Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

by Rutger Bregman

Like humor and satire, utopias throw open the windows of the mind. And that’s vital. 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. The modern creed–or worse, the belief that there’s nothing left to believe in–makes us blind to the shortsightedness and injustice that still surround us every day.

True progress begins with something no knowledge economy can produce: wisdom about what it means to live well.

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.

What, then, is the cause of mental-health problems among the poor? Nature or culture? Both, was Costello’s conclusion, because the stress of poverty puts people genetically predisposed to develop an illness or disorder at an elevated risk.8

Genes can’t be undone. Poverty can.

There’s a key distinction though between people with busy lives and those living in poverty: You can’t take a break from poverty.

Henry Ford knew it and that’s why he gave his employees a hefty raise in 1914; how else would they ever be able to afford his cars? “Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult,” said the British essayist Samuel Johnson in 1782.28 Unlike many of his contemporaries, he understood that poverty is not a lack of character. It’s a lack of cash. A

When you’re obsessed with efficiency and productivity, it’s difficult to see the real value of education and care. Which is why so many politicians and taxpayers alike see only costs. They don’t realize that the richer a country becomes the more it should be spending on teachers and doctors. Instead of regarding these increases as a blessing, they’re viewed as a disease.

Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

The purpose of a shorter workweek is not so we can all sit around doing nothing, but so we can spend more time on the things that genuinely matter to us.

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. This attitude is one I’ve begun to think of in recent years as the phenomenon of “underdog socialism.”

“There’s a kind of activism,” Rebecca Solnit remarks in her book Hope in the Dark, “that’s more about bolstering identity than achieving results.”

But first, the underdog socialists will have to stop wallowing in their moral superiority and outdated ideas.