Demise of Utopia

Utopia, the ultimate perfection of all social systems, a way of life which eliminates all inequality, all selfishness, and from this womb of perfection flows harmony in abundance. Communism, in theory is the sinless, pure combination of satisfaction and benevolence between every single human being. Workers sweat in factories to generate convenient products, bakers pull out their trayful of delicious breads and freely hands it out to the passerby, artists paint on the sidewalk, making the city a stunning sight, and everyone picks up the trash by their feet, eliminating the need of street cleaners. Technological progress will be based on the goodness of heart, on the compassionate urge to better life for all. By using the divine generosity that each of us possesses deep, deep in our hearts, everything should work out miraculously, like the elusive 'perfect machine' which produces more output than input. Money becomes a dirty word, and is tossed into books of ancient history along with greed, and working just for oneself will considered dispecably barbaric. Marx had everything figured out perfectly! But why wasn't this noble social system carried out? Why hasn't the grace of communism pervaded the world?

You see, even when a country claims to be pursuing the final phase of perfection in communism, it is but a distorted mess of corruption. There are many vital flaws to communism that will disable this perfect plan from ever becoming a reality.

First, Marx miscalculated the real human being. We are not good at heart, or at least not completely. Second, the Marxist socialism phase in the pursuit of communism is too difficult to overcome. As mentioned before, people are not perfect. Human beings will never let go of power once s/he grabs hold of it. Third, communist countries will not be able to compete economically against capitalist ones. The competition poses no problems if the entire world embraced communism, but unfortunately that is not the case. Because of these critical miscalculations, Marx's utopia will never exist in the scale he intended. And the utopia will always remain but some good-looking words on paper.

So let's face it. People are not as good as we hope they are. Greed is an integral part of us, and that fact will remain permanently. We are genetically programmed to compete against others as hyenas brawl for pieces of carcass. This primal instinct is the force that carries us through the process of natural selection, and evolve from primitive monkeys fighting for yellow pieces of bananas to cultivated human beings fighting for green pieces of crispy paper. Since we are greedy creatures, we cannot stand living in harmony and ignore opportunities to step on somebody else's head. We rarely do things, things even relatively easy for us, plainly for the good of others. Even rarer does anyone sweat their backs off for the good of others, perhaps someone they don't even know. And that was what Marx asked the people to do. Communism is extremely fragile, and just one greedy mind will lead the entire world into lusting for power and wealth (And there is usually a much higher proportion greedy minds). Marx didn't understand that we are complex beings, and greed is part of us.