How to Build Utopia

How to Build Utopia

From premises no one disputes, to a goal everyone can sign, through the hard problems no one will name, to the steps that get us there. Written June 2026.

The method, and why every other utopia failed

Almost every utopia ever written fails in one of two ways.

The first way is to require better people. The plan works if everyone becomes generous, honest, and tireless. People do not become those things on schedule, so the plan fails, and its authors usually conclude that the people were not worthy of it. Some of the worst crimes of the last century were committed in that mood.

The second way is to smuggle in the author's politics. The book describes a perfect world, and by a remarkable coincidence everyone in it has stopped disagreeing with the author. The religious people have quietly become secular, or the secular people have quietly found God. Property has been abolished and nobody minds, or property is absolute and nobody starves. The disagreement that defines actual human life has been written out of the story before the story starts. This is not solving the problem. It is deleting the problem and describing what remains.

An earlier version of this page failed a third way. It tried to derive a perfect world from numbered axioms, in the style of a geometry proof, and it refused to use words like capitalism, communism, democracy, or religion, on the theory that the words were too loaded. The result sounded rigorous and said almost nothing that could be checked, used, or disagreed with. It is preserved here as a warning. Abstraction is how you make hard problems sound solved without solving them.

This version makes the opposite bet. It follows five rules.

No step may require people to become better than they are. The plan must work with people who are selfish about their children, suspicious of strangers, bored by distant suffering, and tempted by power. If people turn out better than that, everything gets easier. Nothing is allowed to depend on it.

Every hard disagreement is stated at its strongest before it is answered. If you cannot state the other side's case so well that they would accept your summary, you have not earned the right to answer it.

Claims about the world come with numbers and names , so you can check them. Where a number is rough, it is marked as rough.

The path counts as much as the destination. A utopia you cannot get to from the world of 2026, by steps that real people with real interests would actually take, is a painting, not a plan.

What cannot be undone must not be bet. Every large plan contains errors. So every step must be reversible, and any step that is not reversible carries the burden of proof twice over.

One more thing before we start. The word utopia was coined as a joke — it means "no place." This document takes the joke seriously. Utopia is not a place we arrive at and stop. It is a direction, with a measure of progress, like health. No one is perfectly healthy; everyone knows which way healthier is. The claim of this document is that the same is true of the world: we can know which way utopia is, agree on the measure, and walk.

Part oneEleven things we know about people

Everything that follows is built on the eleven claims below. They are chosen for one property: no serious person of any politics or religion denies them. A Marxist and a libertarian, an imam and an atheist, can read this list and object only to the emphasis, not the content. If you find one you actually deny — not dislike, deny — the rest of the document does not bind you. That is the deal.

1People disagree about the best way to live, and the disagreement is permanent.

We have roughly ten thousand years of recorded argument about God, sex, art, food, family, honor, and the meaning of life. Convergence has not happened. It is not happening now: the children of every belief system grow up surrounded by the others and mostly keep their own, and where they convert, they convert in every direction at once. No argument, no evidence, and no amount of education has ever ended this disagreement, and there is no reason to expect the next ten thousand years to differ. Any plan that begins "first, everyone comes to see that…" has already failed. This is the single most important fact in this document.

2People agree about the worst things.

Here is the strange asymmetry that makes utopia possible at all. While agreement about the good life is nowhere, agreement about the bad life is nearly total. There is no culture, no religion, and no political movement that prizes watching your child starve. None that prizes dying of a treatable disease, being tortured, being enslaved, being illiterate against your will, or being imprisoned without ever hearing the charge. People disagree about what to build on the ground floor of life; almost nobody disagrees about what counts as the basement. This means a universal goal cannot be a shared picture of the good — premise 1...