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ICFAOUNSFI t1_iqwo8j4 wrote

Reply to comment by Zaptruder in Utopia”: meaning ‘no place’; from Greek: οὐ (not’) and τόπος (‘place’) by Sphaerocypraea

Here’s something that’s always bothered me:

If we’ll never reach utopia, why bother striving towards it?

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Zaptruder t1_iqwofoh wrote

Because things get better by moving in that direction.

It's simply an idea - that we can aspire for society to be much better than what it is now; and we can imagine it, then deconstruct it, assess it, then see what we can actually do within the limits of our reality to move in that direction.

The alternative is having no direction, no guide post. Society lurches from one direction to another, without clear progress. Society moving on the whims of chance, as the games of luck and opportunity play out at high levels, and the rest of us deal with the fallout.

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ICFAOUNSFI t1_iqwr15s wrote

I get it - so we aren’t striving for utopia at all. We are instead inventing a hypothetical “perfect world” to which we can compare our own world, and thus improve our own world to make it “more perfect”. We aren’t trying to fix it, just make it less broken.

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Zaptruder t1_iqwtxk4 wrote

Yep.

Thing is, as we progress, we'll find the previous idea of the 'perfect world' wanting - either we'll have progressed enough to see how the concept was unattainable (i.e. we didn't factor in the issues that the solutions would create), or our values will have shifted such that previous ideation no longer seems like as great an idea as it did before - or we'll have additional requirements for 'perfecting' things.

And so we iterate and improve - thus a vector, not a point.

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iiioiia t1_ir1s4r5 wrote

> It's simply an idea

Certain simple ideas seem to cause the mind to retract, as if it has some innate fear or something.

> The alternative is having no direction, no guide post.

Well, there's also ~authoritarianism, or basically rule by people who are not so lazy.

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