The trouble with utopias is that they remain stagnant. Life on the other hand is predicated upon progress, even if through brutal measures, and that if one is to confront the truth about life as a process, one must dispatch with all compassion for their fellow human, for they recognise that they are mere automatons who exist to serve higher forms of life. Life is aligned to intelligence, to higher orders of intelligence, and will seek superior vessels, to carry life itself forward.

When individuals recognise themselves as vessels for life to progress through, and there is no longer suffering present within the individual. The organizing principle of society will always be for the exceptional few to pave the way for better modes of living for the many. This entails necessarily, that for life to progress, there needs to be many iterations, many trials for successful variants to propogate, and in this regard it becomes even more essential for individuals to perform their assigned roles. Capitalism is perhaps the closest we have come to a good system of organization, but it remains nonetheless terribly flawed, this is however not a bug, but a feature.

One would assume then, that the utopic ideal of society would be one in which there are those born to serve, and those born to rule, who are happy to serve and rule, and therefore do not suffer. This was Plato’s ideal Republic, a perfectly stagnant, perfectly reproducable order. Individuals in this system are not only merely taught from birth that their purpose is to fulfill a specific function within society, but it is encoded within them that what they will do in life is what will gratify them. It will entail, in essence, the complete removal of free will, and it is a utopia of this nature that Huxley envisions in Brave New World.

Of course, the trouble with such a utopia is that it does not serve life’s own purposes very well, and neither do any other utopias. The final objective of any utopia would be to eliminate any form of suffering, but suffering in itself is born through our ability to desire more than which we have, to desire otherwise. Suffering is rooted in our ability to be unpredictable, to want more than what we have been given, and the task of any utopia would be to eliminate suffering through the elimination of unpredictability, through the elimination of choice. Life’s progress is predicated upon radical growth, which is dependent inherently on unpredictability, on the desire to transcend one’s current circumstances. It may not necessarily be born out of desire to rule, but it most certainly is born out of a desire to better one’s circumstances. Such desire may never be found in utopias, for they are doomed to stagnancy, and this is perhaps the only reason they may instead be more appropriately referred to, as dystopias.