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| Image source: Utopia, Loyalty Books (audio book) |
We just passed the anniversary two Thursdays ago of what would become the first terrorist attack in Paris on Charlie Hebdo. Many cries went out "Juis Suis Charlie," which prompted this post by me.
Six months earlier, I posted this, seeing common cause in the movements around the world authoritarian, rigid, disdaining of change and fairly apocalyptic; in many cases racist and xenophobic.
Utopia: entered into our lexicon by Sir Thomas More (1516) in a book by the same name. Before that, humans used a similar words: heaven; nirvana, paradise. Benjamin Sisko used the term in an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in reference to Earth in the 24th Century. In his mind, there was no better picture of perfection*.
* Captain Sisko: I don't get much time to spend on Earth. And it is so pleasant here, with a Starfleet officer on every corner. Paradise has never seemed so well armed.
Star Trek is incredibly Utopian Science Fiction, the majority currently Dystopian have us as a species hanging on by our nails over a cliff festooned with deserts and cannibals that used to be our neighbors. Trek gave us warp drive, time scales we could live with to explore the stars and green exotic alien women for nerds to fantasize themselves with (as Captain James T. Kirk, of course).
We seem to reach for this perfection that we have no evidence of ever existing. Humanity is noble and cruel; wondrous and petty. We're both enamored with some past perfection that never was, and a future for which its Calculus is myriad, cloudy, or to put it in biblical terms: "in a mirror, darkly." That has never stopped the inane practice of end-of-the-world "predictions" that has a long track record of missed proclamations.
We thus map this desired perfection on our leaders; we give them a script they must parrot to comfort us and sooth our dissonance - cognitive and fearful - with empty rhetoric and faux flourish. Facts, reason or truth are all unnecessary.
Many have recently taken arms and sewed the seeds of sedition. In inner cities they are gangs; abroad terrorists and in bird sanctuaries: militants. Each expressing a kind of "aggrieved fundamentalism" (There were links too numerous popped up in a Google search. They could be applied to enlighten or insult; I chose not to do the latter.)
In this American election silly season, we are quaintly "looking for [a] Jesus" purity; an Avatar - when like humanity, democratic republics are simultaneously noble and cruel; wondrous and petty. Perhaps the most suitable definition for utopia need not lead us down a dark path of an undesirable Dystopian future, but summed up such that we no longer buy the snake oil sold by our politicians professing themselves as the "purist" of their respective bunches; taking responsibility for an ever-coming future in our hands we have yet to make, and realize our vaunted dreams of utopia for what they are, to:
"Nowhere place."
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