The definition of utopia, from the name of the ideal country coined by Thomas More in his famous libretto of the same name, (1516) with the Greek voices οù , (non) and topos, place, “the place that does not exist”, is the formulation of a political, social, religious order that is not reflected in reality, proposed as an ideal and model.

Dystopia is its opposite, that is, the description of a state of affairs in which highly negative situations, developments, political-social and technological assets are prefigured.

Beyond the definitions, our conviction is different:

Utopia and dystopia, dream and nightmare, tend to intertwine, to get confused, up to a singular coincidentia oppositorum, the union of opposites which for some is a category of dialectics.

More simply, our thesis is that the utopias of which our culture is full born to represent the hope, the desire for perfection, the aspiration to happiness of the human species, inevitably turn into their opposite when faced with reality.

That is, nightmares, suffocating cages, madness. Our time is clear proof of this: it has invented political correctness in order not to offend and its outcome is the prohibition, the change of language, of meaning, even the anthropological mutation through the overturning of communication and the change of meaning of words and concepts. He put reason on the throne and then denied it in fact, obscuring the natural law,

Soon someone, with perfect seriousness and in coherence with what has been stated above, will ask for and obtain the censorship of the Bible, starting with the rash assertion that post modernity has revoked in doubt: male and female he created them. The utopia of maximum freedom is dragging us into a world made up of prohibitions, bars, prohibitions, justified by an alleged moral superiority of the present: light against darkness. The gag of ideas, freedom, free thought becomes the consequence of a “progress” in which two indisputable taboos dominate: a frenzied tension towards equality and a crazy anti-racism.

Equality has turned into a touchy fetish, full of rancor, with the enormous exception of the acceptance of the only inequality about which it is right to object, that of economic means.

Anti-racism started from the denial of the existence of races and ethnic groups in the name of equality; the postmodern vulgate has denied itself to the point of reducing men to the color of the skin in the name of hatred against a specific civilization, the European and Western one, whose maximum fault is to be the daughter of “dead European white males” (DWEM, dead white european males , in the globish acronym of the illuminati woke ).

Observed with the criterion of reality and concrete freedom, all the utopias produced by Western thought are from the very beginning real dystopias, starting with the most ancient, the Republic of Plato.

They all had in common the rejection of natural law, the horror of individual and collective freedom, the belief that the source of all evil is private property.

All exude a radical pessimism, vindictive towards the concrete man, all end up intruding into intimate and sexual life, all deny parents the authority and education of their children.

Utopias envision an immobile humanity, at the mercy of an omnipotent, pedagogical power, the only dispenser of truth, devoid of any flicker of creativity, the enemy of everything that springs from nature. Utopia is programmatically anti-human.

All this is evident starting from the work that gave the concept its name. Thomas More’s Utopia “Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, de optimo reipublicae statu, deque nova insula Vtopi” , a truly golden book, no less beneficial than amusing, on the best state of a republic and the new island of Utopia , Neverland.

In Utopia peace reigns, common property, justice exists and the system is similar to the Republic imagined by Plato. The author deserves every justification: Catholic minister of the sovereign who was submitting the English church to the interests of the crown, a man of strong principles who had to climb the stairs to the gallows by order of the dictator King Henry VIII.

A strange ideal place, the island, conceived by a strong spirit in the midst of maritime explorations, at the dawn of the colonial conquests, contemporaneous with the Protestant reform and the advance of the Ottoman Empire. In Utopia there is religious freedom – the subject was very close to Moro’s heart – hunting and discrimination were prohibited. Perhaps convinced of the impossibility of that dream, Moro calls Itlodeo the protagonist (“the one who tells lies”) and admits from the name that utopia is nowhere. All goods are in common, trade is useless and peace reigns. The city is planned so that all buildings are constructed equally. The number of children is established to keep the population constant. Utopians have no money but use general stores as needed. The number of children,

Challenging program, but in a society of this type it is difficult to develop the arts, thought and science. Utopia resembles a farm, a livestock enterprise in which the care for the welfare of animals is linked to their more rational exploitation. Moro was an idealist enemy of tyranny and knew how to die with faith and courage. Accompanied to the gallows, with British humor he asked the officer who was escorting him to be helped up the steps. “To get off, I will arrange on my own.” Keeping his faith, he claimed to die as a “good servant of the king, but above all of God.”

Another idealist was Tommaso Campanella, author of the City of the Sun at the beginning of the 17th century. The Calabrian thinker paid dearly for his work as a dissident: over twenty-five years in prison. But a prison is also his City of the Sun, where the sun is not the star of the sky, but the supreme magistrate, representative of power. The “happy” society is an impregnable fortified city that knows no conflict, corruption, enmity, envy, betrayal, hunger. The form of the book is the dialogue between two men of the world, the Ospitalario, a Knight of Malta who visited the city, located by Campanella on the island of Ceylon and the Genoese, a merchant.

Even in the City of the Sun wisdom is raised and religious faith is in force, albeit in bizarre union with astrology, but there is no private property, reproduction is not linked to marriage or to a family system. Wisdom and philosophy, for Campanella , are the antidote to cruelty and tyranny, but the objection is the same: what freedom exists, in a regime of sheep equality, in which conflicts are abolished and natural bonds are forbidden, considered , like private property, the source of all conflict and pain?

In the City of the Sun , reproduction is not linked to marriage or a kinship system, but is managed and organized by political officials, whose job it is to establish couples and plan mating . The selection criteria are physical and moral characteristics. Mostly, they mate individuals with opposite characteristics, with the aim of “making temperie”, that is, obtaining a fair balance between the two.

The children are educated in common and immediately taken away from their mothers. Of the fathers, no trace. Regardless of the blood relatives, irrelevant, the inhabitants are brothers, parents or children according to age: “all young people call themselves friars, and those who are fifteen years older than them, fathers, and those younger, sons “. T.all are equally linked by friendship relationships, the most alien to reality: friendship is a special bond, which we establish only with some, chosen by affinity or for others, mysterious threads of our complex humanity.

A dystopian, oppressive world, just as animal as that of Utopia. Few differences with the dystopias inaugurated in the twentieth century. The first, perhaps the most profound, is that of Noi, the novel by the Russian engineer Yevgeny Zamyatin, published in 1924. The book was the first banned in the Soviet Union, where it was released only in 1988. In the work of Zamyatin the protagonist is the leaden conformism of society, the antechamber of totalitarianism. In the “negative” society of Us, the enemy is free will, considered the cause of unhappiness. The claim is mathematical control, an anticipation of the power of algorithms and contemporary surveillance. Depersonalization is total: the story is told in the first person by a certain D-503 (names are replaced by codes, does it say anything to contemporary man?) the houses and every other object are built in transparent materials. Everyone is visible at any time, Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon extended to the whole life.

The most famous dystopia, Orwell’s in 1984, prefigures a universe of total control, indoctrination and the abolition and falsification of history.

There are even officials involved in changing the past so that it does not conflict with the ideas of the ruling party.

The basic principle is the overthrow of the truth, so much so that on the building of the Socing, the single party, three slogans are carved: war is peace, ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery.

The words are obligatory and follow the pattern of the bis-thought, or rather the lie erected as a system in the neo-language. Curious similarities with the politically correct and with the new post-modern prohibitions.

In Animal Farm, Orwell tackles the issue of obsessive equality, but among animals – all the same – some are “more equal than others”, significantly the pig.

In 1932 the dystopia of Brave New World had come out (excellent new world), translated into Italian as The New World. The author was an exponent of the English oligarchy, Aldous Huxley, who probably intended to accustom the world to the social and anthropological changes desired by his class. Huxley introduced the subject of reproductive technologies, eugenics and population mind control. The title refers to a verse by Shakespeare in The Tempest, the last, enigmatic work of the bard, set in turn on a utopian island. It takes place in a year called Ford 632 in a company run by World Governors after a huge conflict whose reason is unknown. Knowledge of the past is forbidden. It is officially said that the entire past was characterized by terrible barbarism. The only God is Ford, the automotive manufacturer, and the T sign,

There is Freud’s influence in the fact that children are driven to satisfy the drives from an early age, to avoid the development of strong emotions and attachment to peers. Serial production – Fordism – also applies to human reproduction, through the development of embryos in special factories according to quotas pre-established by world governors.

Everyone, it is said, belongs to all the others and contraception practices are developed to prevent “natural” births. Even the surname does not indicate membership: you can freely choose the name we call “baptismal”. Sexuality is encouraged in all forms and conditioning is normal practice, so much so that individuals use the term conditioned instead of educated. Everyone is indoctrinated to love the social position to which he is destined based on the caste to which he belongs. The words mother and father are insults. The remedy for unhappiness is a medicine called soma, a euphoric and antidepressant drug, which guarantees further population control.

Perhaps someone is beginning to think that utopias and dystopias are becoming reality under his eyes: de te fabula narratur , the story is about us. It was neither utopia nor dystopia Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Race and History, in which, in 1952, the French anthropologist advocated a sort of globalism: a single language, a single species and seemed to want to banish any distinction. Thirty years later, in the Gaze from afar, he changed his mind and returned to reality. The diversity among human societies results from the desire to distinguish themselves from the civilizations that surround them, that is, from the desire to be themselves, he stated bluntly.

Between utopia and dystopia, cinema and television play an essential role.

The term Matrix to indicate superordinate and technological power comes from the Wachowski brothers’ film. Social control was the theme of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, in which a race of men – the Precogs – are programmed to know in advance the thoughts and actions of other human beings, to the point of arresting them before they commit crimes. It goes without saying that a crime is what power sees as such.

A television series, written by British screenwriter Denis Kelly, is called Utopia.

These are “conspiratorial” mysteries produced a few years ago, inspired by the theories on overpopulation of the nineteenth-century pastor and economist Thomas Malthus.

In the television Utopia, recently revived by various world broadcasters, an attempt is made to cut the world population through a virus. Malthus proposed to find a remedy for poverty through practices aimed at drastically reducing the population. Hunger, abortions, wars and pandemics would therefore be justified with a “humanitarian” objective.

Is what awaits us perhaps revealed in the cult drama?

A virus used to create a vaccine ends up causing infertility to anyone who lets it inoculate it. In reality, the new vaccines are gene therapies whose effects we are unaware of. We are injected into the body with ribonucleic acid, which means it changes – or could change – our genetic makeup. That the “superiors”, the Dominion that controls and dominates us, know more than they say about the long-term effects?

The utopia of the miraculous cure is intertwined with the dystopia of unknown and – perhaps yes, perhaps no – devastating effects.

But we can’t talk about it: flat-earthers, paranoid, crazy. Deniers, another good all-purpose insult. De te fabula narratur. The narration speaks of me, of you, of everyone and we do not know it, stunned by the burden.

Ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery: it is the official version, believed by the flock for compulsion to repeat.

Source: Utopia and dystopia: coincidence of opposites by Roberto Pecchioli – Maurizio Blondet

• Translated

Note:

Emunah: Generally translated as faith.

We’re used to thinking of faith as a strategy for people who can’t think for themselves. “The fool believes everything,” Solomon writes, “the wise man understands.”

Emunah, however, is an innate conviction, a perception of truth that transcends, rather than evades, reason. Quite the contrary, wisdom, understanding and knowledge can further enhance true emunah.

Nevertheless, emunah is not based on reason.

Reason can never attain the certainty of emunah, since, reasonably speaking, a greater reasoning might always come along and prove your reasons wrong. In this way, emunah is similar to seeing first hand: Reason can help you better understand what you see, but it will have a hard time convincing you that you never saw it. So too, emunah endures even when reason can’t catch up.

Source: CHABAD