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

In that plastic moment of rapid social change, where all the old rules seemed negotiable,

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.

As the mathematicians of Kroton knew two and a half millennia ago, utopian thinking is an essential ingredient of progress—whether unraveling the mysteries of the universe or ensuring that the burden of care work doesn’t always fall disproportionately on anyone’s shoulders. It’s time to let our imaginations run wild.

learning about other political and economic systems opened my mind to the possibility that the reality in which I lived was not the only one available.

think our way into a different future.

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

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.

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

In 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.”