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By Root 251 0

which is condemned as morally indefensible and empty. Through persuasion, deceit, and coercion, the individual must be stripped of his identity and subordinated to the state. He must abandon his own ambitions for the ambitions of the state. He must become reliant on and fearful of the state. His first duty must be to the state—not family, community, and faith, all of which challenge the authority of the state. Once dispirited, the individual can be molded by the state with endless social experiments and lifestyle calibrations.6

Especially threatening, therefore, are the industrious, independent, and successful, for they demonstrate what is actually possible under current societal conditions—achievement, happiness, and fulfillment—thereby contradicting and endangering the utopian campaign against what was or is. They must be either co-opted and turned into useful contributors to or advocates for the state, or neutralized through sabotage or other means. Indeed, the individual’s contribution to society must be downplayed, dismissed, or denounced, unless the contribution is directed by the state and involves self-sacrifice for the utopian cause.

In a somewhat different context, although relatable here, the extraordinary French historian and prescient political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville explained, “When the traces of individual action upon nations are lost, it often happens that you see the world move without the impelling force being evident. As it becomes extremely difficult to discern and analyze the reasons that, acting separately on the will of each member of the community, concur in the end to produce movement in the whole mass, men are led to believe that his movement is involuntary and that societies unconsciously obey some superior force ruling over them. But even when the general fact that governs the private volition of all individuals is supposed to be discovered upon the earth, the principle of human free-will is not made certain. A cause sufficiently extensive to affect millions of men at once and sufficiently strong to bend them all together in the same direction may well seem irresistible, having seen that mankind do yield to it, the mind is close upon the inference that mankind cannot resist it.”7 Tocqueville was writing of religion but his observation assuredly applies to utopian tyranny.

Utopianism also attempts to shape and dominate the individual by doing two things at once: it strips the individual of his uniqueness, making him indistinguishable from the multitudes that form what is commonly referred to as “the masses,” but it simultaneously assigns him a group identity based on race, ethnicity, age, gender, income, etc., to highlight differences within the masses. It then exacerbates old rivalries and disputes or it incites new ones. This way it can speak to the well-being of “the people” as a whole while dividing them against themselves, thereby stampeding them in one direction or another as necessary to collapse the existing society or rule over the new one.

Where utopianism is advanced through gradualism rather than revolution, albeit steady and persistent as in democratic societies, it can deceive and disarm an unsuspecting population, which is largely content and passive. It is sold as reforming and improving the existing society’s imperfections and weaknesses without imperiling its basic nature. Under these conditions, it is mostly ignored, dismissed, or tolerated by much of the citizenry and celebrated by some. Transformation is deemed innocuous, well-intentioned, and perhaps constructive but not a dangerous trespass on fundamental liberties. Tocqueville observed, “By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again. A great many persons … are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large…” (II, 319)