Word: utopias
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...true believer who would not die for his beliefs? Indeed, Jones seems to have sensed a great secret of the national consciousness: Americans tend to be ashamed of their faith, to feel it is weak, for they see that their vision of a "city on a hill," a utopia, a Great Society, has failed. Americans are by history failed absolutists: but if they are given a second chance at some absolute spiritual system, they grasp it with fervor...
...their worst, the cults acquire a psychosis of millennialism. This chiliasm, playing at the drama of the last days, nourishes when life is no longer seen as ascendant. But no matter how democratically advertised, visions of the New Jerusalem, Utopia or an Edenic Jonestown are bathed in a totalitarian light. And they are shadowed by glimpses of enemies: Antichrist, Gog and Magog; paranoia is often a cult's principal instrument of discipline. Even in 1978, one catches whiffs of an old dementia and witchfire...
Gosh! Gee whiz! Golly day! Now how about letting us hear from the thousands of escapees who risked their lives to leave Utopia...
...planning for the future. These individuals seem to think that they are something new and unique to this country. Unfortunately they are merely a repeat performance of an overextended, spendthrift, pre-Depression America. They are naive to think that the rug can't be pulled from under their Utopia via a recession, job layoffs or a death in the family. What these "college graduates" need is to recognize that today's new elite can also become tomorrow's newly impoverished...
This demonstration of how philosophy informs "the whole life of humanity" is no academic exercise. Barrett is convinced that the history of ideas foreshadows the fate of the Western world. His vision of the future, in both its American and Russian versions-Skinner's programmed Utopia vs. the triumph of Soviet totalitarianism-sometimes sounds like a science-fiction scenario. A former Marxist, Barrett shares with other victims of the god that failed a dramatic anxiety about the menace of Communism...