Word: utopianizing
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...more I learn about volunteering in the United States, the more I think about my own country of Romania, and about the need to revive a volunteering spirit in the hearts and minds of Romanians. The moral value of voluntarism slowly died during the 45 years of the cruelly utopian Communist ideology. Today, when the transition to an open-market economy moves the Romanian society toward a composition of money-oriented and self-centered individuals, volunteerism is a necessity...
Since then two developments have fostered the spread of cultism. One is the end of communism. Whatever the disasters of Marxism, at least it provided an outlet for utopian longings. Now that universalist impulses have one less way to expend themselves, religious enthusiasms of whatever character take on a fresh appeal. And even Russia, with a rich tradition of fevered spirituality and the new upheavals of capitalism, is dealing with modern cults...
...gradual, wistful loss of his Utopian enthusiasms, though, that shapes Seabrook's narrative. Inspired by the promise of a "virtual community" to join the Well, a legendary West Coast bulletin-board system, Seabrook learns in various hard ways that a community of digital beings can be just as constraining--and cruel--as the corporeal kind. Unwritten rules abound, and when Seabrook breaches a few, the Well's otherwise benevolent group mind turns on him in what one Well veteran calls a Chicken Peck--"where one of the flock shows a bit of blood, and a few of the other chickens...
...utopian scene closes at this point of my autobiography. For in order to arrive in Washington, I need to be thinking like an upperclassman, and as we have already established, I am a first-year who is still discovering the Harvard campus. I need to focus. I need a vision of what my time here is going to be like, what I am living for. At this point, I have neither...
...ambitions with him, and these were fully realized in his triptychs. They represent one of the greatest efforts of the symbolic imagination in all 20th century art, a sort of theatrum mundi, or world theater, in which the follies and tragedies of Europe, along with its pining for a utopian order on the very brink of its collapse, were given an unrelentingly vivid allegorical form...