Reference: facebook.com/groups/Ethpols … 847478785/
“D Edward Tarkington I may need to refresh my idea of Utopian.
While your view makes sense to me to a point there is still a disconnection in my mind.
In my mind to be Utopian in any sense, disregarding the fact that I disbelieve in both personal and collective utopias, requires some thought and planning. For instance we don’t say kids are Utopian because they may want to eat candy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We may consider that foolish or inexperienced or something else but I’ve never heard it described as Utopian.
I think in the same way i think the majority of hateful, violent, bigoted (and on and on) people do not think things out. I think they compartmentalize so much that they fail to achieve any type of possible reality.
For instance if you want the government to create and maintain a social safety net for you but do not want the government to have the resources or the laborers it needs to do so, nor do you want anyone to contribute to it. In my mind that is similar to the kid wanting candy 24/7.
So in other words I don’t feel they have thought out their positions enough to know what they truly want.”
First of all, Sitty, I apologize for posting what we already know: your post. I do this for two reasons –especially when it comes to someone not familiar with my methods of madness. For one, it makes it lot of easier (through copy and paste –that is on a Word document (to wind through, point and reference to, and comment on various points you have made. (You’ll see what I mean in the following.) Plus that, it allows me to groom it for cross pollination.
That said, I once again am empathetic with your argument when you say:
“D Edward Tarkington I may need to refresh my idea of Utopian.
While your view makes sense to me to a point there is still a disconnection in my mind.”
I am asking a lot when it comes to asking you to take on a broader understanding of the term “Utopian” as compared to how we normally think of it. This why I actually think (in the context of the general understanding (the normal logic (of the term (you make a good argument when you say:
“For instance we don’t say kids are Utopian because they may want to eat candy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We may consider that foolish or inexperienced or something else but I’ve never heard it described as Utopian.”
That, going by the framing you are working from, is a good argument. Where I am departing from you (that is from the framework I am working from (is the recognition that those children are actually acting in the capacity of Utopians to the extent that they are imagining a perfect world, one, BTW, that certain adults are always standing in the way of. And I would segue this into the argument that we are all basically Utopians in that we all have these ideas about what the perfect world would look like. However, if we’re realistic, we also recognize that there is a big difference between the world as we would like it to be and the world that we can hope for. And this is the distinction between the Utopian and the democrat. The democrat recognizes (as any Poly Scy 101 class will tell you (that politics is the art of mediating between diverse interests. Therefore, the optimal situation would be one in which everyone has things they can appreciate while still having issues. The Utopian, on the other hand, seeks perfect satisfaction (even if it comes at the misery of the other), and can only result in a situation that goes from perfect satisfaction (generally at the expense of the other (to perfect misery when all those appeals to self indulgence turn into a lot of talk about what you must sacrifice for the sake of the higher principle that bought you that self indulgence in the first place.
And there is more to say about this, Sitty. For instance, we can see the same Utopian dynamic at work in addicts who will turn to ill for the higher principle of that first high. But my window has run out. My main point for now is that for all the libertarian and FreeMarketFundamentalist claims and criticisms of socialists being Utopians, and dismissing them based on that (on being too idealistic), they (and I include Ayn Rand’s nonsense in this (are no less so.