NAILED IT:

"What can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities?" Fyodor Dostoevsky asks in his 1864 novella Notes from Underground. "Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species."

"Even then," Dostoevsky continues, "out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though that were so necessary--that men still are men and not the keys of a piano."

When Dostoevsky wrote these lines, Russian writers were obsessed with the idea of utopias. They wrote stories and treatises in which they envisioned how the increasingly dysfunctional czarist empire could be replaced by a society devoid of suffering or conflict. Their vision for the future sparked the imaginations of numerous individuals, from armchair philosophers to armed socialist revolutionaries eager to turn such speculative fiction into a political reality.

Dostoevsky, however, was not impressed. As explained by the quote above, the author of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov believed that utopias were, by definition, incompatible with human nature, which gravitates toward freedom. People, he argued, would rather be free in an imperfect world than unfree in a perfect one. Since the line between utopias and dictatorships is unclear, the writer also believed that the planning one would inevitably result in the creation of the other.

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