Ipsissimatopians?
A while ago, I said this:
There's an old saying among psychologists: neurotics build a castle in the clouds; psychotics live there. Similarly, we can say: those who imagine some future state in which all of the social contradictions have been resolved, which will be so equal and free and balanced and peaceful and stable that it will last forever - those people should be called "utopians." And we should reject their nonsense out of hand. But what about people who think we already "live there"? People who think that we have reached "the end of history" - who think that capitalism itself is so stable that it will last for eternity - aren't they even more utopian, even more delusional? There should be a word for that.
Yeah, there really should be a word for that - for a delusional person who not only thinks that a utopian world is possible, but thinks that we already live there. I toyed with "ipsissimatopian." "Utopia" literally means "no place"; "ipsissimatopia" means something like "this very place." It was Nietzsche who coined the word "ipsissimosity," to mean something like "the particular characteristics of oneself," from "ipsissima," "this very (thing)."
Then it occurred to me that there is already a perfectly good that expresses almost the same idea: "panglossian". This comes from Voltaire's book, Candide, in which there's a character, Dr. Pangloss, professor of metaphysicotheologicocosmolonigology, declares that this is the best of all possible worlds. Maybe that's not exactly the same thing, but... close enough.
The added benefit of Voltaire's clever name is that, if you break it down, "gloss" means superficial meaning, or superficial beauty, and "pan" means all - so Dr. Pangloss sees everything as beautiful and meaningful - or at least as beautiful and meaningful as it can possibly be - but only because his understanding is superficial; that is, because he is taking a gloss of all, without diving into the roots.
Is that the right way to categorize, for instance, Francis Fukuyama or Stephen Pinker? I mean, in the sense that they believe that liberal democracy is the end of the road, that there is nothing to aspire to higher than that, at a political level - any activism will be a mere tinkering with liberal democracy, rather than a radical questioning of its precepts. Then again, if it's true, as Fredric Jameson said, that "It's harder to imagine the end of capitalism than it is to imagine the end of human civilization," then perhaps we are all ipsissimatopians, all panglossians.
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