Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

by Rutger Bregman

Now imagine that John doesn’t ask for food, but goes off to the market, where he’ll find plenty of people willing to exchange their goods for work that he can do in return. This time though, I hire a couple of heavily armed baddies to block his way. Joh...

Billions of people are forced to sell their labor at a fraction of the price that they would get for it in the Land of Plenty, all because of borders. Borders are the single biggest cause of discrimination in all of world history. Inequality gaps between people living in the same country are nothing in comparison to those between separated global citizenries. Today, the richest 8% earn half of all the world’s income,24 and the richest 1% own more than half of all wealth.25 The poorest billion people account for just 1% of all consumption; the richest billion, 72%.

From an international perspective, the inhabitants of the Land of Plenty aren’t merely rich, but filthy rich. A person living at the poverty line in the U.S. belongs to the richest 14% of the world population; someone earning a median wage belongs to the richest 4%.27 At the very top, the comparisons get even more skewed. In 2009, as the credit crunch was gathering momentum, the employee bonuses paid out by investment bank Goldman Sachs were equal to the combined earnings of the world’s 224 million poorest people.28 And just eight people – the richest people on Earth – own the same as the poorest half of the whole world.

That’s right, a mere eight people are richer than 3.5 billion put together.

In the nineteenth century, inequality was still a matter of class; nowadays, it’s a matter of location.

In the Land of Plenty, the poverty line is seventeen times higher than in the wilds beyond Cockaigne.32 Even food-stamp recipients in the U.S. live

like royalty compared to the poorest people in the world.

“[T]he U.S. border effect on the wages of equal intrinsic productivity workers is greater than any form of wage discrimination (gender, race, or ethnicity) that has ever been measured,” observe three economists. It’s apartheid on a global scale. In the twenty-first century, the real elite are those born not in the right family or the right class but in the right country.34 Yet this modern elite is scarcely aware of how lucky it is.

Opening up our borders, even just a crack, is by far the most powerful weapon we have in the global fight against poverty. But sadly, it’s an idea that keeps getting beaten back by the same old faulty arguments.

So, if diversity isn’t to blame for the lack of cohesion in modern-day society, what is? The answer is simple: poverty, unemployment, and discrimination. “It is not the diversity of a community that undermines trust,” conclude Abascal and Baldassarri, “but rather the disadvantages that people in diverse communities face.”

Even in a world without border patrols, lots of poor people will stay right where they are. After all, most people feel strong ties to their country, their home, and their family.

Perhaps in a century or so we’ll look back on these boundaries the way we look back on slavery and apartheid today. One thing is certain however: If we want to make the world a better place, there’s no getting around migration.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.

“Cognitive dissonance,” he termed it. When reality clashes with our deepest convictions, we’d rather recalibrate reality than amend our worldview.

Smart people, concludes the American journalist Ezra Klein, don’t use their intellect to obtain the correct answer; they use it to obtain what they want to be the answer.

The question is not can new ideas defeat old ones; the question is how.

Let this be an encouragement to all those who feel like a lone voice crying out in the wilderness: Keep on building those castles in the sky. Your time will come.

“It’s like standing at Chernobyl and seeing they’ve restarted the reactor but still have the same old management.”13 You have to wonder: Was the cognitive dissonance from 2008 even big enough? Or was it too big? Had we invested too much in our old convictions? Or were there simply no alternatives?

Ideas that seem “politically impossible” today may one day become “politically inevitable.”

In less than fifty years, an idea once dismissed as radical and marginal had come to rule the world.

When Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15, 2008, and inaugurated the biggest crisis since the 1930s, there were no real alternatives to hand. No one had laid the groundwork. For years, intellectuals, journalists, and politicians had all firmly maintained that we’d reached the end of the age of “big narratives” and that it was time to trade in ideologies for pragmatism.

“Progress is the realisation of Utopias,” Oscar Wilde wrote many years ago.24 A fifteen-hour workweek, universal basic income, and a world without borders … They’re all crazy dreams – but for how much longer?

These days, however, the left seems to have forgotten the art of Politics. Worse, many left-wing thinkers and politicians attempt to quell radical sentiments among their own rank and file in their terror of losing votes.

Reining in and restraining the opposition, that’s the sole remaining mission of the underdog socialist. Anti-privatization, anti-establishment, anti-austerity. Given everything that they’re against, one is left to wonder, what are underdog socialists actually for?

But the underdog socialists’ biggest problem isn’t that they’re wrong. Their biggest problem is that they are dull. Dull as a doorknob. They’ve got no story to tell, nor even any language to convey it in.

Let’s give everybody a basic income – venture capital for the people – empowering us to plot the course of our own lives.

A few years ago, Australian writer Bronnie Ware published a book titled The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, about patients she had tended during her nursing career.2 And guess what? No one said he or she would have liked to pay closer attention to coworkers’ PowerPoint presentations or to have brainstormed a little more on disruptive co-creation in the network society. The biggest regret was: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Number two: “I wish I didn’t work so hard.”

For most politicians and economists, employment is morally neutral: the more, the better. I’d argue that it’s time for a new labor movement. One that fights not only for more jobs and higher wages, but more importantly for work that has intrinsic value. Then we’ll see unemployment rise when we spend more time on mind-numbing marketing, asinine administration, and polluting junk, and drop when we start investing more time in the things that fulfill us.

It took a while before I realized that my so-called lack of realism had little to do with actual flaws in my reasoning. Calling my ideas “unrealistic” was simply a shorthand way of saying they didn’t fit the status quo. And the best way to shut people up is to make them feel silly. It’s even better than censorship, because people are almost guaranteed to hold their tongues.

Don’t let anyone tell you what’s what. If we want to change the world, we need to be unrealistic, unreasonable, and impossible.

Remember: those who called for the abolition of slavery, for suffrage for women, and for same-sex marriage were also once branded lunatics. Until history proved them right.