Before EPCOT was a Florida theme park that  packs in ten million sweaty tourists a year,   Walt Disney imagined it… a little differently.

His “Experimental Prototype Community  of Tomorrow” would be a new city   built from the ground up with its  twenty-thousand residents in mind. There would be no cars and no unemployment.

Oh, and the whole thing would be  under a climate-controlled dome,   so Florida’s heat and humidity  couldn’t encroach on anyone’s bliss. But when Walt Disney died, his  utopian dream died with him. EPCOT became this instead. [carnival music] And this story got me wondering:   how “good” is too good to be true?  Is political utopia just…too utopian?

Hi! I'm Ellie Anderson and this  is Crash Course Political Theory. [THEME MUSIC] So, okay, obviously EPCOT wasn’t the first   time someone had dreamed of a  better world and fallen short. But the deeper I dug, the more I realized  how radically different our visions of   utopia can be.

And boy do they reveal  interesting things about who we are. I started in the beginning, with Plato’s  “Republic,” the OG work of western political   theory, which is also a utopian blueprint  for how good things could be “if only.” When Plato was just a young buck  philosophizing about politics,   he witnessed thirty leaders  turn out to be thirty tyrants. So he entertained a thought that  countless others have thought after him:   “Government sucks, and we can do better.” Plato thought this sucky situation was  curable by putting philosophers in power.

He made his case: philosophers  love wisdom, they hate lies,   they’re pleasant, they’re brave, they  learn fast, they have a good memory. He forgot to say we have impeccable fashion  sense, but don't worry, I added that in my copy. Anyway, yes, “rule by lie-haters”  sounds better than “rule by tyrants.” But then I read the fine print.

To create this  ideal government, Plato says, we’d need to   train a generation of philosophers. And to do  that, it’d be best to just start from scratch. Kick out everybody over the  age of ten,. and get rid of   all the artists and poets while we’re at it,  because they’re, quote, “imitators  [...] thrice removed from the truth.” Then let the philosophers decide  what everybody’s jobs should be.

Something tells me there won’t be a YouTuber  track. I wonder what would happen to Mr. Beast?

We’ll never know, because  Plato’s utopia never became   reality. Actually, it turns out the  word “utopia” didn’t even exist yet! Not until 1516, when English statesman Thomas  More coined it and wrote a book by that name.

The novel reads like a conversation between  More and a world-traveler named Raphael,   who also entertained the thought that  “government sucks and we can do better.” Especially the government of Tudor  England, a quote “conspiracy of   the rich” that seized people’s land,  squandered resources on gold and armies,   and “create[d] thieves, and then  punish[ed] them for stealing.” But there is one good government, the book  claims, on a distant island called Utopia. Let’s go to the tape. [TV static] Picture yourself here: a perfect  society with no standing army. No   private property.

No lawyers. There’s great  work/life balance—plenty of time to read,   exercise, and go to public lectures.  A place where paradise is real. And it’s normal to see your betrothed  naked before you marry them.

Also, people don’t covet gold and silver;  they make… chamber pots with it. Hm. Alright.

This message has been sponsored  by the Utopia Board of Tourism. [TV static] Sounds pretty groovy. And a little like the communes I  heard about growing up in California. But then I read the fine print again.  In Utopia, enslavement is… fine.

Yikes. Sure, there’s golden chamber pots,  but no mention of that in the commercial. There’s also no beer, no tolerance  for time-wasters, and quote,   “they do not so much as know dice, or  any such foolish and mischievous games.” Well, there goes my friends’  Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

Oh, and that word “Utopia”? It sounds like the Greek “eu-topos,” meaning  “a good place,” but it’s derived from the   similar-sounding “ou-topos,” meaning “no  place.” The good place literally is no place. Thomas More, you tricky badger.

Feels like  you’re trying to teach us something here. [frightening strings] And maybe that’s why “too utopian”  has become such a political burn,   synonymous with “impractical.” A government  that’s too good is just a fantasy. I’ve definitely heard this  criticism thrown at Marxism,   a political theory that envisions a future  society after the collapse of capitalism. Marx is often called out for having  concocted some grand utopian vision   without offering a road map for how  things should unfold after the revolution.

But he was much more interested in  critiquing capitalism than he was   in writing a guidebook to utopia, so that’s  less of a burn and more like a shrug emoji. As for me, I love a good  plan as much as the next gal. But I’m also a philosopher,   so I’m not above insisting that thinking  is a worthwhile endeavor all on its own.

There’s a good case to be made for dreaming. And I’m not alone in that. My guy, Ernst Bloch, a German Marxist  philosopher, argued that imagining a   different future is not only worthwhile but  necessary to understand our present, messy world.

He expressed this idea as the ontology of the  unfinished, ontology being grad-school-speak   for “the study of how things are.” And  to Bloch? “How things are” is open-ended. But it’s hard to examine the not-yet in the  right-now. So utopias give us something concrete   to discuss and explore, and help us remember  that our present reality isn’t a finished draft.

Whoa, okay. When I read that, it felt both obvious   and deep—we don’t know what the future  will be. We need ways of visualizing it.

And that got me thinking: maybe utopias shouldn’t  be written off as an idealistic waste of time. Like any bold plan, should  we poke them, prod them,   consider if they’re practical? Yeah.  Should we read the fine print?

Absolutely. There could be an artless city of ten-year-olds in   there. Or an island of gold  toilets but no board games.

And all this poking and prodding of our  utopian visions can also reveal more   about what we value—in our cultures,  governments, and day-to-day lives. So I started thinking about utopias differently:  as a sandbox for testing political futures. Which made me wonder, “What do thinkers across the  political spectrum think the future should be?” On one end, a utopia might be what scholar Robert   Nozick describes in his book  “Anarchy, State, and Utopia.” He argues that governments, like M&Ms,   are best when mini— a libertarian view that  prioritizes individual freedom above all else,   and takes any meddling from the  state as a threat to those freedoms.

Nozick’s utopia doesn’t interfere  with people’s private property or   private lives—like, by redistributing  income or legislating what’s “moral.” It’s there just enough to  protect people’s freedom to   live how they want—without presuming  what the right way to live might be. To him, the perfect government is minimalist. Very clean-girl aesthetic of him.

At the same time, Nozick thought it  was naive to imagine we could ever   achieve a perfect society that suits everybody. He writes, "It is helpful to imagine cavemen  sitting together to think up what, for all time,   will be the best possible society and  then setting out to institute it.” I mean, yeah, it sounds silly when  you put it like that! For the record,   I’d love to know what Grog,  Zurg, and Durg’s ideas were.

On the more progressive side,  I found that utopian thought   is often a vehicle for critiquing how  things are and imagining what could be. Like, scholar bell hooks doesn’t explicitly  talk about “utopia” in her writing. But she imagines alternatives to  current systems that hold everyone back,   ways we could make life better  for as many people as possible.

In her book “Feminism is for  Everybody,” she clarifies that   feminism isn’t about crafting  a pro-women, anti-men future. It’s about challenging the problem of sexism,   which we’re all socialized to accept in our  thoughts and actions from the time we’re born. She invites us to imagine: what would society  be like if we changed our own sexist thoughts   and actions?

How could the world transform for  the better, if we transformed ourselves first? Similarly, scholar José Muñoz  invites the LGBTQ+ community   to embrace utopian thinking  as a source of hope and joy. In his book “Cruising Utopia” he argues that queer  literature, art, and drag shows offer a kind of   utopian map, a way of dreaming up “other ways of  being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” Queerness challenges how things are, and  models something different and better.

So by the end of all this, I’m thinking  that it doesn’t make sense to rush into   any “good place” that’s dreamed up. I  mean, it could end up being… a bad place. But it also doesn’t make sense to turn away from  good ideas just because they seem “too utopian.” One of the perspectives I click with the most  comes from feminist scholar Lucy Sargisson,   who challenges the idea of utopia as a  perfect blueprint that we follow to a T.

She advocates instead for a more slippery,   dynamic vision of the future that  values the process over the endgame. So, maybe the point of utopias isn’t  perfection. Maybe the real utopias   are the friends we make — I mean, the  paradigms we shift — along the way.

If we’re not happy with what is…there’s  power in imagining what could be. Next time, we’ll talk about two best  frenemies: art and politics. See you then.

Thanks for watching this episode  of Crash Course Political Theory,   which was filmed at the Basteel Studio and was  made with the help of all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash  Course free for everyone,   forever, you can join our community on Patreon.