Would a utopia be possible and would it even be desirable?

Are we wired up with desires and preferences like tribalism and jealousy

that make perfect societies difficult to achieve?

Do we love hierarchies? Why are primate brains such

excellent detectors of unfairness? Do we actually like struggle? Did the church's disavowal

of first cousin marriages lead to better politics? This week, we'll talk with psychologist Paul Bloom about

the possibility slash impossibility of achieving societal utopias. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me,

David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford,

and in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe to understand why and how

our lives and societies look the way they do.

This is an I-Heart podcast.

Today's episode is about whether we humans yoked with our brains and our psychologies, whether we will ever get to a utopian society.

Imagine a world where everyone has what they need, no crime, no hunger, no injustice,

a place of peace and fairness and fulfillment. For as long as we have been human,

we have dreamed of such a place. We've even given it a name, Utopia. Now, the word

utopia was coined by Thomas Moore in 1516. He described a fictional island society where

private property didn't exist and where everyone worked and where everyone shared equally.

But even then, he chose the word as a pun from the roots U-topos, which means no place.

This was his hint that such perfection might not exist anywhere or any when.

But this possibility of it not coming to fruition has never stopped people from thinking about it

and working toward it and often picking up arms to try to achieve it. But again and again, the road to utopia gets off-ramped by human nature.

One historical example of this comes from the French Revolution in 1789.

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