Why Describing Utopia Goes Badly

Holden Karnofsky, Cold Takes, December 2021. Why Describing Utopia Goes Badly.

Summary

Written utopias tend to fail in one of three ways. They read as dull, because nothing is at stake and nobody struggles. They read as homogeneous, because they impose one way of life on everyone. Or they read as alien, because they stray too far from the world readers know. Abstract utopias that promise only freedom, such as Robert Nozick’s framework of many voluntary communities, avoid all three, but nobody can picture living in them.

Karnofsky argues these are structural problems with describing utopia, not proof that a good future is impossible. His follow-up, Visualizing Utopia (December 2021), is his own attempt. Utopia links (2021-12-23) collects fictional utopias readers suggested, including the Worth the Candle epilogue.

Related views

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s earlier Eutopia is Scary (2009) turns the “alien” failure around. A future that really is better would probably shock people today, the way our world would shock someone from a few centuries ago, so a utopia that feels comfortable is probably not ambitious enough. Read together, the two essays leave a describer with no safe option: too familiar undershoots, too strange repels.

Joe Carlsmith’s Actually possible: thoughts on Utopia (2021) warns, as Yudkowsky does, that picturing utopia as a tidied-up present underestimates it, and stresses that a profoundly good future could actually be built.

The essay is the starting point of the A good future path; the disagreement it feeds is Should the good future be designed or left open.