Utopia, for what?

By Arturo Macias @ 2025-09-15T14:50 (–2)

“The Rumour” is a dystopian novel by my friend Eduardo Zugasti. It belongs to the subgenre of “happy dystopias”, in the line of Huxley’s Brave New World, while the style is oneiric and consequently closer to Zamaitin’s “We”.  Zugasti is emphatically not a science fiction writer: he describes his work as “theology fiction”, a label I completely endorse. 

Set in the aftermath of ecological collapse, The Rumour imagines a human colony on Mars governed by Concordia, an artificial intelligence entrusted with both social control and emotional regulation. Deep inside, Eduardo’s novel is a criticism of utilitarianism, and in that sense, the novel is to some extent a monument to our intellectually adversarial friendship. 

One possible conception of welfare is satisfactionism: a utilitarian vision that privileges the passive fulfilment of preferences. It imagines a world of contented minds, frictionless institutions, and finely tuned hedonic flows. The Rumour portrays a society engineered precisely along these lines. Concordia, the governing intelligence, ensures that her subjects’ desires are consistently met—but she also shapes those desires to remain within the bounds of her capacity to satisfy them. Preference and fulfilment are not merely aligned: they are co-engineered.

But while in classic utilitarianism satisfaction is a necessary condition, it is far from being sufficient. J.S. Mill says “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides”.

Utilitarianism, as a moral framework, is highly parameterized—its conclusions hinge on how we assign value across sentient beings. Suppose, for instance, that the welfare of a shrimp is deemed to be 20% that of a human. Under such a metric, a Concordia-like system overseeing a vast colony of euphoric shrimp, even at the cost of human extinction, could be considered the planet’s optimal configuration. But the calculus shifts dramatically if consciousness is super additive, and if the worth of metamathematics, transfinite numbers, and romantic entanglements among affine minds is seen as uniquely valuable.

The prequel of “the Rumour”, named “under the grey skies” is a techno thriller about the creation of the Concordia system. Being a less interesting piece (theology-fiction is not so effective for techno thrillers), there is a greater than life character: Selene Yarrow, the EU Comission President in the years before the creation of Concordia. A technical mind, a solitary goddess, a similar character to the irresistible Susan Calvin. Selene is not merely a character—she is a litmus test. No society can claim the mantle of Utopia if it cannot produce a Selene Yarrow. More than that, a true Utopia should be populated, predominantly, by people like her: lucid, unyielding, while (hopefully) not so lonely.

True utilitarianism is first about the cessation of pain, and then about the design of an Olympic existence.  In his 1960s anthology Buy Jupiter, Isaac Asimov offered two starkly contrasting visions of Utopia. In 2430 A.D., he imagines a world perfectly optimized—closed, saturated, and populated by interchangeable, unremarkable humans: the repugnant fulfilment of the repugnant conclusion. On the other hand, in “the Greatest Asset” he describes a society where the balance between social needs and human ends is properly maintained: “Man’s greatest need is a balanced ecology. Man’s greatest asset is the unsettled mind.”