Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

by Rutger Bregman

We live in an era of wealth and overabundance, but how bleak it is. There is “neither art nor philosophy,” Fukuyama says. All that’s left is the “perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.”

But the real crisis of our times, of my generation, is not that we don’t have it good, or even that we might be worse off later on. No, the real crisis is that we can’t come up with anything better.

Voters swing back and forth not because the parties are so different, but because it’s barely possible to tell them apart, and what now separates right from left is a percentage point or two on the income tax rate.25

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.

Without all those wide-eyed dreamers down through the ages, we would all still be poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick, and ugly. Without utopia, we are lost. Not that the present is bad; on the contrary. However, it is bleak, if we have no hope of anything better.

Even the Economist had to conclude that the “most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.”

Free money makes people lazy. Except that, according to the evidence, it doesn’t.

“The big reason poor people are poor is because they don’t have enough money,” notes economist Charles Kenny, “and it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that giving them money is a great way to reduce that problem.”

“You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots.”

“Look in depth at Exodus 16,” he wrote, “the people of Israel in the long journey out of slavery, they received manna from heaven. But,” he continued, “it did not make them lazy; instead, it enabled them to be on the move…”

We, the inhabitants of the Land of Plenty, are rich thanks to the institutions, the knowledge, and the social capital amassed for us by our forebears. This wealth belongs to us all. And a basic income allows all of us to share it.

The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living. Richard Buckminster Fuller

Genes can’t be undone. Poverty can.

Frankly, there’s almost no country on Earth where the American Dream is less likely to come true than in the U.S. of A. Anybody eager to work their way up from rags to riches is better off trying their luck in Sweden, where people born into poverty can still hold out hope of a brighter future.21

The crux of poverty, he says, is that “it annihilates the future.” All that remains is surviving in the here and now.

This isn’t a war on poverty; it’s a war on the poor.

What’s the nature of the activity? That is precisely what modern society’s sacred measure of progress, the Gross Domestic Product, does not measure.

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.

“Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.”

“Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure.”

Research suggests that someone who is constantly drawing on their creative abilities can, on average, be productive for no more than six hours a day.

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

How is it possible that all those agents of prosperity–the teachers, the police officers, the nurses–are paid so poorly, while the unimportant, superfluous, and even destructive shifters do so well?

“banks need people a lot more than people need banks.”

Higher taxes would get more people to do work that’s useful.

Which knowledge and skills do we want our children to have in 2030?

Instead of wondering what we need to do to make a living in this or that bullshit job, we could ponder how we want to make a living.

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.

The reality is that it takes fewer and fewer people to create a successful business, meaning that when a business succeeds, fewer and fewer people benefit.

“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.”

Technological progress may make a society more prosperous in aggregate, but there’s no economic law that says everyone will benefit.

Borders are the single biggest cause of discrimination in all of world history.

The correlation between ethnic background and crime, it turns out, is precisely zero.

However disruptive, migration has time and again proven to be one of the most powerful drivers of progress.

When reality clashes with our deepest convictions, we’d rather recalibrate reality than amend our worldview.

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

Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I’ll never reach it. So what’s the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking. Eduardo Galeano

If you can’t explain your ideal to a fairly intelligent twelve-year-old, after all, it’s probably your own fault.

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

If we want to change the world, we need to be unrealistic, unreasonable, and impossible.