![\"\"](\"http:\/\/localtvkstu.files.wordpress.com\/2014\/03\/utopia-400x225.jpg?w=400&h=225&crop=1\" "\\"utopia\\"")
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Fox, in the kind of an understatement we have come to expect in the marketing of reality TV, is billing its new fall series \u201cUtopia\u201d as \u201ctelevision\u2019s biggest, boldest social experiment.\u201d <\/span>The show\u2019s premise taps into the age-old dream of creating a perfect society. <\/span>This dream burns particularly brightly in the treasured eighteen to thirty-four year-old demographic, marinated in the you-can-do-anything ethos. <\/span>These are the very folks who would ask: <\/span>Can a group of random strangers actually create a perfect society?<\/p>\n No, they can\u2019t.<\/p>\n It sounds almost mean to put it so bluntly, as if I wanted them to fail. <\/span>Not true. <\/span>I am an ardent utopian for as long as I can remember. <\/span>I spent summers in grade school drawing pictures of ideal cities, imagining happy and productive citizens living in peace and prosperity amidst stunning public spaces. <\/span>In college, I studied history, technology, and economics, which eventually led to my current work in building or enhancing the governance of organizations, and teaching governance at the university level. <\/span>I developed a library on \u201cintentional communities\u201d to study their governance.<\/p>\n \u201cUtopia\u201d (the Fox show) might be the first such experiment tried in front of TV viewers, but it is just one more in a long line of attempts at a “perfect society”\u2014over 300 in the U.S. alone. <\/span>They have been tried by religious zealots, dogmatic atheists, and all degrees of spiritualism and skepticism in between. <\/span>They have been tried by firebrands bitterly disappointed with the state of the world, and by ordinary people looking simply to escape their daily grind. <\/span>They have been led by charismatic authoritarians and by collegial intellectuals. <\/span>They have been organized as communistic societies, where property was owned in common and everyone got the same rewards for their work, and as hyper-individualistic societies, where personal and property rights were held sacred above all, albeit always with some constraints. <\/span>They have been tried by intact communities relocating en masse<\/em> to a distant land. <\/span>And they have been attempted, as with the Fox show, by folks from different walks of life banding together in the wilderness. <\/span>(Although, with millions of dollars invested in the Fox location, it\u2019s not as dangerous as where the Pilgrims landed.) <\/span>Some of these communities were second or third generation societies rigorously applying lessons learned from previous attempts.<\/p>\n All of them failed. <\/span>Seeing how and why can help us understand how this Utopia will fare.<\/p>\n Disney World Doesn\u2019t Count<\/span><\/p>\n Whatever utopia might look like, it must be economically viable on a stand-alone basis. <\/span>The majority of utopian experiments could not pass this simple test; their participants couldn\u2019t create enough food and basic comforts to sustain themselves.<\/p>\n This should not be surprising. <\/span>Many settlers aiming merely to survive<\/em> never developed into communities. <\/span>Businesses, which are explicitly started to be economically viable, fail more than half the time. <\/span>They fail even without the additional constraints\u2014or impatience\u2014that accompany utopian aspirations.<\/p>\n On the other hand, the 19th<\/sup> century Owenite villages, Fourierist phalanxes and similar utopian concepts were founded on distinctive visions of how people would live and relate to each other. <\/span>The people drawn to these visions were generally more concerned about how the bounties of society should be apportioned than what it would take to actually create them. <\/span>Consequently, these communities found themselves bereft of necessities, or rapidly accumulating debt with no way out.<\/p>\n The longest-lived utopian societies looked more like locally owned company towns. <\/span>Their leaders possessed well above-average business acumen. <\/span>The Harmonists, a religious commune, were so focused on their material (as well as spiritual) success that after firmly establishing themselves on the banks of the Wabash River, they sold all of their land and buildings\u2014at a profit, to another utopian group\u2014to move near Pittsburgh so they could be closer to eastern markets. <\/span>There they thrived for decades more. <\/span>The Perfectionists at Oneida<\/a> and the Inspirationists at Amana<\/a> created enterprises so successful that they ended up far outlasting the peculiar communal arrangements of their founders.<\/p>\n Economic viability was not achieved by accident. <\/span>Their leaders planned for it, and their followers contentedly worked for it, and occasionally sacrificed for it. <\/span>This is probably why none of the societies that lasted more than eighteen months looked like a leaderless group of strangers embarking on a glorified camping trip.<\/p>\n