Toward A Better World

Frogmarch To Utopia

At a semi-formal gathering the other day, a few other Lucky Six Farms staffers and myself were queried about utopia, although I wasn’t certain the interrogator viewed her probe in such overtly classic, albeit historically futile, terms. “What should you do to make a better world?” we were asked. At this, my mind immediately reeled back across our well-documented millennium of Western hegemony. I wondered how the Nazarene Teacher of Brotherly Love would have regarded the enormous, highly organized efforts from the 12th through the 16th Century to forcefully bring about His Heavenly Kingdom. Interestingly enough, though, when religion was lustily thrown aside by sophisticated 18th Century acolytes of reason who claimed to know better, their airy social theories generated the kind of pragmatic impression seen when a hand is withdrawn from a water-bucket. Perhaps their peers were simply too thick to understand or too busy making fortunes in enterprises like piracy or slaving. Unfortunately, however, those vacuous intellectual speculations only served to whet the ever-popular whistle of practice, so our culture’s nightmarish frogmarch to utopia soon began in earnest.

Utopia - Darkness At The End Of The Tunnel

The two monstrous personalities who would work hardest to “make a better world” were birthed in the 19th Century but saw partial fruition of their efforts only by virtue of remarkable technological advances cheerfully lent to them during the 20th. Having been thoroughly schooled in the irrefutable virtue of science’s beloved Occam’s Razor, both quickly boiled the problem down to its simplest terms: a better world could only come about once the worst sort of people were permanently removed. Thus, these well-intentioned zealots and those they had schooled (sans the fundamentally wrong types, of course) turned the better part of the last hundred years into a display of inhuman excess, corruption, and atrocity on a scale hitherto unrealized even under the vilest, most notorious tyrannies of the past.

Utopia - Buy Your Ticket To Nirvana!

Happily, we were quick to put the memory of these tragic events behind us as we entered a New Age of world betterment. Here, we were told - contrary to any hidebound, traditional Teachings of old - that spiritual upliftment and material gain were not adversaries at all but rather bosom buddies. Growing rich and getting enlightened were really two sides of the same coin; and indeed plenty of coin was always required if one wanted to receive these newly revised blessings from media-authorized experts.

“How should I make a better world?” As the question rang in my ears, I scratched my head in puzzlement. Finally, I replied, “Maybe if I start working on just myself alone, I might be able to deal with everybody else much later.” Like a vapor, the suggestion dissipated into thin air, lethally muffled by a brief, uncomfortable silence...

By Alan Beck

 

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