'Utopian' is a word people use to deride your platform when it is such a good idea that liberals and chuds need to pretend it's simply impossible to protect their fragile ideologies from the cognitive dissonance of recognizing that leftists are right.
Utopia is actually a good thing, it basically just means 'really good place', but people use it as an insult when they are trapped in capitalist realism and can't imagine better possible futures.
The word 'utopia' was coined in the 1500's for the title of a book about a really good/perfect society. Interestingly, the modern media landscape is dominated by dystopias, rather than the utopias one might expect from healthy minds.
This is because we, culturally, don't tend to look forward to better times, we're all stuck in fear and can only imagine destructive futures. It's a massive cultural blindspot that most of us don't even recognize we have.
In short, 'utopian' is looked down upon because we live in a culture of dystopia-obsessed doomers who are too capitalist realist to imagine better possible futures, let alone utopia.
As @gammison mentioned, there is more to it. In the Marxist sense it means a system that is conceived without studying society and its inner mechanisms, and thus that an utopia is something that will be inefficient to fight capitalism.
So it's good to have utopian hopes, but a society cannot be efficiently built just on these utopians hopes and must emerge from analysis of our current predicament and how to change it, I think in this sense then utopian can have both a pejorative and complimentary meaning
Right, yes. The question didn't frame 'utopian' in the marxist sense, so I went with the the sense that was both the original, and still the most commonly used. Didn't realize that would be controversial hehe
But ya, gammison's take is really good too. I think there's value in both the orthodox marxist take, and my more general take. It kind of parallels what you said, that there are both positive and negative dimensions to envisioning utopia. Which is why I'm not responding to astigmatic's negativity haha
Fully understand you position, I just thought since your answer was the top post it would be worth adding an explanation of that other point of view :p
'Utopian' is a word people use to deride your platform when it is such a good idea that liberals and chuds need to pretend it's simply impossible to protect their fragile ideologies from the cognitive dissonance of recognizing that leftists are right.
Utopia is actually a good thing, it basically just means 'really good place', but people use it as an insult when they are trapped in capitalist realism and can't imagine better possible futures.
The word 'utopia' was coined in the 1500's for the title of a book about a really good/perfect society. Interestingly, the modern media landscape is dominated by dystopias, rather than the utopias one might expect from healthy minds.
This is because we, culturally, don't tend to look forward to better times, we're all stuck in fear and can only imagine destructive futures. It's a massive cultural blindspot that most of us don't even recognize we have.
In short, 'utopian' is looked down upon because we live in a culture of dystopia-obsessed doomers who are too capitalist realist to imagine better possible futures, let alone utopia.
As @gammison mentioned, there is more to it. In the Marxist sense it means a system that is conceived without studying society and its inner mechanisms, and thus that an utopia is something that will be inefficient to fight capitalism.
So it's good to have utopian hopes, but a society cannot be efficiently built just on these utopians hopes and must emerge from analysis of our current predicament and how to change it, I think in this sense then utopian can have both a pejorative and complimentary meaning
Right, yes. The question didn't frame 'utopian' in the marxist sense, so I went with the the sense that was both the original, and still the most commonly used. Didn't realize that would be controversial hehe
But ya, gammison's take is really good too. I think there's value in both the orthodox marxist take, and my more general take. It kind of parallels what you said, that there are both positive and negative dimensions to envisioning utopia. Which is why I'm not responding to astigmatic's negativity haha
Fully understand you position, I just thought since your answer was the top post it would be worth adding an explanation of that other point of view :p
Ya hell ya :) :heart-sickle:
no this is not what any of us mean when we talk about utopian socialism but nice try
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Engels_Socialism_Utopian_and_Scientific.pdf
lul.
link.to.something.com
well are you interested in your argument or not?