Guest Post from Steve Wiegenstein, author of Slant of Light

I’m so pleased to have a guest post from Steve Wiegenstein, the author of Slant of Light, today. I reviewed Slant of Light yesterday. Welcome to the Chaos Steve!

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I like writing about utopian communities, not because they are strange, but because they are familiar. I believe many of us carry the seed of the utopian in us.

Let’s start with the personal. A lot of people, myself included, have individual self-improvement projects on one burner or another, front, middle or back. (I almost said “everybody has an individual self-improvement project,” but then I remembered that there are those fortunate or deluded souls who think everything in just hunky-dory with themselves.) We’re going to drop a few pounds, we’re going to exercise more regularly, we’re going to write a thousand words every day . . .

And then there are those who take that self-improvement project a step further. We see them at the gym filling out their workout charts after every machine. They’re the ones posting photographs on Facebook of every low-fat, high-fiber vegetarian dish that they have so carefully crafted and eaten. The desire for self-improvement has become a quest for perfection, an obsession, a refusal to accept the entropic tendency that we are all heir to.

Take the next step—what’s good for me is also good for you—and then you’re starting down the road to something, whether it’s motivational leadership, preaching, setting up an ideal living arrangement, or simply being the crank who writes letters to the paper. The urge to improve is so basic that it’s easy to forget where self-improvement merges into general improvement, and where general improvement moves from “my humble opinion” to “this is a self-evident truth.”

So when I write about a utopian community, I’m not seeing people who are strange or different. I’m seeing people who have taken that same instinctive response we all experience when we come up with a great idea—You’ve got to try this! It’s great! It works!—and put it into genuine practice, in their own lives and in the lives of their fellow believers. We are all utopians, in some corner of our hearts.

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Thank you so much for stopping by Steve – great post!