Even in perfect societies, the struggle to be human never ends

There’s a subgenre of jokes called “the three wishes,” which you might have heard from time to time.

An example is: Three men are stranded on an island. One day, a bottle washes on shore, a genie comes out and tells the men they are granted three wishes.

Astounded, the first man says: I want to go to Paris. And there he is, sitting at a table at Arpège.

The second man says he wants to go to Hollywood and immediately finds himself on a Scorsese movie set.

The third guy, feeling a bit abandoned, says: My wish is to have the other two back here.

It’s a ha-ha joke in a funny sort of way but there’s a deep side to this and all three-wish jokes that’s never looked at. That is, the jokes are a comedic form of utopian literature, here defined as the imagination envisioning a society in which the needs of all are met.

The genie acts like a supportive community satisfying the expressed wishes of the participants — except that we are led to wonder whether the wish of the last person supersedes or cancels out the already-granted wishes of his island-mates.

You might think this is a question for the political economist but it’s the kind of thing we all think about all the time. Do we think of a society where the needs of all are satisfied without grief, resentment, and dismissive disregard? We can tell by the way we talk to each other.

In the United States today, the utopia issue is far from academic because America is faced with creating a new identity out of the ashes of the old apple-pie American Dream.  

The great irony of course is that the vast majority of folk are not able to articulate the kind of society they’d like to live in: a time, a place, the kind of family they’d like, the kind of work they’d like to do. They were never given the competency to do so.

They stay away from speaking utopian thoughts, as well, because they know they’ll be laughed at. When people hear someone talking about a society in which the needs of all are met, they turn into a mocking Greek chorus and start with: stupid, insane, pipe dream! Who’s going to pay for that!

It’s strange but there’s a dimension to the human psyche — more prominent in some eras than others — that represses envisioned alternatives. Not to get too analytical but it is in fact the human community engaging in self-punishment — for failing to make good on its collective dreams in the past. It’s Adam and Eve stuff.

We see it manifested in a lack of trust for each other, in a resentment-filled allocation of goods and services, and ultimately in the adoption of authoritarian social arrangements to keep the growling rabble from getting out of hand.

We see acceptance of this way of life in an increasing number of literary and cinematic dystopias, visions of societies that rely on totalitarian or fascist-like social arrangements for survival.

Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” is a case in point. In the spring of 2017, it appeared in a highly-popular, award-winning television series that’s captured people’s minds.

There’s a society, Gilead, militaristic in nature, where women are owned as property. The fertile among them, the Handmaids, are ritually raped so the leaders can offset society’s dwindling population. The old story of women as sexual pack mules.

The cinematic trilogy “Hunger Games,” which appeared in 2012, is a similarly gruesome dystopia, derived from the novels of Suzanne Collins.

The society of Panem holds an annual survivalist-game where 24 young people head into the wild to stalk and kill each other until the savior-seed of the future emerges.

The 2014 film “Divergent,” a dystopia based in Chicago, also drapes a pall over our mutual aid and cooperation traits so future generations will forget they’re part of human nature.

And the young have taken to these dark visions. Harry Potter was the talk of the town for decades but in 2012 the “Hunger Games” took over. National Public Radio said teens were drawn to them like moths to a flame.

This shift in imaginative literature (and film) did not escape the great science-fiction writer, Ursula LeGuin, who died in January. She saw her imaginative-writer colleagues making a living off creating visions that feed human despair.

When she received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014, she said we — America — were headed for “hard times” and, to get through them, we need writers who could project “alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being.”

The emphasis is on “other ways of being.” She said we needed more poets and other visionaries, “the realists of a larger reality,” who present societies in which people solve problems through nonviolent means, who figure out how to distribute goods and services without resentment, a society in which people generally feel good about themselves.

The United States of America today does not feel good about herself.

But, as LeGuin pointed out in her highly-acclaimed anarchist-based “The Dispossessed” (Harper & Row, 1974), even in perfect societies, imperfections arise; there’s always work to do, the struggle to be human never ends.

Ironically, while America was debating the tenets of LeGuin’s anarchist society, Anarres, in 1974 sixty-nine leaders of United States society were being indicted for acts of treason, 49 pleaded guilty to selling out the American Dream. Their president escaped on a helicopter.

Two years after “The Dispossessed” appeared, Marge Piercy’s brilliant “Woman on the Edge of Time” arrived. In Piercy’s utopian society, Mattapoisset, no one would ever think of putting women into subservient roles or making them structurally dependent. In Mattapoisset, mothers, nobody in any family, are to be enslaved for the interest of anyone.

We all know that in any society people cheat and steal and take more than they need, but every “per” — as a person is called in Mattapoisset — is guaranteed care for all their needs for life, constitutionally, because everybody, structurally, is deemed to be of equal worth.

If you’re one of those who laughs at utopian thinking because you’re wedded to dystopian dog-eat-dog modules, consider the sabbatical that everyone in Mattapoisset is guaranteed, as they do in universities now, every seven years.

That is, every seventh year, every per is freed from work and family obligations to regenerate, study, think, refresh, reassess the value and meaning of life, fully supported by the community, and without resentment. It’s part of mental health.   

You like that sort of thing? Or has dystopianitis pushed you to the point where all you can offer is derision?