About Utopia.

I concur with my learned friends (Orwell & co.) that the very concept of utopia doesn’t allow it to exist. But my reasoning isn’t exactly the same. As I understand it, Utopia is not meant to be a state of things or even a state of being like nirvana or moksha if you will. It is meant to be an endless pursuit of a goal. It is by its very definition, unattainable. But, the concept permits just enough hope. It admits the theoretical possibility of universal happiness. It postulates that, given the current state of our existence, it is possible if we are ‘perfectly good’ and ‘perfectly righteous’ that we will be free from Pandora’s evils so to speak. What is ‘perfectly good’ and ‘perfectly righteous’ of course differs depending on your system of belief or the religion you follow or for that matter don’t follow.

Having said that, I think that authors/thinkers have merely accepted the idea (and I think rightly so) that utopia is what we strive for but not what we can actually achieve. The logic is warped but clear, by its very definition, utopia is unattainable. We cannot conceive utopia, because that’s what utopia is ‘something we can never know’. We cannot conceive it, so, we cannot attain it. It’s sort of like infinity, if you could conceive it, it would not be infinite.

Now, as for the comparison between western thinkers and ‘us’: I couldn’t disagree with you more. It is only those who accept Christianity in whole (no offence meant) that can accept the idea of good and evil being independent of each other. For eg: if everyone obeys God’s will, there will be no evil. But, we (and by we I mean Eastern cultures in general) cannot reconcile the idea of utopia, because our teachings presuppose a balance between good and ‘ungood’ (evil may be the wrong word in this context). This means that there is a presupposition that good cannot exist without ungood, and consequently both good and ungood must co-exist. Both, the doctrine of karma and the doctrine of the yin and the yang are based on this premise. So, we cannot conceive the idea of utopia.

I may be slightly inaccurate about the religious observations, but by and large I think the logic is accurate.