UTOPIA
ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE

UTOPIA IS EVERYTHING AND NOTHING

A private song, a few loose wishes, an edifice if you like.You can make up your own.What do you want? A cottage, a citadel, a wilderness, a lift to the beach? Making it up is a form of truth. Utopia is a place that doesn’t exist. No place. Every no place is also a place. Every nowhere is a bright planet, when you start to think: newly hatched, full of promise, as you might say of a young dancer. Already there’s conversation, a sunlit meeting place, chance encounters, general availability and respect, no government to speak of, plants and seasons to speak of and observe, harmony to absorb: sufficiency, unity, exchange.

A DAY WILL COME

A day will come when our houses will fall, all cars will have become scrap metal, we will be freed from all airplanes and rockets, renounce the invention of the wheel and the ability to split the atom, the fresh wind will come down from the blue hills and swell our chest, we will be dead and breathe, it shall be our whole life.

SOMEPLACE BEYOND BEHAVIOUR

To imagine a polity beyond behaviour—good or bad—in which the behavioural sciences would be close to meaningless, would be to find some seeds of utopia.

ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE

The ideal society is one that allows for, even encourages, the feeling that anything is possible.

LUCKY PEOPLE

My ideal society is the size an old-fashioned local newspaper easily covers, like the long-defunct Skibbereen Eagle in West Cork. There is an open space in the middle of a small town where people gather or pass each other by, with villages around, gardens and woodlands, hills, open heath and hidden lakes. I can see sunlit yellow stone. I cannot see social structures or rules.Whatever is working in society isn’t visible. Social media is replaced by the hum of bees. Everyone gives up a little of what they want so that others can have what they need, which allows people to be creative and grow as human beings, which leads to a more equal society, a society we are discovering and reshaping all the time.

It’s all right for you, the chorus sings out.There’s no time for any of that.We have our lives to live.Who gets to walk through bluebells with a view of the turquoise sea?

Lucky people. Or everyone? If we have the energy to wash out our inner lives, rewild our fields, our heads, our lives, our imagination.