If man is simply good by nature and governed by social or natural laws, then someone somewhere could raise up utopia for the perpetual happiness of all who lived there. Dostoevsky said that if such a place could be constructed, let several years pass and “people would suddenly see that they had no more life left, that they had no freedom of spirit, no will, no personality. . . . they would see that their human image had disappeared . . . that their lives had been taken away for the sake of bread, for ‘stones turned into bread.'”

Gary Saul Morson writes about Dostoevsky’s faith in human independence and that the idea is politically practical.

A passage in Notes from Underground looks forward to modern dystopian novels, works like Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1920–21) or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), where heroes rebel against guaranteed happiness. They want their lives to be their own. Put man in utopia, the underground man observes, and he will devise “destruction and chaos,” do something perverse, and, if given the chance, return to the world of suffering. In short, “the whole work of man seems really to consist in nothing but proving to himself continually that he is a man and not an organ stop. It may be at the cost of his skin; but he has proved it.”

Any politician who believes the right policies or governing body can right all wrongs does not understand the people he claims to serve nor, perhaps, himself. We must be free, even to our ruin. (via Prufrock News)