“Ouch!”, Yelps Society…

By Shreya Sriram

Fuel. Coffee. Same Thing.

~Teen Writer, 2022.

Earlier…

I push my oversized glasses up the bridge of my nose and stifle a yawn that’s a hair-line away from escaping my mouth. Sleep isn’t a subject of familiarity anymore to a species like me that runs on a fabled beverage called coffee. In the real sense though, we are working towards the “Great Awakening” -- A mass sanctification programme designed for humankind. As a recruit scientist and researcher at the Utopia Centre for Genetic Research and Human Sustenance (UCGRHS), I feel it’s crucial to put my mind to its maximum working capacity. Afterall, we do aim for the perfection and amelioration of the Human race.

People act on their beliefs. When beliefs of individuals become incompatible, it's harvest time for disharmony.

“Discontentment brews discord”

These are the very words that groomed me in my childhood. They might as well be imprinted on the insides of my eyelids.

Our leaders envision a perfect society– personal, political, economic, social and environmental perfectibility. That is the desired destination.

Now…

I involuntarily shudder, thinking back to how everything I was made to believe since the age I could apprehend words, just crumbled into smithereens in a matter of a few hours.

The truth was, our human volunteers were treated as nothing more than lab rats and our scientific knowledge was used for something that would hardly pass as noble. Well, the initial intentions of the founders weren’t corrupt, but humans have a recurring fatal flaw- greed.

Followed by, well…doom.

The flipside of Utopian ideologies shouldn’t be hard to imagine. The Dark mirror image: Failed social experiments, repressive political regimes, and overbearing economic systems are just some of many egregious consequences.

Today, it’s hard to imagine that our future could bring us goodness, for our minds are still muddled around the disappointments that came with believing in the Utopias of the past.

We dread the future to the extent that we try avoiding it. But why? Is it because we don't want it to fail? But how would we know if we won’t try at all…

A truth that we all seem to have understood, but have never acted upon- “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

It is to be noticed that not just individuals but entire societies and nations have been jeopardised as a result of not learning from past errors.

“When you have to murder people by the tens of millions to achieve your utopian dream, you have instantiated only a dystopian nightmare.”

The 20th century was a hub to religious cults, world wars, pogroms, genocides, …The list could be endless. Experiments in utopian socialist ideologies as manifested in Stalinist Russia, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, were all large-scale attempts to achieve political, economic and social perfection. They even went on a step further to attain racial homogeneity and put innocent lives through the most complex forms of artificial selection and psychophysical training which inadvertly resulted in tens of millions of people being murdered by their own states.

They say, for an individual, that success is the ‘aggregate of marginal improvements.’

Then, so is it for society. The reason that the Utopian models of the past have failed is fairly easy to understand. They have all been designed as perfect societies for imperfect species.

So, is there a plausible cure?

First things first, instead of eradicating imperfections that define us, we must target to improve our state. Slowly. Steadily. Day by day.

This is model Protopia.

Let us all strive for a better tomorrow than today and keep at bay the anticipation and uncertainty that the future haunts us with and value progression over perfection.

By Shreya Sriram