What does your ideal community look like? How is it organized, and how is community life structured? What values does the community share?

I love impossibilities. The mythical arrangement of Atlantis has always appealed to me. The way I’ve seen possible renditions of that city is a circular arrangement where the different rings were devoted to different zones, like farmland, dairyland, commerce, and residential areas. I also imagine that it was served by super-science and technology served the population in all of it’s needs. No pollution, no noise, no glaring lights blotting out the beautiful night sky. I also imagine people enlightened to the point where crime just doesn’t happen, there aren’t any reasons to cry and the only killer of man is old age. Alas, this is Utopia, otherwise known as “Nowhere” and it’s just a fantasyland. A lovely little ideal that keeps you comfortable when faced with how things really are: Rotting stinking cities packed with wretched awful people.

I really don’t think that humanity can achieve an Atlantean level of sophistication or enlightenment, but that doesn’t mean you just throw away the ideal. There has to be something, even if it’s imaginary that you can grab ahold of and buoy yourself on when faced with just how bleak and awful life really is all around you. So in that, Atlantis will be as real as any of us need it to be, to put all that suffering and wretchedness into context and by doing so, make it appear not as awful as it otherwise would be. In many ways, Atlantis is Hope. Hope is a silly thing, but it’s also a needful thing. Logically then, Atlantis is a needful thing.