{"id":23658,"date":"2014-07-11T00:01:40","date_gmt":"2014-07-11T05:01:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=23658"},"modified":"2014-07-10T16:26:04","modified_gmt":"2014-07-10T21:26:04","slug":"qotd-the-utopian-urge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/07\/11\/qotd-the-utopian-urge\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The Utopian urge"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Whereas a conservative writer might warn that humans are just as likely, if not more likely, to bungle things when applying past experience to new plans for society as when trying to fix their own private lives \u2014 and an optimistic libertarian writer might note that people are far <em>more<\/em> rational in planning their own lives than in planning others\u2019 \u2014 left-liberals have a tendency to think that humans\u2019 ability to plan collectively is <em>inversely<\/em> proportional to their ability to plan their lives as individuals.<\/p>\n<p>A more concrete example: the most neurotic of my fellow New Yorkers tend also to be the people most likely to think sense and order can be imposed on our messed-up lives from above. Politics becomes a route to redemption. Or as one comic book industry professional who is a self-proclaimed communist put it when I first met her here seventeen years ago, \u201cCapitalism is a terrible system \u2014 it allowed me to get $60,000 in debt.\u201d The left-liberal imagining being saved from herself is analogous to those social conservatives who look at their own bad habits and conclude that the whole world badly needs religion.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Seavey, <a href=\"http:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2013\/12\/26\/sci-fi-socialist-like-art\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Sci-Fi is Socialist, Like Most Art&#8221;, <em>The Federalist<\/em><\/a>, 2013-12-26<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whereas a conservative writer might warn that humans are just as likely, if not more likely, to bungle things when applying past experience to new plans for society as when trying to fix their own private lives \u2014 and an optimistic libertarian writer might note that people are far more rational in planning their own [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,41],"tags":[712,576,139,76],"class_list":["post-23658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-centralplanning","tag-philosophy","tag-psychology","tag-socialism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-69A","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23658"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23659,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23658\/revisions\/23659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}