Dangers of Totalitarian Utopian Visions | Jordan B Peterson

I think one thing we should have learned from the 20th century, but of course didn't, was that there's something extraordinarily dangerous about totalitarian utopian visions. That's something Dostoevsky wrote about by the way in his great book "Notes from underground". Because Dostoevsky, had figured out by the early 1900's that there was something very very pathological about a Utopian vision of perfection. That it was profoundly anti-human. And in "Notes from underground" he demolishes the notion of utopia. One of the things he says, that I loved. It's so brilliant, said: imagine that you brought the socialist utopia into being and Dostoevsky says and that human beings had nothing to do except eat, drink and busy themselves with the continuation of the species. He said that the first thing that would happen under circumstances like that would be that human beings would go mad and break the system, smash it, just so that something unexpected and crazy could happen. Because human beings don't want Utopian comfort and certainty. They want adventure and chaos and uncertainty and So that the very notion of a utopia was anti-human because we're not built for static utopia. We are built for a dynamic situation where there's Demands placed on us and where there's the optimal amount of uncertainty. Well we know what happened in the 20th century as a consequence of the widespread promulgation of utopian schemes and What happened was mayhem on a scale that had never been matched in the entire history of humanity, and that's really saying something because There was plenty of mayhem before the 20th century, I guess there wasn't as much industrial clout behind it .

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