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Complex Numbers #1033417 added June 6, 2022 at 12:04am
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Utopia
Entry #2 for "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]...
We've been conditioned.
Thanks to fairy tales, comics, books, shows, movies, etc., most of us take certain ideas as absolute fact. These include:
 If it seems too good to be true, it is.
When wishes come true there's always a heavy price.
Utopia is impossible.
A lot of this is because, were it not so, the story wouldn't be very interesting. "One day, little Angela found an old lamp and rubbed it. A genie came out and granted her a wish. She wished for a pony. She got a pony. They became fast friends and lived happily ever after."
That's not a story. That's an anecdote you tell in an actual story, one with conflict and characterization and plot and shit like that.
You could say that the biggest part of a fiction writer's job is to think about everything that could go wrong, implement some of it, and have the characters deal with it. Preferably they actually succeed in the end, but that's optional. So, faced with a utopia (a concept that, at its very inception, was meant as satire), we're programmed as writers to search for flaws, any flaws.
An early episode of ST:TNG comes to mind. In it, they find a utopian planet where everyone is young, fit, blond, and mostly naked, wearing the bare minimum to get past 80s TV censors (I will just say, as an aside, that William Ware Theiss , the costume designer for TOS and TNG, was a goddamn genius). Everyone on the Enterprise is pumped to be there, especially that absolute dog Riker. And then Wesley (of course) fucks up and discovers its horrible secret first-hand. This leads to Picard bending the Prime Directive to the breaking point, and it's in the running for my award of Worst TNG Episode, despite the preponderance of ultra-hot Nordic babes.
Trek itself, from the get-go, was conceived as a utopia of sorts: a post-scarcity technoparadise where everyone (mostly) got along. Later shows subverted this, mostly after Roddenberry died. Else the property wouldn't have lasted as long as it did: 55 years and counting.
A real utopia, if it's even possible, would simply be too boring to write about.
Which is one reason I've never accepted the idea of Heaven. Leaving aside for the moment the metaphysical issues, the concept of spending eternity in a golden cloud city surrounded by angels playing harps sounds more like Hell to me. I mean, Hell itself doesn't sound too great, but damn , those (and every other) concepts of an afterlife make utter nonexistence seem pleasant by comparison.
The only way to make Heaven work is to alter peoples' minds so that they believe it works, at which point, if you can simply make people happy by manipulating emotion and perception, there's no need to actually create a utopia. It'd be like that meme where the dog is sitting there surrounded by fire going: This is fine.
As long as your mind is in thrall and you never wake up to reality, you'll stay in utopia. Yes, yes, I know, The Matrix did something like that. I maintain that the movie, for all its excellent special effects, was entirely derivative.
The whole thing reminds me of the famous Milton quote: "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." Which I'm still convinced he cribbed from Shakespeare. |
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