I'm not looking perfection; I'm looking for an internally consistent fantasy

Max Beerbohm (by way of Sargent) says:

                              So this is Utopia,

                                             Is it? Well –

                              I beg your pardon;

                                             I thought it was Hell.

Beerbohm does not appear to have been a fan of utopianism. I admit that I am with Beerbohm on this one and tend to view other people’s utopian ideas with a little suspicion. For example, in today’s Washington Post (Knuckle) there was an article outlining the consequences to Virginia’s plan to sterilize “defective” people under a 1924 law “whose aim was to build a more perfect society.” The plan was based on concepts about eugenics and was the same set of ideas that led to the horrors of Nazi Germany.  One person’s utopia was, in this case, another’s hell. With this in mind, I am conscious that whatever I write in this blog about making the world a better place may well turn out to be someone else’s nightmare. There is no possibility of creating a perfect utopia that will accommodate everyone.

However, Sargent (1994) insists that utopia should not be equated with perfection. To qualify as a utopia, according the Sargent (1994), the author has to intend, and perhaps contemporary readers agree, that creating the utopia proposed would be better than the society they lived in at the time.  I would like to think of utopia as a thought experiment rather than an actual desire to change society into what I would consider to be better.

With this in mind: in my utopia, everyone who worked would be paid exactly $75,000 per year. I’ve heard this is the optimum amount a person needs to be happy with his or her life (Luscombe). I perceive there to be several benefits that would outweigh the negatives to this scheme:

1.      People may enter professions, begin careers or jobs they may not have considered because of the pay available;

2.      The gender pay gap would be eliminated, as would the idea of ‘female professions’ and ‘male dominated industry’; and

3.      The class divide may flatten out and the gap between rich and poor narrow (though it would not be eliminated).

Everyone would not live happily ever after. Perfection was not the goal. But my intent for this radical idea is that it would make a society better than the one we have today.

Works cited:

Knuckle, Frederick. “Va. eugenics victims would receive compensation for sterilization under bill.” Washington Post 30 Jan 2013. Web.

Luscomb, Belinda. “Do We Need $75,000 a Year to Be Happy?” Time Magazine 6 Sep 2010. Web.

Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 1-37. Web.