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January 2 - January 31, 2024
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.
Progress is the realization of Utopias.
“Humanity is great,” he wrote, “because it knows itself to be wretched.”
These days, there are more people suffering from obesity worldwide than from hunger.
Meanwhile, science fiction is becoming science fact.
Karl Marx’s ideal (all means of production controlled by the masses) into a reality,
the prestigious journal Science reported on the discovery of a way to harness the immune system to battle tumors, hailing it as the biggest scientific breakthrough of the year.
the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama already noted that we had arrived in an era where life has been reduced to “economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”18
There’s no new dream to replace it because we can’t imagine a better world than the one we’ve got.
the real crisis is that we can’t come up with anything better.
With the benefit of hindsight, anyone reading Campanella’s book today will see chilling hints of fascism, Stalinism, and genocide.
As people and societies get progressively older they become accustomed to the status quo, in which liberty can become a prison, and the truth can become lies.
Why have we been working harder and harder since the 1980s despite being richer than ever? Why are millions of people still living in poverty when we are more than rich enough to put an end to it once and for all?
But they do ask the right questions.
Radical ideas about a different world have become almost literally unthinkable.
without utopia, all that remains is a technocracy.
We see it in journalism, which portrays politics as a game in which the stakes are not ideals, but careers. We see it in academia, where everybody is too busy writing to read, too busy publishing to debate. In fact, the twenty-first-century university resembles nothing so much as a factory, as do our hospitals, schools, and TV networks. What counts is achieving targets. Whether it’s the growth of the economy, audience shares, publications – slowly but surely, quality is being replaced by quantity.
Freedom may be our highest ideal, but ours has become an empty freedom.
Advancing technologies are laying waste to ever more jobs, sending us back again to the job coach. And the ad industry encourages us to spend money we don’t have on junk we don’t need in order to impress people we can’t stand.28 Then we can go cry on our therapist’s shoulder. That’s the dystopia we are living in today.
to the World Health Organization, depression has even become the biggest health problem among teens and will be the number-one cause of illness worldwide by 2030.
Lest there be any misunderstanding: It is capitalism that opened the gates to the Land of Plenty, but capitalism alone cannot sustain it. Progress has become synonymous with economic prosperity, but the twenty-first century will challenge us to find other ways of boosting our quality of life. And while young people in the West have largely come of age in an era of apolitical technocracy, we will have to return to politics again to find a new utopia.
wisdom about what it means to live well.
But we’ll also see just how much there still is left for us – the richest 10%, 5%, or 1% – to do.
The word utopia means both “good place” and “no place.”
Without utopia, we are lost.
“It empowers people,” one of the social workers said about the personalized budget. “It gives choices. I think it can make a difference.”
He gives them cash, in the conviction that the real experts on what poor people need are the poor people themselves.
“Poverty is fundamentally about a lack of cash. It’s not about stupidity,” stresses the economist Joseph Hanlon. “You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots.”19
great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need instead of things that self-appointed experts think they need.
When the poor receive no-strings cash they actually tend to work harder.
A universal basic income.
Call it the “capitalist road to communism.”
Basic income: It’s an idea whose time has come.
Mincome had been a resounding success.
Mincome had made the whole town healthier.
“The country will not have met its responsibility until everyone in the nation is assured an income no less than the officially recognized definition of poverty,”
Besides putting a man on the moon (which had happened the month before), their generation would also, finally, eradicate poverty.
“Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.”
A basic income, evidently, gave women too much independence.
Futile? For the first time in history, we are actually rich enough to finance a sizable basic income.
Dangerous? Certainly, some people may opt to work less, but then that’s precisely the point. A handful of artists and writers (“all those whom society despises while they are alive and honors when they are dead” – Bertrand Russell)
One of the perks of a basic income is that it would free the poor from the welfare trap and spur them to seek a paid job with true opportunities for growth and advancement. Since basic income is unconditional, and will not be taken away or reduced in the event of gainful employment, their circumstances can only improve.
a system of suspicion and shame.
basic income system would be a better compromise. In terms of redistribution, it would meet the left’s demands for fairness; where the regime of interference and humiliation are concerned, it would give the right a more limited government than ever.
Never before has the time been so ripe for the introduction of a universal, unconditional basic income.
The old adage of “those unwilling to work will not get to eat” is now abused as a license for inequality.
Don’t get me wrong, capitalism is a fantastic engine for prosperity.
Yet it’s precisely because we’re richer than ever that it is now within our means to take the next step in the history of progress: to give each and every person the security of a basic income.
This wealth belongs to us all. And a basic income allows all of us to share it.
