Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life

a persistent and profound suspicion of political imagination; readers avoid even thinking about visions labeled or derided as “utopian.”

We accept the way things are because we’ve never known them to be different. Behavioral economists call this the “status quo bias.” People prefer things to stay the same so they don’t have to take responsibility for decisions that might potentially change things for the worse.

The German sociologist Karl Mannheim argued that utopia was a necessary antidote to what he considered the normative role of “ideology,” a term he specifically defined as the unseen but omnipresent social, cultural, and philosophical structure that upholds a particular “order of things” and protects those who wield political and economic power.

Doubters can mount a stiff resistance, but in every generation from Aristophanes on down, the dreamers persist.

where we reside, how we raise and educate our children, our personal relationship to things, and the quality of our connections to friends, families, and partners impact us as much as tax policies, the price of energy, or the way we organize formal employment.

It’s just so much easier to do nothing. Accepting the status quo—even if we hate it—means the potential for fewer regrets.10 We might not want to admit it, but many of us are too scared, too tired, or too lazy to dream. Thinking outside the box requires courage.

This is why utopian visions of how to build a different future often follow moments of great social upheaval. Ordinary people find themselves unmoored from the realities they once believed to be fixed and immutable—the “order of things” is disturbed.

“While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”16 It was an explicitly optimistic commercial message about the transformative power of utopian thinking…. So why limit such thinking to designing better Apple products?

Dreamers Have Always Had Haters