When you say that something is utopian, what do you mean by that, and why is it bad?
Utopianism tends to assume that
A) There will be a point in the future if we just implement X policy where all human suffering has been removed and we can live in a perfect or near perfect society
B) The best way to achive that is to just get ride of Y policy or idea, usually tied to the notion that human beings are inherently good reasonable understanding people who can work together if only we got ride of this one bad thing
So capitalism is bad, if we just got ride of it, then everything is good right? No, because all of the evils of capitalism (and trust me, capitalism is pretty evil) comes out of a larger framework. And its all very abstract and vague intellectual waffling rather than concrete focus on specific reforms, which is why I always find communist so insufferable to talk too, because its all these broad generalizations and no focus on the specifics like “How do you incentive people to be nice to each other”
“How do you design a political system with enough checks and balances that it won’t turn into an oppressive dictatorship (this is the one where communism always breaks down”
“how do you keep people invested in the system long enough so you can implement your reforms?”“How do you prevent goverment corruption or make sure none of the communist leaders subvert the system”
Utopian is very prone for these nice simplistic extremely reductionist narratives where everything is understood through these nice neat little blurbs or basic answers to complicated problems. Here are a few examples.
“Slavery and patriarchy were invented by coionalism and/or capitalism.”
Now this is wrong because both of those things have existed long before 1492 or 1776, but it also implies that if we just removed this one factor, then those massive problems would go away when no, they wouldn’t, because patriarchy and slavery have been popular for thousands of years because of how human beings are really good at dehumanizing people for our own interests, which isn’t the fault of any one system, but instead our own mentality
“Religion is responsible for every war in history”
again, this isn’t true, but it also takes humanities love of war and places it on a single source, oh if we just removed that one source, then we would all be fine and perfectly happy.
“Big goverment is the cause of all of humanities ills”
This one is totally wrong because you know…libertarian nonsense, but its the same logic, just from a right wing perspective instead. And it basically assumes that the free market will just magically solve all of our problems even though that has never worked.
Utopian is a large scale version of “Simple solutions to complicated problems” though I will admit that Utopian can have a purpose in terms of pointing out societal’s ills And as always, left wing Utopianism is at least somewhat respectable while Right wing is just..abhorrent
