I’ve analyzed my relationship with control a lot. I believe that for myself and many others, wanting to feel IN CONTROL is the driver behind so many of our actions, including the less ideal ones (self-sabotage, disordered eating, overloaded schedules, etc.). Striving for perfection is part of wanting to feel IN CONTROL. It’s something I’ve struggled with in the past and with the culture of hyper-optimization (in work produced, time, and in the “self”), quantification, and filtered presentations of our lives, I’ve heard many others say the same.
Many years ago, I wrote down “perfection is a sort of death”. I still believe it. If something is perfect, it means that it has nowhere to go and nothing to learn. There is no growth left for it and it functions in a sort of stasis. This is why I am against utopias.
To have a utopian society, we would need a homogeneous society with everyone believing the same thing. Hard to imagine, right? This would mean a homogenization of culture (possibly ethnicity?), religion, class and life experiences. As someone who grew up with many cultural influences, this seems like hell, a dystopia, even. Two sides of the same coin.
During the NFT and digital fashion bubbles, I noticed a lot of people on Linkedin/people trying to sell others things marketing these movements as a sort of utopia. Unfortunately some people did believe in it and it was a sad let-down when it didn’t pan out. I think they just wanted something to believe in.
Searching for a utopia like this is like searching for death. To me, it’s how people talk about heaven, which one can only get to if one dies. There is no heaven on earth, there will always be the complexity, and the tension. I’m a pragmatist at heart and this is simply the reality of life, whether we like it or not.
To accept this reality and the complexities that come with it is to take agency in our lives and reduce suffering <3
Thanks for your comment x
Perhaps it's growing up with such a multi-cultural background, but I personally believe in Yin/Yang, with multiple forces at play and the tension that creates. In Christianity as well, there are multiple forces at play, namely, the duality of "good" and "evil". In this world, there will always be tension as everyone has a different life experience and a different understanding of what "good" and "evil" is and what a better world means. This alone creates tension and a fractured view of what we are working towards.
This article should definitely not be mistaken as saying we should not work for a better world. In Chomsky's theory of Utopia, we're always working for a better future, which is good, but that's not colloquially how this word is used in most common conversations. If one is always working for a better future, there isn't an end point, it's about the process and it never stops.
One can argue about semantics, but if someone is hoping to reach a utopia that's synonymous with perfection, I'd argue that is indeed death.
Thank you so much, Tabita, for your text.
What do you mean when you conceptualize the concept of Utopia? I'm asking you this because, in my understanding of this concept leads to a different path from you:
"To have a utopian society, we would need a homogeneous society with everyone believing the same thing."
This is not the truth about utopia. Utopia is in my resume, a social benchmark, and there are cases where utopias have been imagined as a core for social experiments. So there is no "believe in the same thing" as you use when you put "homogenization of culture." Many people outside of philosophies or social science fields who talk about Utopia generally make the same mistake of using the neoliberal discourse (which is pejorative ) of Utopia as "social fantasy."
You applied very well when you said "a lot of people on LinkedIn/people trying to sell others things, marketing these movements as a sort of utopia" ...Because they are selling it as a benchmark for a better society. But when you analyse critically ( I mean materially), we can see there is not a "better society in there". And here is what I believe you got stuck: you are stuck in the concept of utopia as a selling a fantasy.
To outsmart this trap, we can understand Utopia as a theorization of a better state of society. This demands accepting what you tried to address as dystopia (heterogeneous).
Borrowing Chomsky's idea, searching for Utopia is not like searching for death, but it is the necessity of imagination of a better place, in order to make it.