Lennon’s Utopia
John Lennon asks us to imagine a bunch of things…
He asks that everyone live in the present. No countries. No religion. No wars. No possessions. No sins. That we live in eternal peace.
John, you are asking us for too much. Though not as much as when you asked Chuck Berry to let Yoko Ono sing with both of you.
As we near the two-year anniversary of the cringy celebrity rendition of Imagine (I still think you are wonderful, Gal Gadot), I decided to listen to it again. I listened many times over.
I love this song. And I love the message. It’s one of those songs that gives you chills every so often, that takes us out of our ego and invites us to think not only of ourselves, but the world we live in.
At the same time, it presents a utopia. Utopias are dangerous. They are finely tailored visions of the qualities we desire to see the most in ourselves and others. It's the perfect candy for our sugar-indulgent conscience.
Yet, these utopias are such simplified versions of the world that they mislead those who believe them most feverishly. Principally, they neglect presenting our world as the complex adaptive system that we are. In comparison with our sugar-coated utopias, the complex reality of our world looks like a steaming pile of kale.
(For the record, I’m a fan of kale).
Complex adaptive systems are defined as a dynamic network of interactions with a systemic behavior that may not be predictable by the behavior of its individual components. Furthermore, both the individual and combined elements mutate in reaction to an event or sequence of events. In short, these systems are unpredictable, highly dynamic, and self-organizing. This may be a wordy concept with a bunch of buzzwords, but I think it’s more reflection of *gestures around* the world that surrounds us.
The irony is not lost on me that this is a simplified definition of a broad concept. Simplification is natural. It’s been present for centuries across Western and Eastern culture. There is a reason there are 10 commandments and not 100. The idea of Nirvana in Buddhist religion is simple. The best writers are the ones that can take a very complex idea and present it in the simplest, most elegant manner. This is why metaphors are such powerful communication devices.
I’ve seen a trend the past few years where complex ideas are simplified to the point that we fail to see how they interact with other ideas. In the attempt of understanding something, we break all linkages with its dependencies–and miss out key context. It’s like trying to understand why cars don’t fly without understanding how physics plays a role. This trend is fueled by tribal politics, the incentives around media and advertisement, and social media.
We live in a very complex world. A world where Imagine as a song is far more beautiful than Imagine as a manifesto. In a world where our information diet is so poor, utopias gain traction for their simplicity. This oversimplification creates zero-sum games that inevitably will continue clashing with each other. Each clash creates a series of other clashes. This is why othering and tribalism are getting worse, not better.
Back to Lennon’s utopia and one of its messages. A popular narrative I tend to see among some of the more progressive voices in the political spectrum is the idea of not having borders. I understand the spirit of the idea. Borders are man-made, seemingly arbitrary (e.g. look at a map of the US and a map of the African continent), and the enforcement of these borders more often than not, results in violent conflict and humanitarian strife. Therefore, it’s very easy to deduce that borders are absurd and that they mainly bring harm and suffering to the world. Framed in this simple manner, who in their right mind would be in favor of national borders?
But what we fail to see from those that offer such a simple narrative is what this utopia looks like in practice, and how it becomes self-sustaining. We fail to acknowledge why borders exist in the first place and why they’ve been around for thousands of years.
Borders naturally emerge because they are a recurring property of how humans organize themselves. To presume that we can end them, ignores thousands of years of historical evidence and evolutionary tendencies. We overestimate how much we’ve evolved as a species.
It’s shitty to think about, but no one benefits from the delusion of utopias. They provide no constructive end-state by which to work towards. They feed on our ever growing desire to escape our current reality, and ultimately disconnect us from the world as it is.
I don’t have a good answer on how to think about borders, nor what more constructive alternatives to utopias are. I’m telling you to not listen to the siren song. Yet, I’m afraid I can’t tell you what to listen to instead.
But I believe that if we approach today’s world with the understanding that we live in a complex, dynamic environment, that we don’t have most of the answers, that our agency in this world rests primarily with ourselves, and that the most meaningful communities we can impact are our friends and family; I think collectively we can operate to create the type of world we want to see.
Imagine that.
