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

By studying the history of social dreams, we can reject the bad bits and keep the good: challenging ourselves to explore alternatives for how we live,

If there were entirely unexplored continents to the west, perhaps there were also newer and better ways to organize society to maximize human flourishing.

Young as I was, I understood that Wonder Woman and Princess Leia were allowed to be the heroes of their own stories because they didn’t live in my world.

sudden change forces us to question our perception of reality and consider new possibilities that may have previously seemed unthinkable.

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.

We have to fight against our own deeply ingrained status quo bias and control the normal defense mechanisms of cynicism and apathy because without social dreaming, progress becomes impossible.

When we lose sight of the past, we lose sight of the idea that there were other pathways forward, other roads not taken. We begin to feel our present reality as static and inflexible. We convince ourselves that things cannot change, and that if they do, they will change for the worse.

“Tell everyone that the future will be radiant and beautiful,” Chernyshevsky wrote. “Love it, strive toward it, work for it, bring it nearer, transfer into the present as much as you can from it.”3