Utopia: In Search of the Dream

Utopias come, and utopias go.

In this series, we've explored these visions of a good place

as blueprints for future societies,

and as new ways of living.

Grand designs and experimental communities that have often failed.

But is there another path to utopia?

Smaller, more human in scale.

A spark of creativity, a moment of perfection.

A sense of transcendence.

Can we find utopia within?

Is utopia, after all,

just a state of mind?

In this episode I turn the camera on perhaps the most intriguing aspect

of our relationship with utopia -

how we relate to the idea as individuals.

This is not about the utopia of the future

but about the utopia of now.

I think it's really beautiful and very powerful.

You could call it the a-ha moment.

That moment where you go, "Wow."

The ways we've created to immerse ourselves in a better moment.

If I'm reading a crowd I can build, like, an entire emotion.

To push the boundaries of art and expression, to find authenticity.

People being more expressive, more loving, more argumentative,

more whatever.

It's about how the belief in better pushes us to be all that we can be.

If we want to find utopia,

perhaps we first need to understand what happens

when grand utopian visions fail.

With the Velvet Revolutions of 1989

followed by the rapid collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,

it seemed to many Western minds that Eastern Europe had suddenly awoken

from the utopian dream - or nightmare - of socialism.

But I think that the toppled statues

gathered here in a park in southern Lithuania

reveal a fascinatingly complex story

about our relationships with utopia.

These are symbols of what was once envisaged as a paradise of equality

and the power of collective effort.

But it was a utopia that crumbled.

The economy stagnated, party power was often arbitrary and corrupt,

and many people felt that they were not given sufficient freedom.

And yet, as the old system was swept away, was something lost?

Deimantas Narkevicius is a Lithuanian artist.

Originally trained under the Soviet regime,

he gained growing international attention

when he captured the strange emptiness left behind

when Soviet landmarks were suddenly removed.

I was aware that the city would look different

when the objects will be gone,

and I wanted really to document

their last moment.

In his 2016 work, Doubled Youth,

Deimantas recorded the removal of 1950s socialist realist statues

from a bridge in central Vilnius.

This lack of cultural sensitivity

to understand that when the political regime is gone,

the art objects produced during that regime

does not automatically represent that regime.

It becomes cultural objects.

You seem to be suggesting

that we still need to respect the cultural output?

Through culture we understand history richer and more complex.

Deimantas takes me to the bridge

to see what's become of the now post-utopian space.

So when the sculptures were taken down,

the four plinths were standing empty

and they were looking really provocative

because they were suggesting that there was something there,

obviously, and it's something supposed to be there,

and, I think, for a while there was even an attempt

to use them for a car advertisement.

It didn't work because I think people started to protest

because it looked very vulgar.

And then arrived these pots, with the flowers.

I think there will be debates coming.

What to do with these empty plinths in the future?

So it strikes me that there's a kind of hunger now

for more socially aware kind of art to appear back on the bridge.

Do you see it that way?

Well, partly, yes,

because I think we should understand that the society

was pretty poor during even the post-socialist period,

and they were really eager to get, you know, better off, you know,

like get cars and clothing and houses and so on.

But I think now, 25 years later, they've got that.

And people think, what is next? What is the vision?

Because nobody was thinking about kind of the future.

They were thinking about the past.

So, we're kind of missing utopian vision? I think so.

Plinths...

with flowerpots on top of them.

They appear to be metaphors for our society nowadays.

Perhaps a little short on grand shared aspirations.

Communal utopian ideologies seem to have failed or faded.

We're left to shape our own lives but we're still searching

for that good place, trying to find our own utopias

in our own countless ways.

Perhaps the most commonly held utopian dream today

is the idea that you can buy your way to happiness.

You can buy your way to a better place.

It's the utopia of consumption.

We've long been bombarded by advertising

with the simple message - purchases make you happy.

Buying things gives you freedom, choice and control

in ways that the socialist utopias could never match.

But is a consumerist utopia, in its own way, just another illusion?

How much freedom or control do we really have when our desires

are constantly stimulated but can never be sated?

As new products become available,

there's always something else to buy.

If only I had a bigger telly,

a flatter telly, a curved telly,

a 3D telly, a telly with surround sound,

then I would be in a good place.

But, of course, it's a myth.

The good place of consumption always lies just, just, just beyond reach.

We never quite get there.

This spectacle of capitalism and consumerism that we live amongst,

is cheating us into thinking we can find our way to happiness

through purchasing.

On the face of it, the digital revolution,

the massive technological shift we're living through today

seems to promise yet more of that consumerist spectacle.

More than 3 billion of us now live our daily lives hooked to screens

that are so often seeking to sell us ever more goods.

Now we can access the promise of a consumerist utopia

at the click of a button.

But is there a more positive story to tell about the digital world?

Can it empower us,

be about more than just consumption?

Many digital spaces have been imagined to allow us to create

and, just as importantly, control our own utopias.

So this is actually the computer we created Civilisation on.

Sid Meier, creator of Civilisation,

is one of the great innovators of the digital revolution.

You had to put eight different disks into your computer

and copy them over onto your hard drive before you could play.

He pioneered open world strategy games,

as personal computers filled homes across the planet

in the early 1990s.

Civilisation.

I'm ready. I can do it.

"BUILDING NEW WORLD." All in caps.

In Meier's game, you create your perfect world digitally

from the comfort of your own home,

leading a people from the dawn of time to the space age.

I'm very touched that you chose to call your tribe the English.

You're welcome.

The desire to create perfect digital worlds has proved popular.

In the last 25 years, Civilisation and its sequels

have sold over 40 million copies.

And so it falls upon you to fill our people's true destiny.

Under your leadership, we shall surely prosper.

From the seeds of this small settlement

shall you grow our empire.

Our people await your command.

I think there are some real comparisons

between certain utopian urges,

the desire to explore, to contest,

to protect whatever utopian vision it is that one has

and the game Civilisation.

Do you agree? I've never actually looked at it that way,

but now that you mention it I can see the parallels.

In a utopia, I think we'd expect technology to progress

and technology to bring us advances and a better life.

I think we'd expect nations to communicate with each other

and work together. I think we'd expect exploration,

I think we'd expect to explore our planet,

and, after that, explore the solar system and the universe around us

so, although Civ wasn't really designed

with the idea of utopia in mind,

I think many of the processes that are part of the game

would be part of a utopia.

To ensure the safety of our borders

we must defeat the enemy at its source.

In playing Civilisation,

there can be quite a desire to defend your ideal utopian society

that you're building. There's something very human about that.

I do think the players get invested in what they create

because they know it's unique -

they've designed it, they've built it,

they've made all the decisions that went into getting to this point.

So there's a strategy we call turtling,

which is just protecting what you've built because you're really invested

in it and want to keep it safe from all the forces of the world that are

trying to take it away from you.

There is aggressive expansion,

conquer the world strategy.

There are also cultural victories

or wonder victories.

If you can build these great wonders you can win the game.

Or if you can bring on world peace

that's another way of winning the game.

Truly we have achieved a golden age

of peace and cooperation.

Civ has gone from being just a game

to people really thinking that it represents a version

of the real world and now they start to think, you know,

"I'd really like the world to be a peaceful place and want to try that"