Lenin said, “If you want to make an omelet, you must be willing to break a few eggs.” However, 20 million dead Russians and 45 million dead Chinese are not eggs, and all those five-year plans and great leaps forward failed to produce an omelet.1 The history of attempts at putting utopian ideas into practice is strewn with the wreckage of failed societies, from Robert Owen’s New Harmony in Indiana and John Humphrey Noyes’ Oneida Community in New York— both relatively harmless communal experiments—to Lenin/Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s Communist China, which were catastrophic. Prophets and prognosticators often envision what life will be like when we get “there,” but this is not the right way to think about the future because there is no there there2 —in the utopian sense of the word’s Greek origin as “no place.”3
Utopias are no place, save for in the imagination, because they are grounded in an idealistic theory of human nature—one that assumes, quite wrongly, that perfection in the individual and social realm is a possibility. Instead of aiming for that unattainable place where everyone lives in perfect harmony forever, we should instead aspire to a process of gradual, stepwise advancement of the kind one might imagine occurring on a mountaineering expedition. It’s not a straight climb up, like on a ladder; instead, decisions have to be constantly made about the best route and method to get everyone further up the mountain, one step at a time.