With an election coming up, we’re thinking what do we want, better yet, what do we deserve?

Alas, utopia, by its very definition, is an impossible dream. In Greek, it means “no place,” though to many scholars, it’s a pun for “happy place.”

Did Saint Thomas More, the Renaissance humanist and theologian, imagine it as a happy place in his book Utopia in 1517? Not if it was a satire or at least not for the slaves there, two to every household. 

What about in Plato’s The Republic, circa 380 BC, where, run by philosopher kings, a society of egalitarians would engage once a year in a wild sex orgy, so nobody would know who fathered the children born nine months later? The mothers would know but the children would be raised by the state. No one owned no one in The Republic.

In 1405, Italian poet Christine de Pizan, who worked at the court of King Charles VI in France, imagined utopia, arguably the first woman to do so, in The Book of the City of Ladies as the ultimate escape from patriarchy, still utopia, still “no place” to this day.

Irish daydreams, compiled in 1330, in The Land of Cockagayne, dreamed of no work, no authorities, no private property, just a lot of fun—and a lot of free love, of which “Every man may drink his fill / And needn’t sweat to pay the bill.”

Ah what world is possible out there that isn’t like this where the rich basks in luxuries made possible by the labors of the poor?

Impossible dream, but people have tried—Francis Bacon in the New Atlantis in 1627, Henry Neville in the Isle of Pines in 1668, Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe in 1719, Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels in 1726.

William Blake fantasized about it, as did Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Leo Tolstoy... but others decided it was a lost cause so in its place, they invented dystopia—H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell.

But what is utopia to us now, here in the Philippines, with an election coming up? Are we voting for the best or settling for the least evil? What are we exercising our right to vote for? For hope or for fear? For country or for ourselves? To each his own or together we can?

There is no utopia on earth, but there are peaceful, prosperous, progressive nations. Peace, prosperity, and progress, not for a few, but for the great many, are no utopian dreams, but if they are too much to ask for, maybe we can settle for now for at least an efficient train system, or good teachers, or decent, protective uniforms or even just gloves or masks for our garbage collectors or a flood control system that doesn’t cause any floods.

Are those really impossible dreams in our country?