The Screwtopian Dialectic

While submitting myself to the casual heat of aimless conversation, a ferret-faced acquaintance once asked me to describe my vision of a hypothetical utopian society.

My response to the question remains unaltered:

“An unlimited supply of fish balls of the native-Thai variety, regular discourse with favorite journalists, co-thinkers, and visionaries (living or dead), Claudia Schiffers (the plural form absolutely is intentional), bi-weekly Rolling Stones live sets, Glock 33s periodically duct-taped to both my hands (affectionately labeled as an act of “Edward Glock-33-issorhands”), feed boxes overflowing with Cutty Sark, and around-the-clock death to fascism.”

(The only amendment I might one day wish to add is dead-bolting the Schiffers and Keith Richards in the same closet and then coming back in exactly nine months; I’m not a man capable of refusing the prospect of my own personal militia of dangerously good-looking six-string-demon newborns.)

Of course, any serious, thoughtful person would leap at the opportunity to tell you that the creation of a utopian society isn’t practical or possible, and certainly not fathomable beyond self-indulgent fantasies like the one written above. Tough-guy-intellectual-type Englishmen are generally the best at internalizing this basic principle.

In 1943, George Orwell penned the imperishable essay Why Socialists Don’t Believe in Fun (as a matter of record, Orwell passionately remained a democratic socialist as long as he drew breath; this merely underlines the indispensability of never ceasing to criticize one’s own side), in which he takes particularly top-form aim at the campaigners for perfect little worlds:

“Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.”

Pete Townshend made such an outlook phenomenally simple:

“Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss.”

First and foremost, the importance of abolishing any lingering impulses to manufacture utopia is, inevitably and unavoidably, almost exclusively political. A week’s stream of (inter)national headlines will make this abundantly clear. The most one can hope for, whether storming a parliament compound in Thailand or sloppily assembling an interim government in Kyrgyzstan, is a new or old society that prides itself on the inability to degenerate into flagrant human rights violations, serfdom, and nationalized Air Supply (both the band and the reactive gas, I suppose).

To achieve this, we should strive to live by heavy doses of unadorned moral clarity, the “duh” of personal responsibility and accountability, and predictably accompanying mottos. In the spirit of giving just one example, my previously mentioned acquaintance also asked me to identify my one-line tack for leading a decent life. Again, my response has been prepared for quite some time:

“Be funny, be free, stay cool, die conveniently, read Orwell, listen to The Who.”

And that’s the closest I will ever come to honestly elucidating the virtue of social “perfection.”