Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Wells, H.G. (2004), A Modern Utopia, Project Gutenberg, New York, NY, Retrieved on 2010-11-01Source Material [www.gutenberg.org]
Folksonomies: centrism utopias Memes
01 JAN 2010
The Will to Live Perpetuates Aggression
In space and time the pervading Will to Live sustains for evermore a perpetuity of aggressions.
The fertilising conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of the personal life, and all our Utopias no more than schemes for bettering that interplay. 1 
notes
notesAn insight from H.G.Wells.
01 JAN 2010
A Modern Utopia Requires an Entire Planet
No less than a planet will serve the purpose of a modern Utopia. Time was when a mountain valley or an island seemed to promise sufficient isolation for a polity to maintain itself intact from outward force; the Republic of Plato stood armed ready for defensive war, and the New Atlantis and the Utopia of More in theory, like China and Japan through many centuries of effectual practice, held themselves isolated from intruders. Such late instances as Butler's satirical %u201CErewhon,%u201D and ... 1 notes
notesThe time is long past when a utopia could exist in a country or city, now a utopia can only exist if the entire world is involved.
01 JAN 2010
Utopia Will Have a Universal Language
We need suppose no linguistic impediments to intercourse. The whole world will surely have a common language, that is quite elementarily Utopian, and since we are free of the trammels of convincing story-telling, we may suppose that language to be sufficiently our own to understand. Indeed, should we be in Utopia at all, if we could not talk to everyone? 1 notes
notesBut it doesn't need that anymore. Translators and translations break down the language barriers, so that technology eliminates the need to overcome this cultural barrier.
01 JAN 2010
A Mind Like a Dog Turning Around for a Time Before Allowi...
So presently to bed and to sleep, but not at once to sleep. At first my brain, like a dog in unfamiliar quarters, must turn itself round for a time or so before it lies downFolksonomies: metaphors
Folksonomies: metaphors
1 notes
notesA nice way to describe thoughts that keep us up at night.
08 JAN 2011
The Various Ways of Exterminating a Race
Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, and most of them are cruel. You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrew fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards did the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly with deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of their Indians; you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is not accustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that will expose it to infectious dise... 1 notes
notesH.G. Wells gives a sad history of how various empires have extinguished other cultures.
08 JAN 2011
Humans Are Naturally Xenophobic
the more important thing about an aggregatory idea from the State maker's point of view is not so much what it explicitly involves as what it implicitly repudiates. The natural man does not feel he is aggregating at all, unless he aggregates against something. He refers himself to the tribe; he is loyal to the tribe, and quite inseparably he fears or dislikes those others outside the tribe. The tribe is always at least defensively hostile and usually actively hostile to humanity beyond the ag... 1 notes
notesThis is a fact of human nature that must either be overcome or used to good purpose. It even occurs in academia, as with the example of the botanist.
08 JAN 2011
The Samurai Must Share Their Rule With a Mix of Commoners
Practically all political power vests in the samurai. Not only are they the only administrators, lawyers, practising doctors, and public officials of almost all kinds, but they are the only voters. Yet, by a curious exception, the supreme legislative assembly must have one-tenth, and may have one-half of its members outside the order, because, it is alleged, there is a sort of wisdom that comes of sin and laxness, which is necessary to the perfect ruling of life. 1 notes
notesBecause there is a wisdom that comes with sin and laxness.
08 JAN 2011
Samurai Hold a Personal Relationship with God
Just as they will have escaped that delusive unification of every species under its specific definition that has dominated earthly reasoning, so they will have escaped the delusive simplification of God that vitiates all terrestrial theology. They will hold God to be complex and of an endless variety of aspects, to be expressed by no universal formula nor approved in any uniform manner. Just as the language of Utopia will be a synthesis, even so will its God be. The aspect of God is differen...Folksonomies: voluntary nobility
Folksonomies: voluntary nobility
1 notes
notesThey do not interact with god through a priest.
08 JAN 2011
The More Dimorphic the Female of a Society, the Greater E...
An adult white woman differs far more from a white man than a negress or pigmy woman from her equivalent male. The education, the mental disposition, of a white or Asiatic woman, reeks of sex; her modesty, her decorum is not to ignore sex but to refine and put a point to it; her costume is clamorous with the distinctive elements of her form. The white woman in the materially prosperous nations is more of a sexual specialist than her sister of the poor and austere peoples, of the prosperous cl...Folksonomies: feminism
Folksonomies: feminism
1 notes
notesIf women are made to dress up and accentuate their sexual attributes, they become useless for anything but sex, since their presence will inflame mens' passions and make them act hormonally; while women who are treated with equality could be teachers and productive members of society.
08 JAN 2011
Property Equals Freedom
Under modern conditions%u2014indeed, under any conditions%u2014a man without some negotiable property is a man without freedom, and the extent of his property is very largely the measure of his freedom. Without any property, without even shelter or food, a man has no choice but to set about getting these things; he is in servitude to his needs until he has secured property to satisfy them. But with a certain small property a man is free to do many things, to take a fortnight's holiday when he...Folksonomies: centrism
Folksonomies: centrism
1 The more property a person has, the more freedom they have with it, but there is a point where their amassing of property infringes on the rights of others.
08 JAN 2011
Socialism and Individualism are Absurdities
To the onlooker, both Individualism and Socialism are, in the absolute, absurdities; the one would make men the slaves of the violent or rich, the other the slaves of the State official, and the way of sanity runs, perhaps even sinuously, down the intervening valley.Folksonomies: centrism
Folksonomies: centrism
It is an ideal mean to which we must strive.
08 JAN 2011
The Use of Gold for Money Leads to Efforts to Inflate Its...
Gold is abused and made into vessels of dishonour, and abolished from ideal society as though it were the cause instead of the instrument of human baseness; but, indeed, there is nothing bad in gold. Making gold into vessels of dishonour and banishing it from the State is punishing the hatchet for the murderer's crime. Money, did you but use it right, is a good thing in life, a necessary thing in civilised human life, as complicated, indeed, for its purposes, but as natural a growth as the bo...Folksonomies: economics
Folksonomies: economics
1 notes
notesReminds me of the Mortgage crisis, when homes became a source of money and every effort was made to over-inflate their value.
08 JAN 2011
Replacing the Gold Standard with an Energy Standard
It has been suggested by an ingenious thinker that it is possible to use as a standard of monetary value no substance whatever, but instead, force, and that value might be measured in units of energy. An excellent development this, in theory, at any rate, of the general idea of the modern State as kinetic and not static; it throws the old idea of the social order and the new into the sharpest antithesis. The old order is presented as a system of institutions and classes ruled by men of substa...Folksonomies: economics
Folksonomies: economics
1 notes
notesAn interesting idea; however difficult to quantify. It does set monetary standards to something more practical than a rare metal or credit evaluations.
08 JAN 2011
Total Liberty Would Reduce Our Liberty
To have free play for one's individuality is, in the modern view, the subjective triumph of existence, as survival in creative work and offspring is its objective triumph. But for all men, since man is a social creature, the play of will must fall short of absolute freedom. Perfect human liberty is possible only to a despot who is absolutely and universally obeyed. Then to will would be to command and achieve, and within the limits of natural law we could at any moment do exactly as it please...Folksonomies: centrism
Folksonomies: centrism
If we had the liberty to kill, then everyone's liberty to move about free of fear would be impacted.
08 JAN 2011
We Cannot Trend How Our Reasoning May Go
There is no abiding thing in what we know. We change from weaker to stronger lights, and each more powerful light pierces our hitherto opaque foundations and reveals fresh and different opacities below. We can never foretell which of our seemingly assured fundamentals the next change will not affect. What folly, then, to dream of mapping out our minds in however general terms, of providing for the endless mysteries of the future a terminology and an idiom! We follow the vein, we mine and accu... 1 notes
notesAs we follow lines of thought, "mining" them, we do not know where they will take us, and as we metabolize our thoughts, they pass away from us.
08 JAN 2011
The Samurai, or "Voluntary Nobility"
I reflected. "What else may not the samurai do?"
"Acting, singing, or reciting are forbidden them, though they may lecture authoritatively or debate. But professional mimicry is not only held to be undignified in a man or woman, but to weaken and corrupt the soul; the mind becomes foolishly dependent on applause, over-skilful in producing tawdry and momentary illusions of excellence; it is our experience that actors and actresses as a class are loud, ignoble, and insincere. If they have not ...Folksonomies: voluntary nobility
Folksonomies: voluntary nobility
1 The voluntary nobility of H.G.Wells Utopia may not sing or act, as professional mimicry is undignified.
08 JAN 2011
The Samurai Reject Elaborately Ornate Religious Displays
The leading principle of the Utopian religion is the repudiation of the doctrine of original sin; the Utopians hold that man, on the whole, is good. That is their cardinal belief. Man has pride and conscience, they hold, that you may refine by training as you refine his eye and ear; he has remorse and sorrow in his being, coming on the heels of all inconsequent enjoyments. How can one think of him as bad? He is religious; religion is as natural to him as lust and anger, less intense, indeed, ...Folksonomies: centrism voluntary nobility
Folksonomies: centrism voluntary nobility
Like over-eating or alcoholism, the Samurai view ornate religion as a form of gluttony, as they also see religion accepted with an uncritical eye.
08 JAN 2011
The Regimen of the Voluntary Nobility
of the things that the samurai are obliged to do.
There would be many precise directions regarding his health, and rules that would aim at once at health and that constant exercise of will that makes life good. Save in specified exceptional circumstances, the samurai must bathe in cold water, and the men must shave every day; they have the precisest directions in such matters; the body must be in health, the skin and muscles and nerves in perfect tone, or the samurai must go to the doctors o...Folksonomies: voluntary nobility
Folksonomies: voluntary nobility
The samurai must speak with other Samurai to fend off "unsocial preoccupations" and "intellectual sluggishness" among other duties.
08 JAN 2011
The Samurai Must Be Alone With Nature One Week Each Year
But the fount of motives lies in the individual life, it lies in silent and deliberate reflections, and at this, the most striking of all the rules of the samurai aims. For seven consecutive days in the year, at least, each man or woman under the Rule must go right out of all the life of man into some wild and solitary place, must speak to no man or woman, and have no sort of intercourse with mankind. They must go bookless and weaponless, without pen or paper, or money. Provisions must be tak...Folksonomies: voluntary nobility
Folksonomies: voluntary nobility
The practice is intended to promote self-reflection and clarity of thought.
08 JAN 2011
The Samurai are Prohibited from Professional Sports
Gentlemen of honour, according to the old standards, rode horses, raced chariots, fought, and played competitive games of skill, and the dull, cowardly and base came in thousands to admire, and howl, and bet. The gentlemen of honour degenerated fast enough into a sort of athletic prostitute, with all the defects, all the vanity, trickery, and self-assertion of the common actor, and with even less intelligence. Our Founders made no peace with this organisation of public sports. They did not sp...Folksonomies: voluntary nobility
Folksonomies: voluntary nobility
A professional athlete is an "athletic prostitute," and the Samurai do not participate.
08 JAN 2011
Economics is Merely Psychology
In Utopia there is no distinct and separate science of economics. Many problems that we should regard as economic come within the scope of Utopian psychology. My Utopians make two divisions of the science of psychology, first, the general psychology of individuals, a sort of mental physiology separated by no definite line from physiology proper, and secondly, the psychology of relationship between individuals. This second is an exhaustive study of the reaction of people upon each other and of...Folksonomies: economics
Folksonomies: economics
...and with as much credibility, attempting to predict a chaotic system and all.
