What looks like greed when it comes to knowledge hoarding is often fear of penury, because we live in the neoliberal/winner-take-all hypercapitalist era where you’re either a supermanager with a multimilliondollar salary, or you’re headed for impoverishment and enimiseration.



Everyone who’s not in the one percent is living in a social experiment of musical chairs writ large, where we know that no matter how much fun we’re all having, by the time you’re retired, or sick, or have a kid who gets injured, there’s not going to be enough chairs to go around, and so it’s awfully hard to be collegial – let alone generous – with the other players.



Utopia isn’t a society where everything is good. Utopia is a theory of human action – a commitment to be generous and kind even when things are bad. A society where everything is good is necessarily temporary, because the world changes – politics, climate, even meteors! – so whatever optimal fit your society has found for this set of circumstances will be suboptimal when the circumstances change.



The utopian condition is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you mentally rehearse kindness in the face of adversity, when you imagine your neighbors coming over with covered dishes instead of rifles when the lights go out, you set the stage for utopias to come.