The Tyranny of Utopia

How Covid paves the way for a New World

“True religion consists in punishing, for the happiness of all, those who disturb society.”

- Maximilien Robespierre

Part 1

This is not a normal essay. But, then, these are not normal times so perhaps I can be forgiven that. Unusual times call for unusual words.

Some of these words are about vaccines but, then again, not really. I’ve already written about vaccines here and here and I don’t want to tread old ground. Why anyone who is not grossly at threat from Covid would take one is beyond me and, even at that, someone who is grossly at threat from Covid is grossly at threat of dying in general. The fact that the average age someone dies “with” Covid is at or beyond the average life expectancy is the giveaway. No vaccine can save you from death. It waits for us all.

But, as I said, I don’t want to cover old ground. People can make their own decision (but do make sure you make an actual decision instead of allowing yourself to be swept away in a wave of religious fervour. Decisions that are made for you, rather than by you, are always the most difficult to live with when they go wrong). This essay, for what it’s worth, is more about what the vaccines represent or rather where they are taking us. And that is to the destination of every tyrant: Utopia.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has existed since 1971 without anyone really noticing until Covid somehow promoted them to being the leading authority on what our post-pandemic world should look like. And when they tell us that that world should be a place where people “own nothing” and “have no privacy”, I’m inclined to think they genuinely see that as a good thing. It’s not a trick - they believe it. They believe people and the world in general will be better off in such a place. The “Young Global Leader” who wrote this piece certainly does as she waxes lyrical about the joys of sharing everything with her fellow citizens, including not just her possessions but her home, her thoughts, even her dreams.

Now, you might, like me, recoil from such an image of the future. You might recognise in it the inherent danger of making yourself so utterly dependent on the state to provide your basic essentials which, in a previous world, you owned and could not have taken away from you if, say, you failed to follow whatever diktat was in vogue that week. However, it is important to understand why this isn’t an unattractive option for many.

For the citizens of this Utopia, they have everything they need when they need it. They don’t have to worry about losing their possessions or having them stolen (if petty crime is even possible in such a world) because they don’t own anything that could be lost or stolen. They don’t even have to worry about making decisions. As our Young Global Leader says:

“sometimes I just want the algorithm to do it for me. It knows my taste better than I do by now.”

This is, surely, the ultimate infantilisation but it is not without its appeal for some. No worries, no stresses, no thinking - just existing. Like a well-treated (and well-trained) pet, you have everything you need - so long as you behave. And all it costs is your freedom. Is that such a great loss?

Freedom is hard. It comes with responsibilities and obligations and stresses and worries. You have to protect yourself and provide for yourself because no one else is going to do it for you. And you also have to protect freedom itself or it tends to slip away from you as we’ve seen this last year. Perhaps, it’s not so hard, therefore, to convince yourself that you’re better off without it.

The real benefit, though, of this world is for those who design it - the Klaus Schwabs and Tony Blairs or the ones behind them whose names we will never know. Let’s continue to assume good faith on their part, that however malicious or repugnant their methods may seem, they actually have a world in mind that is genuinely “better” for all. This world, described above, is one that provides them with the tools to directly address real global problems. Crime, climate change, sustainability, recession, inflation, disease, over-population, refugee crises, terrorism, resource supply - they are all problems that are much easier to control when you have centralised ownership of assets, mandatory “Green” technology, removal of privacy, and the tracking, tracing, monitoring, and tagging of every citizen. In essence, they are easier to control when you have total control.

If you really believed in this idea, in this Utopia, where people are content and the world’s problems are solved, what would you do to achieve it? How far would you go?

Would you kill? Sure, wars have been fought over far less.

Would you lie? That seems like a silly question. For Utopia, why not?

Would you cheat? Would you manipulate? Would you terrorise people, torture them, use them and manipulate them? If it is for their own good, if it is to make the world a safe and happy place? The ends don’t justify the means but maybe this once, for this end that is greater than all other ends, maybe they do?

Would you take advantage of a pandemic to restructure society? Would you prey on people’s fear of death and disease to strip them of their rights and freedoms? Would you use the chaos to reorient them towards accepting a world where they never regain those things? Would you, in short, bring them blind-folded along that road to Utopia whether they want to go or not?

In many ways, it is this type of leader who poses the greatest threat to our freedom - the one who is intent on doing us good whether we like it or not. Conviction gives their tyranny a strength that mere malevolence can never match. As C.S. Lewis once wrote, almost as if he were somehow seeing this very day:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”¹

Part 2

A long time ago, a man I knew wrote a story. Although he was a well-known author, this was an unusual story and not the sort he put in any of his published works. I read it as a young man (a child to be honest) and it had a profound impact on me. It was a story about a man who died and found himself at a crossroads. To his left was a wide, paved road leading to a bright city where music and raucous voices could be heard. The person standing at the crossroads could see his friends happily walking that way towards the city and they called to him to join them. However, to the person’s right, there was another path, a narrow winding trail that disappeared into a forest and seemed to lead up a lonely mountain. There was no one on this path - it was, as Robert Frost once wrote, the path “less traveled”.

I often think of that story now as I look at the world today and I imagine myself at that crossroads. To my left is the city, the new Utopia that is being constructed all around us everyday, by groups like the WEF, and towards which all my friends and colleagues are moving, happy and laughing. And this is where vaccines finally return to the story because, you see, they are the price of admission to this new world. They are the entry fee. Maybe that’s not yet apparent where you are but here, in Ireland, it’s as clear as day.

It’s this type of thing that starts to make me uneasy, just as the ridiculous use of masks did before it. Even if I did want to enter this new world, the idea of paying a non-negotiable price, one which must be handed over without question and without hesitation, would be enough to make me wary. However, to be honest, I’m not interested. In fact, I find myself utterly uninterested in this effort to Build Back Better, to construct a new Utopia out of the ashes of Covid.

Maybe it is the word ‘Utopia’ itself that whispers a warning to me. In another life, I studied Greek from where the word οὐτόπος comes. It translates, you see, as “no place”.

Thomas More surely chose this word deliberately. He could have used Eutopia (εὖτόπος), which actually does translate as “good place”, but he didn’t. He chose “no place”. Because Utopia is no place. It is a mirage. As other tyrants in history have found as they tried to march toward it, bodies trod into the ground beneath them, the road never reaches the promised land. It turns and it twists and it diverts as more and more people fall beneath the jackboot march until it settles somewhere that turns out to be, not a pale shadow of Utopia but rather, a monstrous distortion of it. By then, of course, it’s too late to turn back.

So, maybe that’s why I end up looking to my right, to the mountain path through the forest and find my feet moving that way instead. I don’t know where this path goes, no more than the man in the story. I know it will be harder - all the comforts are back in the city. But the air smells better this way and, for now, I think that’s enough.

“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”²

1. C.S. Lewis, “God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)”

2. Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”