Eutopia, precisely what? Batch 1

Let the dreams of Europe and the planet as a place of relationship return to the centre of public debate.

When Israel called on the people of Tehran to leave the city for their own safety, I spoke to an Iranian activist and dissident surviving in Berlin. Her household lives in the capital of Iran. These days, they were practically constantly in touch. A female with all her strength encouraged her parents to leave town. However, the father, who is simply a doctor, powerfully refused to leave the hospital. Of over a 100 and 50 medics in the facility, there were respective people left, so that's not enough, he said.

– I do not justice those who flee, or those who remain," my interviewer commented. I just don't want my dad killed by a bomb.

This text is written in Andalusian Granada. Spain has become a country in fresh years where Israelis who do not agree with their current government are eager to come. A young man joined them recently. A man, shocked by the attack of October 7, 2023, volunteered to join the army. A fewer years earlier, he had a basic military service and now wanted to fight in Gaza. He was convinced that this would defend the lives of his loved ones and prevent an even greater catastrophe: after all, another Hamas attack could spill across the country. However, what he saw changed his views radically.

– I didn't defend anything there – he said. "Our brutality was based on the fact that on 7 October it will be repeated shortly with the force of the second Holocaust.

By the way, my interviewer found that he could not cope with fear in combat conditions. He was terrified by the distinctive buzzing of drones. In the end, his intellectual condition was considered a hazard to the another squad members. He left for Spain immediately.

Contrary to decision-making

At the heart of Eutopia is the belief that war, all war, are primarily stories of specified people. People lost, sore and afraid. People de facto thrown into social-political reality so constructed that they are practically excluded from its formation. due to the fact that in a crisis situation (arms conflict, pandemic) our countries are practically not offering citizens the anticipation of co-decision. At the same time, they bear a large burden of responsibility. Under the slogan of security, they push them or even force them to hazard their lives in the name of a reality they had no influence on.

The media message accompanying the Israeli-Iran conflict well illustrated this decision-making exclusion. On the 1 hand, war was dominant in the layer of the painting as a fascinating spectacle. The sky is lit with shot down (or not) rockets, smoke bubbles, fires, futuristic plane silhouettes. Nothing, just sit back, crunch chips and watch. On the another hand, from Polish, but besides German, Spanish and even arabian media, which I followed, the grim determinism was smoldering. He expressed himself in the following words: “Iran must respond strongly, or he will lose his face” (PAP), “I think it will get worse, due to the fact that the Israeli army will gotta react” (Polsat News).

What reality lies behind specified comments? The motive behind political and military action is the tooth for tooth. Not the good of citizens, not the balance of profits and losses, or the effective resolution of the conflict that led to the outbreak of war. And at the same time, no space for civic co-decision. Is the regulation of tooth a tooth a good thing? Is he an example of good politics?

Eutopia: Why so?

I firmly believe that all Euro and all Euro spent on arms, not on investment aimed at seeking peaceful empathic paths and solidarity in conflict resolution, is simply a step towards multiplying this kind of situation.* Oh, my God *. It increases the hazard of human suffering and distances us from building a better world.

Commenting on Tel Aviv’s bombing of Tehran, an Israeli - Spanish friend told me: “As you know, the Tehran government disgusts me. But let's not fool ourselves. atomic weapons are not needed by any country. If you refuse 1 and let others, it's just hypocrisy. It is hard to anticipate that this will build lasting peace in the world." In my interviewer's reasoning, I see an effort to communicate with her in a relationship. From the level of specified qualitative communication begins Eutopia.

Eutopia refers to the Greek word "eu-topos" meaning a good place. As such, Eutopia restores the forgotten condition of the crucial political triad of dystopia, utopia, and eutopia, which is understood as a place of failure, impossible and good and possible.

Why is it worth taking care of the eutopia-utopia-dytopia triad? The absence of a eutopian triad has caused present the word “utopia” to combine 2 different meanings – a plan of a good and simultaneously impossible world. However, the large popularity of specified a understood utopia is problematic. It exposes progressive projects to criticism a priori It's like they're utopian dreams, so they can't come true.

The restoration of eutopia so aims to remove the "impossible" odium from formulating a imagination of good policy. due to the fact that reflection on a good future shouldn't be a shame. On the contrary, let the dreams of Europe and the planet as a place of relationship return to the centre of public debate.

Perjury, Dreams, Hope

Getting politics back for people's dreams is no gliding in the clouds. erstwhile a man knows what he wants, he mobilizes and acts in this direction. Precise formulating and naming needs besides makes it easier to remind politicians that they should respect them. Dreams are so a key condition for civic performance. They aid go beyond decision-making exclusion.

By restoring their motivational energy to our dreams, we have a chance to gain more. alternatively of the anger of depriving ourselves of politics from the needs of the citizens, we will make bonds easier. Among each other, within our social networks, but besides with professional politics. We'll quit celebrating differences and divisions. We'll talk about our dreams and focus on uncovering allies in the way of their implementation. In addition to dreams, hope is besides a condition for civic justice. Dreams aid to accurately specify the objectives of action. Hope restores religion that it can be accomplished. Without hope, you can't have good politics.

Emphasis on similarities in human relationships and attentive communication about building bonds aid to supply hope for a better future. alternatively of strengthening the identity ghettos, they make concrete Community experiences. They aid go beyond the individual burden of work and loneliness in the face of global and local challenges.

Communication, emotion

The eutopian space of communication is oriented towards mindfulness towards each another and the environment. It encourages the present listening and speaking. It besides inspires concrete actions in public space. It is based on 3 assumptions.

First, although the spheres of reflection and emotion describe 2 different words, this is an artificial division. all man, whether as an individual or as a associate of the collective, is both reflective and emotional in his actions.

Politics is no different. Any effort to mention to “rationality” as the other of non-rational behaviour is simply a profound misunderstanding. They aid stigmatize voters of 1 political organization or another. They origin antagonism, they provoke frustration, mistrust, a sense of rejection, a desire to retaliate. They destruct social ties and strengthen communication blockades. They are as profoundly harmful to citizens as to politicians.

Eutopia encourages respect for emotions. Good politics should make spaces to exemplify anger or fear, for example, alternatively than suppress or push into the shame zone. And erstwhile we get tired of screaming, we can get any fresh air and talk. It's not the litany of pretension, it's the communicative of dreams and needs.

Secondly, Eutopia treats human socialization as a continuum. The Continuum extends from household level, romanticist relationships etc. to the scale of the state and transnational creations. A good policy should not antagonise the private and public spheres or treat them as competing areas.

This is accompanied by the belief that "sacrificing" household happiness "on the altar of the homeland" does no good to anyone – neither household nor country. On the contrary, a happy, loving and loved man is besides a happy and committed citizen, is simply a better world.

Thirdly, it has already been mentioned, Eutopia encourages communication to look for what links. In the family, among friends, and in society, it is very similar: the conditions for the good functioning of tiny and large groups of people are the bonds of their members. They are worth cultivating. With neighbors, but besides on a national or continental scale.

Emotion, reflection, action

The past 5 years have dominated deep regional and global crises. They changed the perception of our planet radically. COVID, a full-scale war in Ukraine, a bloody conflict around Gaza, the overthrow of paradigms of political communication by people like Javier Milei or Donald Trump, and the progressive militarization of Europe and Russia are just any examples.

The order we believed in, and who has been cleaning up our lives so far, suddenly, it's like it's breaking in the seams. I think that this is more than a collective chandra or a cyclical regression in respective another crucial areas: the process of unifying Europe, equality between women and freedom of speech.

As a result, on the 1 hand, a self-absorbed sense of powerlessness reduces already narrow areas of civic persuasion. Deficits of interpersonal ties and forms of community existence lead to moving distant into identity. alternatively of supporting each other, we stand out and manifest our lonely self. The solidarity hope, the nomen omen, of a good change replaces a mixture of resignation, fear, shame and humiliation.

On the another hand, many of us seem to be choking. Energy displaced and stigmatized in the sphere of emotional policy and subject to detailed body regulations seeks an outlet. It undermines the foundations of the countries in which we live. Moreover, the littered and overt language of public debates hinders communication. We inactive conflict with the belief that there are “naked facts” and “reliable experts” among fakes and information noise. They could soothe our fears and supply a unchangeable cognition of the world. They just request to be found... Does Eutopia aid address these problems? Under what conditions?

Body, the welfare state

Some of the phenomena described are linked to the disappointed expectations of a democratic state, alleged caring state. Distributed to the west before the fall of the Iron Curtain, it became a mark model in Central Europe and elsewhere in the world.

However, a state as a guardian to warrant citizens the anticipation of a far-reaching self-fulfillment and helping in request is neither apparent nor possibly as noble as it seems. For the welfare state requires loyalty and frequently considerable sacrifice. The problem is that the "obligation" of citizens towards the state is subject to strict decision-making exclusion.

The COVID period is simply a crucial example. Since everyone could easy get infected with the virus, and even as the so - called asymptomatic, could endanger others, abruptly we all became sick. In accordance with the logic of the welfare state, as “diseasers” we needed care. However, in this way, "health" has become the derivative of the order of power, and only in the second place was the welfare of our bodies.

The consequences were everything. The state's emergence and isolation of alleged hazard groups was not accompanied by increased participation. Have we talked to people in these groups about what they request and how they feel? For how many of these possible protection against infection and even death was worth the price of the isolation they were told to pay for the flat? Is solidarity advocated with those who may not want specified solidarity at all inactive solidarity?

Shepherd's curatela

In a broader perspective, the welfare state's consequence to COVID was far-reaching incentives (and sometimes and coercion) to push man's vital bodily needs to the margin. Specifically, detailed rules regulate touch, heat and another forms of proximity.

The welfare state greatly dehumanized the promise in its name. The personification of this policy is the shepherd figure. State officials “knowed better”, so they decided without consulting citizens who “did not know”. Freedom of choice, individual dignity, inviolability of the flesh, and yet self-determination, the basis of a democratic state, fell into a sharp conflict with care.

Similar doubts arise from another contemporary phenomena at the interface between the state-citizen. Eutopia encourages that even in a crisis, we should not bloat with either-or-either conclusions. It is better to scope for the gentleness of both-and-other principles. The essence of good policy is restraint. The desire to regulate everything and so to enforce regulation through increased control over citizens puts democracy under dense strain.

Love, violence

Health and illness, but of course besides pain or death in war, are not just ideas, but a concrete experience of the body. As with reflections and emotions, Eutopia encourages body rafting and thoughts combined.

In the Cartesian tradition of identifying being exclusively with thinking, cogito It's like it's giving up the body, it's everywhere at erstwhile and nowhere in particular. At best, the body was a spirit vessel. Hence bodies that did not fit the concept of the spirit vessel were forced to submit. "Diseased", "weak", but besides menstruating and giving birth.

The improved communication with the body illustrates the attitude towards his key experiences – sexuality and violence. The bare man with his bodily here and now inactive oscillates between the disgust of physiological refinement, the fiction of pornographic staging and the transgression pursued by the law. By legitimizing this state of affairs, the state sends a signal that the body, proximity and love should be pushed beyond the brackets of what is visible and heard. So, beyond the political brackets.

Violence is governed by completely different laws. "Military service", "defence of homeland", "killing enemy" – please, in the glow of cameras and fireworks. You don't gotta hide them, be ashamed, bag them with complexes and reproaches. Suffice to say that the vast majority of parents will brag about a kid who learns to kill (she goes to the army), but will burn out of shame that she went to learn to love (in tantra workshops).

Body energy, political energy

A state that displaces love and institutionalizes killing itself undermines its foundations. It's overwhelming the energies that the eruption will turn on him. It is no wonder that during the sanitary or war crisis, a state so constructed must disciplinaryly discipline citizens erstwhile reaching for the resources of their bodies.

Eutopia encourages a change of attitude to the body. A good policy should make spaces that are friendly to the loving splendour of the body, the eruption of its autonomous energy and celebration. alternatively of going with the bodies of citizens to the thighs, a good policy should look for ways of integrating body dynamics into solidarity society.

Body energy besides promotes human reintegration into nature. Nature besides eludes regulation and regulation. Communication with the body strengthens human respect for nature beyond all rationality. It helps integrate politics and nature by laying the foundations under a truly worthy name green order.

Trace paradigm

Contrary to popular saying, the facts do not talk for themselves. People talk for themselves. For example, through science. discipline transforms what is sensual, so embodied, into a average of meaning. Perception becomes circumstantial – a symptom in the sense of Hippocrates (Greek semeion).

Meanwhile, the dominant imagination of discipline and its accompanying cult of experts refers alternatively to Plato and Galileo’s paradigm. It's a chapter of explanation from empathy and the rule of the verifiability of cognition through repetition. but Galileo called the universe a book written in the language of mathematics, whose letters are triangles and circles. So the book remains sterile. She's un-bodyless and non-human. Its deficiency of creative ambiguity.

Culture, as well as the historical era, disagree as to whether they consider ambition a problem. The treatment of ambiguity as a kind of mistake is alternatively a derivative of circumstantial education, selected traditions or political practice. From the position of another cultures, and even the past of our continent, fashion for clarity is simply a kind of collective agreement. Like any deal, you can say it.

Socialized Joyful Knowledge

Eutopia encourages the appreciation of ambivality and circumstantial paradigm in the Hippocratic tradition. alternatively of putting reality into tight rules, alternatively of "understanding" and "predicting" the future (repeatability of experience), it is better to formulate suppositions – individual, variable and constantly subject to revision.

The benefits would be enormous. In politics and crisis management, it would no longer be essential to delude ourselves that the deficiency of clear signs is simply a weakness, temporary difficulties, a temporary deficiency of expert knowledge, an authoritative oversight or a hold of the ruling. An additional benefit would be that anti-system populists and their prescriptions for everything would no longer attract anyone.

In empirical science, the force to formulate conclusions on a either-or basis would be reduced. It would be easier to part with expectations that erstwhile 2 “truths” contradict each other, 1 is false (Galleus). There would be an chance for more "joyable knowledge," as Nietzsche utilized to say, for solidarityal ambiguity and harmony between man and man among people and with nature.

Text as a fetish

We mostly believe that the reproduction of technological and even literary texts, in any amount and in any technique, does not affect their value. In painting, in music or another fields of art, it is different.

Carlo Ginzburg points out that this is simply a world-view convention. 1 consequence is the different degree of trust that we are willing to give on the 1 hand even the most realistic painting, and on the another hand the text (also, as a circumstantial derivative of text, a photograph or movie relationship). Ignoring sensory and contextual elements in the latter, so per se individual, leads to religion in the text as a average of material message.

So we have the literature of fact (not the painting of fact), but besides archival documents, alleged agency messages and authoritative reports. From legal codes through school textbooks to diet guides – in countless spheres of life we trust on the belief that texts convey unchangeable fact about the world. By fetifizing texts, we make another forms of expression marginal.

But the fashion for facts, with red stripes and sales posts, is driven by sex appeal: the message is to be understandable, consistent, conclusive and best catchy. Meanwhile, pretending that reality is sexy and can be told like that is not innocent.

Facts, Facebooks

Fashion for facts raises false expectations. erstwhile the text “says what it is”, always individual else can say that “it is” completely different. And right, it's seldom on 1 side.

In this sense, fashion for facts strengthens the arrogant dominance of the authors of relations towards those concerned. “Telling how it is” silences the latter. In conventional news, but besides in archives, police and science.

Moreover, the power to fire fake-news comes from the trust placed in reporting as it is. And from the belief that reproduction of text and pictures does not consequence in losses. So alternatively of pushing yourself into a blind alley of facting, Eutopia encourages you to mention to the circumstantial paradigm again.

A circumstantial paradigm would aid to treat the text as an image with its individual features, inherently connected with the place, time and technique, and with the author-man, i.e. with his body, moods, aspirations and beliefs. alternatively of saying what it is, a good policy would treat a "fact" as circumstantial.

A eutopian weakening of attachment to the text would aid prevent decision-making and incapacitation processes. This would be a turn to circumstantial perceptions and actions – heterogeneous, embedded here and now. For socialization aimed at valuing the creative function of the body in perception, mild blurryness and cognitive modesty.

* Oh, my God *In the February issue “Liberté!” I wrote about the eutopian peace fund. It is simply a proposal to allocate our ideological and material resources at least equally to creating tools for resolving conflicts by military and peaceful means.