There’s such nonsense talked about utopia. Here’s Oscar Wilde: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”
In 1516 St Thomas More published Utopia, before losing his head on refusing to recognise the marriage of Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn. In it he outlines a world where everyone works according to their abilities and consumes according to their needs.
That was more than three centuries before Karl Marx came up with the same idea, proving, yet again, that there is nothing new under the sun. Indeed, More’s/Marx’s idea has roots in the Acts of the Apostles.
“Utopia” was derived from the Greek for “nonsense”, which More invented for a perfect world in an ideal state. Bless his sweet soul. You’d imagine Oscar would know better.
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Both ignored that much more prevalent entity, state even, without which no map of the world has ever been complete. In every age it has been far and away the most populous place on Earth, as today.
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More people live there than the 1.5 billion in Africa, the 1.46 billion in India, the 1.41 billion in China, not to mention the 450 million in the EU and the 753 million in Europe as a whole (including Russia west of the Ural Mountains). Its numbers, of course, exceed the 480 million in South America and the 347 million in the United States.
It is that place Hamlet describes as: “The undiscover’d country from whose bourn/No traveller returns, puzzles the will/And makes us rather bear those ills we have/Than fly to others that we know not of?”
Welcome to Inertia, where nothing is done and nothing happens, often. Where, eventually everything topples under its own crushing weight, with “no spur to prick the sides” of any intent and, as with its opposite “vaulting ambition”, it “o’erleaps itself and falls on th’other (side).”
Very many citizens of Inertia now live among us, in well-placed, well-heeled public-sector positions, making it appear that we are back in the Ireland of James Joyce, with paralysis the name of the game.
Inertia, from Latin “inertia”, for “inactivity, idleness”.
