginary however, because the world in which such a perfection is attained is also imaginary. Attempts to achieve it in our reality (communism, etc.) ends up running up against a complex system of nonlinear tradeoffs, which is what I imagine the OP is alluding to.

This is an important idea. Optimality shifts when the environment shifts, and some ideas which work well in one environment may end up working badly when the world changes.

Because the world is inevitably complex and stochastic, we need enough dynamism in society in order to continually adapt, and for that we need a system that permits competing ideas, as well mechanisms to limit the amplification of the effects of bad ideas (good democratic institutions do a decent job at the latter).

Is it synonymous with social change? Most social changes aren't optimisations, they are complicated changes to how resources are distributed; leading to unpredictable outcomes.

Take social welfare. This can probably be considered a social optimisation and most reasonable people would agree that some level of welfare is appropriate. But there doesn't seem to be any particular agreement on the economic or social front about whether the optimum amount is more or less. Or what we are optimising for.

Simply having a few determined goals means the design necessarily have to be biased against the unmentioned goals. And those might be important for the general state, but it can be a hidden preference.

By that I assume you're largely referring to the Soviet Union and China during the cultural revolution? Yeah sure, those were bad, but it's hard for me to say whether they were particularly better or worse than slavery (at least from the perspective of a slave).

Moreover, I think that the assumption that those 20th century projects failed because they were utopian is unsourced. I think I could equally validly claim that they failed because of a fundamental failure to understand basic economics and/or a deep lack of empathy or realism on the part of national leadership.

Is there such an attempt? I see a lot of discussion of Dystopia, a few restatements of the thesis, but I don't actually see anything attempting to prove the thesis. The logic is "Not everything bad is a dystopia. Dystopias really suck. Trust me, Dystopias come about from trying to achieve utopia.

The author DOES distinguish speculation from perfection, so your criticism of the above post is correct, but even with the author's provided definition, I don't actually see any ARGUMENT being made, just a claim with some disconnected but true statements around it.

>Likewise, dystopias are inevitably totalitarian: to achieve a perfect society, nothing can be beyond the reach of the state.

This discounts anarchist utopias entirely, and any argument against the attainability of an anarchist utopia makes it all the moore utopian. The author seems to be using a shoddy, half-baked definition created for the purpose of this article.

Describing is not the same as justifying. Nature is what created us as individuals. Humanity could have been a vast society of clones (like an ant colony) but it isn't. We take all of the good and all of the bad together when we accept our individuality.

primarily a positive work describing existing material conditions and relations is utopian

It sounds to me like you're conflating the Communist Manifesto with Capital. The Manifesto is distinctly and unabashedly utopian. It is not a critique of any extant society, it is a call to arms. It sets forth a sharply bifurcated worldview, proletariat versus bourgeoisie, and attempts to rally the former in revolution against the latter.

This fact is so obvious, to so many people, that terms like "Communist utopia" and "worker's paradise" have become clichés.

(Or so proponents seem to believe.)

Sometimes It feels like the "conservatives" are more utopian than the progressives. They just live in the utopia of a past that never existed.

I like the perfectionism vs progressivism thing. My analogy would have been that it's like "the truth": if you think you're in full possession of the full truth, or ever could be, that's silly. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to learn more, be more honest, and so on. "truth" with a small t is still a useful concept. But it's always subjective, and requires people figuring that out both alone, with nothing between themselves and their conscience, and together (which will never change it to being objective, or completely agreed upon by all, or mean 100% the same thing even for two identical twins who "totally agree" on it).

Just like one could say we are the "result" of what our cells are doing all the time (I know you really couldn't simplify it like that at all, but for the sake of argument), society is the result of the daily decisions of the actual people in it - what they think others expect of them, and whether they listen to that or their inner voice, and so on.

It seems to me many want to change society "on" others rather than with them, you might say they would rather attempt to change society on a drawing board to change their neighbours, than get to know their neighbours and themselves in the first place. But societies aren't really that different from personal relations and families. People grow over time, societies grow, decay or heal over time, too -- not as the result of turning a switch or throwing out everything that was before on a dime, just because we really want to.

> Until now the totalitarian belief that everything is possible seems to have proved only that everything can be destroyed.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

Though when we keep failing to produce a simple electronic voting system, a problem shared around the World. You wonder if perhaps the World could come together and group design an open source solution that the people of the World could audit and help improve, until we all become happy. That would be a start.