This is a book about the utopians, what their visions entail, and how they plan to make them real. Since by definition utopia cannot be made real, the utopians are intellectually unserious people, whose worldview can be refuted at a cognitive stroll. Nonetheless, the history of their foolish campaigns and programs is a sorrowful tale of futility and very serious destruction. Explaining the appeal and various forms of human utopian aspiration is an involved and difficult enterprise, neither started nor finished by the book before you.

Since the time of Rousseau, utopianism — particularly, socialism — has been eroding and undermining Western civilization like so many angry ocean waves. Socialism has for so long been a part of the political landscape that most people have accepted it as the cultural embodiment of an idea that is fundamental to the world. In fact, it is just so much confabulated flapdoodle, sewn together from fragments of ancient mythology, chiefly those relating to the Eden of the Hebrew Bible and its inspirations. While its roots are ancient, the program that recognizably constitutes socialism was first assembled by the Sozzinis of sixteenth century Italy, whose ethic became known as “Socinianism” and set the stage for the utopian aspects of the Enlightenment.

This treatise dissects the psychological, cultural, and historical anatomy of the modern utopian movement, presenting it in ten parts: an overview, an investigation of ancient roots, a survey of biblical parallels, some meditations on the Eden motif itself in modern settings, a discussion of the phenomenon of cargo cultism, a survey of population control programs, meditations on egalitarianism, meditations on environmentalism, a survey of the main players in the invention and institutionalization of socialism, and a survey of occult Edenism.

My purpose is simple, and I don't pretend impartiality. I seek to guide the liberal-minded toward classical liberalism, and away from the utopianism that infests modern liberalism. We have likely already seen the high water marks of radical socialism — in the West, 1933-1945, and in the East, 1949-1968. Now it is creeping, moderate socialism — nonetheless, fundamentally the same socialism — that presents the greatest threat to human prosperity and advancement.