"I used to be amused by Utopians. With life experience, I have grown to fear them. The great failing of Utopians is that they can never accept that someone else might not want to be a part of their Utopian vision. Like ill-mannered tourists, they assume that if you don't agree with them, it must be because they're not explaining it simply enough, or often enough, or loudly enough, or ultimately, because you're stupid.
Utopians always think achieving Utopia is simply a matter of education—and then re-education—and then coercion, legislation, litigation medication conditioning threats book-burnings eugenics surgical modifications hunting down the counter-revolutionaries killing the reactionaries genetic engineering—and ultimately all Utopians, no matter how nobly they begin, always end up at the same conclusion: that the only thing that keeps Man from building a secular heaven here on Earth is the nature of Man, therefore we must build a New and Better Man."
Bruce Bethke, Final Afterthoughts

It is said that modern technology like the Internet has the capacity to bring the people of this world closer together, just as it was claimed during the Industrial Revolution that canals and trains would bring people closer together by breaking down the barriers of distance, and therefore of estrangement. Mass distributed technology however does not make the masses more humanist, more reasonable or more cooperative - it simply amplifies what is already there, and that includes the animal and the base, as well as the noble. Mass technology and mass society brings humans out into sharp relief, and it is an image that will increasingly overload the senses with a combination of admiration and revulsion.

"It is the sneering contempt in which white working class people who have socially conservative views and attitudes are treated by the great liberal commentariat. Their preferences in culture, sport, clothes, places to go on holday, celebrities, and a hundred other things are regarded with such unbridled contempt as to have practically begged for a reaction.
How often over the past say 30 years have you seen a TV interview with a group of 'inarticulate' local people who are not thrilled at the idea that their neighbourhood is now peopled by those from a distant land whose language they do not understand and a smug, self righteous, smooth faced reporter showing us all how nasty these pathetic little people are?
I have and worked in countries all over the world and there is practically none other where the liberal bougeoisie has a greater sense of alienation from their fellow citizens who have to wear blue overalls at their workplace."
Guardian comment by Chesire Salt

"The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may soon be turned into complaints."
Burke commenting on the French Revolution.

No ideology survives contact with reality.

Ideals are pure. Humans are not.

"Ours is an era in which political ideology, liberal as much as Marxist, has a rapidly dwindling leverage on events, and more ancient, more primordial forces, nationalist and religious, fundamentalist and soon, perhaps, Malthusian, are contesting with each other."
John Gray, 1989.