Utopia is a culturally constructed vision of an ideal human condition. Although its contents vary cross-culturally, utopian visions exist across cultures and therefore utopian thinking is a widespread human proclivity. When activated, a utopian vision can engage citizens with their on-going societal processes by activating a motivation to criticize and change the status quo, but may also disengage them from their society, enticing them to wallow in their impossible dream. Utopias animate cultural dynamics – the formation, maintenance, and transformation of culture over time – as a critical part of humanity’s effort to collectively self-regulate our construction of society.

Introduction

Long before Thomas More’s coinage of the term, Utopia, humanity has engaged in utopian thinking. When broadly construed as an imagined ideal way of living, utopianism is discernible in most,ifnot all,human culturaltraditions[e.g. 1–۴]. From a psychological perspective, utopia can be understood as a symbolically constructed representation of an ideal human world. It is symbolically constructed because it does not currently exist, but is imagined, represented, and communicated in symbolic forms using language, pictures, or othermaterials.Itis about an ideal, or even perfect,world that humans can potentially live in or perhaps construct. As such, utopia is first and foremost a cultural artefact — a product of human imagination, a potential driver of human striving, and is therefore a significant subject matter for cultural dynamics [5]: investigations on the formation, maintenance, and transformation of culture over time.

Utopia and ideology

Mannheim’s [6] Ideology and Utopia is a classic text that contrasts utopianism to ideology. In his view, ideology is a worldview that maintains the status quo, whereas a utopia is meant to change it. He regarded both as more or less coherent depictions about a societal state, which diverge from the actual state of the society as it is. Mannheim arguably takes what Jost et al. [7] called a critical approach to ideology. Thisis because he regards ideology as serving the function of maintaining the existing social system as highlighted in system justification theory [8,9
], and he suggests that ideology can function to mask the social reality at times. In contrast, he regards utopia as functioning to challenge and alter it. In this sense, utopian thinking can activate what Johnson and Fujita [10] called system change motivation (also see Refs. [11,12]).