Bergerud’s Law and Pantopia

Bergerud’s Law and Pantopia

 

Thomas More made a revealing pun with the word ‘Utopia’: it meant both Eutopia, the Good Place, and Outopia, No Place. The satirist More posited a place too good to be true, in order to mock what is. Somehow the world was slack enough to think his impossibility was an ideal to strive for, by flying off to infinity-and-beyond.

A friend of mine, Eric Bergerud, proposes what I dub ‘Bergerud’s Law’:

Utopian politics always fail, always do damage, and are always incoherent.

This is due to the Outopian nature of Eutopia. Another Eric, the longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer, said of utopian novels, ‘Now we know how the story ends’.

          The persistent failure of utopia inspired another literary trope, Dystopia, the Bad Place. But perfect wrongness is just as unrealistic and unsustainable as perfect rightness, so dystopia too breaks down. Now the young-adult novels that start off in dystopia end with its breakdown. Katniss Everdeen defeats the Games and has a baby, but loses her sister and has PTSD. Young’uns nowadays, bless ‘em, have hope but don’t expect perfection.

          Utopia and Dystopia are as false a dichotomy as Heaven and Hell. For us here on the Earth plane, I propose a third trope: Pantopia, the All-Place. Pantopia is where everything that happens everywhere, happens. In Pantopia, toast falls buttered-side down, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, power corrupts, freedom creates, and everything now proven was once only imagined. Its political system is the circulation of aristocracies. Its economy is based on trading real goods for imaginary money. Its technology is advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic, but it constantly needs repair. Pantopia sucks and is wondrous. It’s Utopia and Dystopia, intertwined, inextricable. In Pantopia, life is nothing but trouble, yet people are for it.

          I see pantopianism everywhere. For instance, the Internet. Science fiction has long predicted a global cybernetic network containing all human knowledge. This network was always envisioned as an AI with an agenda of its own. Either it was a benevolent Multivac, selflessly guiding us to higher state of being, or a malevolent SkyNet, bent on our destruction. Instead we got the Web, which is Earthly, ours, and all too human. The Web is full of ads, scams, cats, and pornography. We’re too wicked for Multivac’s Heaven, and too virtuous for SkyNet’s Hell. Instead we got the Web that we deserve.