God Save Us from the Utopians

If we truly want freedom from the elitist villains, let’s talk about the central idea we have to eradicate from our minds.

We sure spend a lot of time contemplating the nature of evil these days.

Everyone’s got their finger pointed at someone: corrupt politicians, psychopathic billionaires, deep state agents in smoky boardrooms, mass psychosis, unfeeling AI, ancient secret societies. Some even propose that literal demons walk among us.

Maybe.

And maybe in our times all of these thrive.

I tend toward Solzhenitsyn’s view: the capacity for evil resides in the heart of every man.

We’ve all done wrong at some point. I can think of any number of times I’ve done something I later regretted doing, and apologized to someone (or to myself). But rather than rake myself over the coals now, I’m just going to give you a mild example: I ate a bunch of chocolate last night before I went to bed. I knew it wouldn’t be good for me. Sure enough, I woke up in the middle of the night with an upset stomach.

I’m not being glib. Scale it up. Think institutions, pharma corporations, multinational investment firms, “philanthropic” institutes, and government letter agencies. What is their “pre-bed chocolate?”

And what untold horrors are they willing to inflict on billions of people to have their fix?

Why do we do wrong? Because it seems to offer us some short term pleasure or reward. Good feelings, or riches, or being liked, or power over others. These feel good in the moment.

And what do we do? We justify it.

We say: one time won’t hurt. Or: I deserve this. Or: you have to go-along to get-along.Or: I can’t quit my (evil) job--I have to feed my family don’t I?

Or (and this is the one germane to our conversation): It’s for the greater good.

More blood has been spilled with this justification, I believe, than any other.

Concentration camp ovens were built with this idea in mind.

Every tyrant, every mass murdering villain, every rich psychopath Bond villain you can imagine all have this in common: a contempt for humanity going about its own business, combined with a believe that they, the tyrant or villain or “expert” have “the solution” to make the world a better place.

And woe betide anyone who would stop them from achieving that vision.

The phrase “making the world a better place” should give you chills.

Translated, this means: humanity does not know what is best, only I/We know that. I/We have a vision for humans and we will cause as much suffering, poverty, enslavement, harm, or murder as we need to to see it done. It’s for the greater good.

This is why (and please read this and say it aloud) ALL UTOPIAN PROJECTS BECOME DYSTOPIAS.

They MUST.

No two humans agree top to bottom on everything—this is an inescapable fact called “perspective”. You may have noticed it’s even true among people who purport to be in the same “freedom movement”—even they cannot agree on everything. Even two best friends disagree about things all the time.

And it’s okay. We agree on a common principle of civility and we allow for multiple perspectives, and it does not bring the whole thing (the friendship, or the entire society) crumbling down.

Utopianism, though, is a different beast. It hates such multiplicity and seeks to eradicate it.

Let’s say you’re in a position to implement your utopia. Congratulations, El Jefe... Fuhrer, what shall we call you? The minute one person disagrees with the tiniest aspect of your vision, you’ve got a problem. You’ve got a dirty dissenter on your hands, an enemy of the state, someone that refuses to get on board with your “perfect society” and therefore has to be arrested, imprisoned, sent to the gulag, “re-educated”, exiled, or killed. So you have to employ thought police who monitor, enforce and correct thought crimes, as well as ministers of propaganda to continually remind the populace of what the correct opinions are. Spying on your populace, identifying and hauling off dissenters will become the main focus of your regime.

“To protect our democracy!” (or whatever you’re calling your wonderful system.)

All utopias becomes dystopias.

Any time someone thinks they have the perfect vision for society, remind them of this simple fact: your dream society is someone else’s nightmare.

You believe in a communist utopia? Wonderful. You and all your friends are free to go buy a piece of land somewhere and practice it amongst yourselves. You have that right.

But the second you force your idea of a perfect society on me, we’ve got a problem.

If you’re a monarch who thinks your subjects are here to serve you because of your supposedly divine blood, we’ve got a problem.

If you’re a eugenicist who thinks your superior genetics make you fit to rule society, while the rest of us inferiors need to be culled, we’ve got a problem.

But the problem isn’t just that the elitists think they know what is best. So do the general public.

This is something we all were made painfully aware of over the last few years. Our friends, coworkers and families believe the elites should rule, too.

The public, by and large, are guilty of accepting to heart this idea that they do not know what is best for their lives, and so they require some sort of monarch, or elected office-holder, or white coat expert to tell them. Which is what makes them such compliant slaves when someone gets on their TV and tells them to wear shackles. In the ultimate case of Stockholm Syndrome, the prisoners sympathize with their captors and go along willingly, because “they love us and must know what is best.” (And if you disagree you are an antisocial maniac of some variety).

This is the idea we have to eradicate from the public mind.

The “ruling class”, the elitists, the would-be tyrants... they do not love you and they do not know what is best for your life.

They do not have special access to knowledge that you and I do not have, and they are “experts” in nothing except perhaps in getting paid to cause catastrophe and somehow evading the blame for it.

When we speak of “waking people up” this is what we mean: you are not being protected or kept safe by these monsters. You are their prisoner and slave. And they will not hesitate to eliminate you and your family if you cease to be of value to them.

As long as this belief in “the powerful elites will show us what is best” is widespread in the populace, there will always be someone willing to step into that role. It will not matter if you prosecute or eliminate individual villains. Cut off one head of the hydra, and watch in horror as it sprouts another.

This has been going on for longer than you and I, and all the ancestors we can name, have been alive.

We have to go after the idea.

And to instill the belief in the alternative.

So what is the alternative?

The central idea of civilized republics is the opposite of utopianism. Effectively, it’s something like: society is inherently imperfect and fraught with problems that we will have to overcome. We will have a million different perspectives. We will disagree about quite a lot of things. AND THAT’S OKAY. So long as we agree to a few core principles that allow us to carry out our lives with civility, the rest we will figure out on our own.

This is the central principle: We refuse, on principle, to dictate or force our vision on anyone else. Everyone is free to live exactly according to their own vision, and so long as it does not infringe on anyone else’s core rights that we all agree on. Even if our ways enrage someone else, too bad—they will have to suck it up.

Live and let live.

This is the only moral social philosophy because it’s the only one that rejects, on principle, the use of force on anyone else.

Live and let live means everyone is free to pursue their vision of what is best.

Utopianism is the polar opposite. It means I know what is best and everyone else must conform to it. Or else.

I’ve heard people speak of a “libertarian utopia”.

I’m sorry, but this is a terrible, ill-thought-out, contradiction in terms.

If you are a true proponent of liberty, actual liberty, you have to argue for the RIGHT of someone to pursue a way of life, or even ideas, you hate.

You must even support the liberty of people to hold anti-liberty ideas. You don’t have to like their ideas, and you’re free to argue against them. But you can’t be against their RIGHT to hold those ideas. Not and also be a proponent of liberty.

There is nothing utopian about a libertarian society. There is civility, and I believe, general prosperity and goodwill. But it will also have its problems, disagreements, conflicts—even conflicts about whether to abandon liberty itself. Again, no two people agree on everything.

But if you really believe in freedom, then you believe that the “utopian” alternative is a nightmare not worth considering, and so you accept disagreement and conflict as the preferable alternative.

(Remember, being comfortable with discomfort and uncertainty is the central feature of a strong soul, and I believe, a strong society.)

Anticipating the objection: But James, won’t we just end up in the same place? How do you eliminate the evils of corruption and capital accumulation and monopolies?

You don’t eliminate them, not by societal-level force. On an individual level, you watch them. And do not participate in them. And encourage others to do the same.

You remain ever-vigilant against evil, in yourself, and in others. You call it out (which is what most of us are doing here on Substack). You punish it. (And also reward virtue when you see it.) And you disincentivize evil by removing your dollar (or your labor) from it. (All the corporations now learning the lesson of “Go Woke Go Broke” are intimately familiar with what “disincentivizing” means).

Fighting the ever-present pull to corruption is one of those aforementioned problems we have to deal with in a free society. It’s just part of the lifestyle, you might say.

But that’s not what people want to hear, is it?

What everyone wants to hear: A “top-down” imposition-type solution to evil. Great! Because then they don’t have to take responsibility for confronting evil in their own lives. “It’s all been handled”, they think.

(Except they don’t think as far as… wait a minute, who is to decide what is “evil” and who will be persecuted or eliminated under such a system? Hmm.)

What no one wants to hear: Sorry, pal. You’re still going to have to take responsibility for confronting evil, in yourself and in your family and workplace and in your society, every day, from now until forever. It’s going to be hard. You’re going to have to look away from lucrative rewards. You’re going to have to think, and decide what you will and will not participate in. You’re going to have to argue with people. You’re going to have to remove your dollar from banks and corporations you don’t want to support, even when that is an inconvenience, growing your own food, for instance, or educating your own kids instead of participating in those corrupt systems. You’re going to have to take a stand, and call people out for wrongdoing even if it means losing your job or your career or your reputation. You’re going to have to have principles, and stick by them, even when everyone around you is screaming at you to take the easy, rewarding, go-along-to-get-along path.

Is the message of taking responsibility doomed? People want a quick fix, a societal pill they can swallow. “Once we impose THIS system everything will be great.”

It’s just never going to happen. Sorry. The attempt will, it must, lead to new widespread evils.

If you don’t believe in humanity’s capacity to face evil and fight it in their lives, if you think there must be some “societal-level solution”, some form of imposed system to stop evil from proliferating, that “humans left to their own devices will bring about disaster”, then I’m sorry, you do not believe in freedom. Stop pretending and get out. Go join a think tank. Start attending Davos meetings. Because this is exactly what those people think, and you are one of them, so you better stop lying to yourself and everyone else.

How would you even eliminate evil on a societal level? Going back to the Solzhenitsyn quote: the capacity for evil is in all of us. There is an eternal impulse to do wrong because it is easy and quick. In order to “eliminate” evil you would have to eliminate everyone. Which is exactly what happens any time someone tries.

Any attempt to “eliminate evil” itself becomes a monstrous evil. It becomes a “solution” which requires bloodshed. Think of Robespierre’s “solution” to the evils of monarchy: to lop off the heads of anyone they considered to be “the ruling class”, and their families, and anyone who sympathized with them, or wrote anything in opposition to what the state was doing, or who argued against Robespierre’s policies, or who advocated for a change in leadership, or anyone imagined to harbor secret designs against the head of state… and you see my point. Pretty soon the streets run with blood of imagined “enemies of the state” all the time, and everyone is living in fear of being “imagined” to be an enemy and being sent to the guillotine. So much for a “solution” to evil. (And by the by, Robespierre himself was executed by guillotine, so let that sink in for a second before you start your utopian project).

The Founders understood this. You will never “eliminate” evil, because the capacity resides in all of us. What you must do is be ever-vigilant against it. Hence “the price of freedom”. It means we’re in this fight from now until forever. It means you have to watch and be principled. Any attempt to circumvent that price is an attempt to impose something other than freedom on the rest of us. And it will end just as badly, or worse.

This is why, rather than imposing some new system on humanity I say we have to go after the idea.

The idea of elites knowing what is best, for the greater good… that has to come to its historical end.

None of us have to imagine very hard what it would be like to live in someone else’s utopian vision for us. We’re doing it.

Wonder why everything seems so topsy-turvy, nonsensical, and morally inverted? Because we’re living in the the twisted dreams of morally-inverted psychopaths who had the resources to usher in their vision for the perfect society.

They got to that position with society’s help, because by and large, the public participated in it, got rewarded by it, supported it, or turned a blind eye to it.

Welcome to the Rockerfellian, Gatesian, Schwabian utopia. They achieved their long-awaited dream, and we get to live in it.

I don’t know about you, but I think the dreamers are long overdue for a rude awakening.

This is what true freedom fighters have been fighting against for millennia. The idea that an emperor, or monarch, or president, or a class of “experts”, or billionaires know what is best for you.

They do not. Clearly.

Some new wonderful system is not the answer. The point of freedom is not to establish a new utopia.

It’s to save us from the twisted dreams of the utopians.

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Further Reading:

The difficult conversation we need to have