Ghost of a flea: Coercive fantasists

December 18, 2004

Coercive fantasists

The term "coercive fantasists" has now entered my vocabulary.

A Coercive Utopian is someone who knows what the ideal society should look like and is willing to kill you to achieve it. Coercive Utopians in pursuit of Fantasy Ideologies range from atheistic Marxists to the most God-obsessed religious-types. Bin Laden is part of this latter group, of course.

The trouble with these "coercive fantasists" is that, even if you want to give them what they want, you may not be able to do it - because what they want may not be achievable, even if it were not abhorrent.

An interesting point of agreement between ideologies claiming to be Marxist and ideologies claiming to represent the true faith is their tendency to be opposed to the same things whatever the express ontology of their particular coercive fantasy. Drinking, smoking, sex and sexuality, artistic expression and the war on some drugs all come to mind. This suggests to me that the point of adopting a coercive utopian worldview has nothing to do with social justice, Christ, or the spaceships that are coming to rescue us all.

Rather, coercive utopians, whatever their supposed belief-systems, are actually expressing a psychological aversion to the fun they are evidently terrified the rest of us might be having. This explains the peculiar fact of cooperation among coercive fantasists whose utopias are mutually exclusive in formal terms but in lock-step agreement as to their true goal of banning, censoring and condemning the habits of us live-and-let-live types.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at December 18, 2004 06:33 AM

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