The Future of Utopia

The origin of utopia from myth and religion and the common origin of these forms of human wish projections from the desire for wish fulfilment and the suffering from an unsatisfactory reality form the background against which the contrast becomes visible between the tendency of myth and religion to persist in and be bound to the acceptance of the factually given and the emancipation movement of utopia, whose critique of reality very clearly distinguishes a statement of the factually given from its justification. While myth, religion, and their descendant and complement-the status quo ideology-construct for themselves an apparatus of justification, a canon of doctrines which, as we have attempted to show, are “not precipitates of experience or final results of thought, but “illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, most urgent desires of humanity” made in projection and isolated from realizability, utopia, as an emancipatory figure of thought, attempts to compromise between desire and reality, between experience and the attempt to think alternatives to experience.