Utopia

[Chorus]
Human beings don't want
Utopian comfort and certainty
They want
Adventure and chaos and uncertainty
Human beings don't want
Utopian comfort and certainty
They want
Adventure and chaos and uncertainty

Satan
In Milton's "Paradise Lost" Satan
Decides that he can do without the transcendent
He can do without God
He can do without God
He can do without God
And that's why he foments rebellion
It's something like that
And the consequence of that was
That as soon as Satan decided
That what he knew was sufficient
And that he could do without
The transcendent
Which you might think about
As the domain outside
Of what you know
Something like that
Immediately, he was in Hell
Things get large
And then they get too large
And then they collapse
And so, in 2008 when the politicians said
Too big to fail
They got something truly backwards
The statement was reverse
It should have been
So big it had to fail

[Chorus]
Human beings don't want
Utopian comfort and certainty
They want
Adventure and chaos and uncertainty
Human beings don't want
Utopian comfort and certainty
They want
Adventure and chaos and uncertainty

When I read "Paradise Lost"
I was studying totalitarianism and I thought
You know, the poet
The true poet
Like a prophet
Is someone who
Has intimations of the future
Has intimations of the future
And maybe that's because the poetic mind
The philosophical or prophetic mind
Is a pattern detector
And there are people who can detect the underlying
It's like the melody of a nation
Melody as in song
The song of the nation
And can see how it's going to develop across the centuries
You see that in Nietzsche
Because Nietzsche, for example
In the, around 1860 or so on
I mean, he prophesied
What was going to happen in the 20th century
He said that
He said specifically
That the specter of Communism would kill
Millions of people in the 20th century
It's an amazing prophecy
Some people are very good at detecting patterns, you know and
Milton I think was of that sort
I think he had intimations of what was coming as
Human rationality became more and more powerful
And technology became more and more powerful

[Chorus]
Human beings don't want
Utopian comfort and certainty
They want
Adventure and chaos and uncertainty
Human beings don't want
Utopian comfort and certainty
They want
Adventure and chaos and uncertainty

And then Milton's warning was
The rational mind that generates a production
And then worships it as if it's absolute
Immediately occupies Hell
And that's what I think
The story of the Tower of Babel was about
It's a warning against
The expansion of a system
Until it encompasses everything
It's a warning against
Totalitarian presumption
And so there's a utopian kind of vision there, as well that's
We can build a structure
That's so large and encompassing that
That, that it can replace Heaven itself
And so that the very notion of a utopia was anti-human
Because we're not built for
Static utopia
We're built for
A dynamic situation
Where there's
Demands placed on us
And we're
There's the optimal amount of uncertainty
[Chorus]
Human beings don't want
Utopian comfort and certainty
They want
Adventure and chaos and uncertainty
Human beings don't want
Utopian comfort and certainty
They want
Adventure and chaos and uncertainty

[Chorus]
Human beings don't want
Utopian comfort and certainty
They want
Adventure and chaos and uncertainty
Human beings don't want
Utopian comfort and certainty
They want
Adventure and chaos and uncertainty