The order which has been taken for granted suddenly appears queer and contingent. There is an appearance of the contingency of order. This is the main value of utopias. At a time when everything is blocked by systems which have failed but which cannot be beaten…utopia is our resource. The utopia seems to say something plausible, but it also says something that is crazy. By … Continue reading Recapitulation: How to Save the World
The development of new, alternative perspectives define utopia’s most basic function. May we not say then that imagination itself – through its utopian function – has a constitutive role in helping us to rethink the nature of our social life? Is not utopia – this leap outside – the way in which we radically rethink what is family, what is consumption, what is authority, what is religion and so … Continue reading Avoiding Armageddon: (2) Cracking the utopia code
If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be its author and finisher. Abraham Lincoln In a pair of earlier posts about Rescuing the Future, we looked at the competing delusions on offer from our mainstream political camps, and how Covid has laid waste to these fantasies, leaving us floundering and exhausted. We are mired in an almost cosmic sense of “stuckness,” a foreboding that … Continue reading Avoiding Armageddon: (1) How to circumvent the Polarization Industrial Complex
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at. Oscar Wilde For so many of us, the couple form and the job wind up bearing the weight of all of our hopes and dreams and need for human contact, and they were never meant to bear that weight. We need human relationships that extend beyond the romantic or … Continue reading BHB: Bigger Home Bases – Reasons why we need to start living in larger groups now
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. Albert Einstein We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are. Talmudic Proverb Many thinkers…have argued that studying philosophy is learning how to die. If that’s true, then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age — for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. … Continue reading Utopia Now! Model communities & UBI: our last off-ramps to a sane, realistic future
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller The galloping, microscopic horseman of Covid has quickly exposed the fatal flaws in the American system, and the mixed messaging that we’re getting from our leaders cannot obscure the basic facts, which are not too complicated but profoundly terrifying nonetheless. The … Continue reading Narrowing Options
History is not repeating itself, we are unfolding a new page in national life. The past has gone forever. There is no abiding present, it flies while we name it, and as it flies it is our duty to provide for the thick coming future. . . . We are to shape the future. We cannot escape the duty. — William D. “Pig Iron” Kelley … Continue reading The Last Fiction – Part 3
The order which has been taken for granted suddenly appears queer and contingent. There is an appearance of the contingency of order. This is the main value of utopias. At a time when everything is blocked by systems which have failed but which cannot be beaten…utopia is our resource….The utopia seems to say something plausible, but it also says something that is crazy. By saying something … Continue reading The Last Fiction – Part 2
You have heard that it has been said, You shall love your neighbor, and hate your enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them who despitefully use you, and persecute you. Matthew 5:43-44 Return animosity with virtue. Laozi – Tao Te Ching 63 Just don’t look. The Simpsons … Continue reading Winning the Peace in 2020
In Part 1, we confronted the uncomfortable reality that unequal societies like ours do not, unfortunately, fix themselves gradually or peacefully. Instead, conditions ossify and then worsen, until one of the Four Horsemen of violent upheaval comes galloping along to level the socioeconomic landscape. So at the very moment when we need maximum flexibility to confront the looming spectres of climate change, ecological devastation, and … Continue reading Transparent Trojan Horse – Part 2
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