The Utopian lesson to Americans
"All private property is acquired and improved for the reason that each one of us by himself has his own home and wife and children. From this, self-love springs...But when we have taken away self-love, there remains only love for the State."
"They laugh at us who exhibit a studious care for our breed of horses and dogs, but neglect the breeding of human beings."
- The City of The Sun by Tommaso Campanella.
The City of The Sun by Tommaso Campanella is a utopian book that describes a futuristic ideal collective society where people live in happiness and harmony with nature. Rich people and money don't exist; individuals own nothing, live together in community housing, work to contribute to the greater good of society, and receive what they need, but no more than they need; children belong to the entire community. The rulers of The City of The Sun, the wisest of all, decide the needs of society, who and with whom can be granted permission to have children and for what jobs children should be educated based on what educators think a child will be capable of doing as an adult, what people can do in their leisure time, and all other aspects of lives of individual members of society.
I have no doubts that most people who consider slavery and eugenics immoral, if they read The City of the Sun, would agree that Campanella described the most ominous dictatorial dystopia, not an idealistic paradise people call "Utopia."
Yet, most doesn't mean all. Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Russian Communist Party and the first head of the Soviet Union, was a big admirer of Utopian literature and considered utopian literature a philosophical source of the theory of Marxism-Leninism. Soviet Academia, while admitting some unrealistic features of utopian societies, was primarily concerned about the absence of the Communist Party leadership, not the servitude of individuals to the common good.
Americans who are paying attention to recent ideological shifts of the Left must notice the growing beliefs in a social order in which no one has more than they need, children are raised by the government, people are racially segregated to preserve diversity, and mentally ill children and young adults are sterilized for "their own good." They don't call this social order "Utopia." They call it a society that pursues "equity and liberation from the oppressive systems of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and exploitative capitalism."
They don't want you to know the term Encyclopedia Britannica uses to describe a society ruled by elites where individual interests are subordinated to the common good. The term is "fascism."
