@QMS The utopia dreamed in the book btw will be described as a utopia of sustainability.

sounds like your 5 pillars are sustainable

Dream on!

@joe shikspack hat-tip to Noam Chomsky, who used to say good things about press coverage of sporting events in the US...

heh, your process sounds a lot like sculpting an elephant (chisel away all of the material that does not resemble an elephant) except you are building the rock that will later be formed into the elephant.

this is a great line:

American voters tend to be all about ethos (the appeal to character) and pathos (the appeal to emotions) and not at all about logos (the appeal to reasoning), and Krystal Ball is using some really blatant appeals to reasoning here, a tactic usually reserved in American discourse for discussions of major league sports.

@Shahryar What I have now is mostly a main file with the book in it -- or, rather, with what of the book I've written and what I've done to amend the old book to conform to the thesis of the new book. There are also, however, a series of .docx files marked "fragment" with all sorts of fragments I've copied and pasted before deleting them from the main text.

The hazard of this approach, however, is that once having made a big chunk of text "fragment," I probably won't read it.

Write each bit. When you want to add a footnote put it into "book 2". This would only be when the footnote starts to overwhelm your point.

For example, if you have a historical reference which needs further background put it in a separate section.

Robert Graves uses something like this in his Greek Myths where he divides the story and the interpretation into two parts. That way we don't get sidetracked when reading either section.

Well it's an idea, anyway. Good luck with your book!

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal Writing tons of footnotes and cluttering your prose with too-long sentences is also, to be sure, extending this period in which I am still working on the book. I will put something down and then come back to it later and think "omigod NOBODY is going to want to read this." Thus major editing.

As for wanting constant footnotes and additions, that's just the down side of having a capacious mind that likes to make connections. It makes it hard to write.

@wetterau Oh, I might, at some point, completely switch things around, but probably not.

As for your numbered questions, they're good -- perhaps you yourself could write a book around them. I should say something, though, about them.

1. A utopia is the realization of a utopian dream, which is a dream that the world could somehow be a better place.

2. Utopian dreaming is such an unwieldy thing, and the rush to build utopia so often has led to disappointment. Therefore in many places the utopia building kit is going to have to wait for a utopia of consensus democracy such as what you can see if you travel to eastern Chiapas in Mexico to visit the Zapatistas.

3. I discuss "tools" in my first chapter.

4. There are lots of books with lots of examples already. One place to start might be Chris Jennings' book Paradise Now, about utopianism in the US before the Civil War.

5. We need to figure out how to create a good utopian dream of a sustainable society, or die trying. That's the task-and-hand: go.

@Cass
You are embarking on a great project! One of the good things about a book is that, once out in the world, it can't be taken from you. My sweetheart is presently putting a patina on a small bronze sculpture she cast thirty years ago. If anyone wants to know where she's at, her "qualifications," she can point to a sculpture. That pretty much answers the question.
I give somebody a book (one of ten). It is satisfying,

Every book has a purpose and a voice. You can choose the purpose, but you earn the voice.

It is fine to change purpose, to throw away or modify or save stuff for maybe another book, to start over. But you have to start somewhere. If you can't state the purpose of your book in a sentence or two, you need to keep thinking.

The next step is to lay out a tentative organization or framework for the book. This should take one sheet of paper, max. For example, a novel: my character has long blonde hair, a slight skew to her left eye, she travels to Scotland to learn where her maternal grandmother grew up, she is given a small dog and begins walking everyday to a boat builder's shop... I (the writer) will learn as I write.
Or: 1. what is a utopia?
2. let us construct a utopia building kit
3. what are our tools?
4. 5. 6. historial examples from 3 cultures
7. what is to be learned?
I will first write these in any order and then rewrite them as a whole from start to finish.
etc.
If you can't put a design on one sheet of paper, you need to keep clarifying.

Technique: there is only one--be clear. Rewrite every sentence and every paragraph until it is as clear as you can make it. In doing this, your voice will emerge. Your unique voice will speak to the reader and unify the book.

Aids: get the little Strunk & White book if you don't have it already, and also the AP or NYT style book for help with conventional style and punctuation

This is seriously hard work. You are on your own. But, you wouldn't have it any other way.

@The Liberal Moonbat as the "complete atrophy of political imagination” coming out of global civilization after a certain point in the 20th century, definitely I would say by 1980. He thought that point came around 1950, but maybe he chose that year so he could chart the dynamic period of "Western civilization" as being between 1750 and 1950, both nice round numbers.

There were, to be sure, some telltale signs that "the West," specifically Europe, was going to settle down for a period of intellectual conformity after having conquered the world in brutal fashion. Soviet history is a good place to start understanding this great decline in imagination. The Soviet Union began during a period of blatant global imperialism, in which (for instance) the states of Europe agreed to carve up Africa in 1870 and then had done so by 1914. (Also, don't forget the British and French carving-up of Indochina and, eventually, of the remains of the Ottoman Empire by 1923.) Having conquered the territory of the Russian Empire, the Soviets, presumed heirs to the legacy of 19th-century socialism, went in for a transition period, after which it became obvious that the best they could come up with was Stalin -- another emperor to replace the Romanov dynasty and basically a mock-socialist Peter the Great with 1930s technology. At least would-be-emperor Trotsky could imagine something different, if perhaps not that much different -- for which, like the rest of the old Bolsheviks, he was murdered.

And then after Stalin the most imaginative regime the Soviets could devise was headed by Khrushchev. When Brezhnev's generation died and it came time to reimagine the Soviet Union once again, the best Gorbachev could do was to imagine Russia as a big version of Sweden, the atrophy of political imagination having completely set in by the Eighties. It didn't work of course; by the time of Gorbachev's ascendancy in 1985 there was no room for innovation. The political history of the last two decades of the Twentieth Century looks like the tightening of a noose, a big neoliberal capitalist noose. That's why Klein's book is one of the pillars of mine. Now, whenever you mention "socialism" to an American, the typical arguments you get revolve around the creation of a "socialist country." The socialists of the 19th century would themselves have been completely embarrassed by our one-dimensional thinking about socialism. What mattered to them were, among many other things, social relations in the workplace. Here's a thought: compare, on a literary level, the writings of Charles Fourier, or even of William Morris, with the monotony of, say, Anthony Giddens.

The trajectory of the West, also, follows the same dreary path from imagination to conformism. Neoliberalism, the intellectual product of a conference at Mont Pelerin in 1947, was made into a global regime as the result of an elite consensus established in 1973 with the founding of the Trilateral Commission. The Trilateralists produced a book titled "The Crisis of Democracy" in 1975 and have been capable of nothing of interest since. Today the only utopian dream that has much prospect of becoming real on an economic level is the one voiced in Thomas L. Friedman's books.

Actual thinking about global elite consensus has itself become boringly unimaginative. The boring thing about "conspiracy theory" is not that it is alt-right, although much of it is, but rather that it is stuck in the same capitalist rut as that which it claims to oppose. "9-11 was an inside job," you are told, by a bunch of people who probably voted for George W. anyway and who no doubt participated in his something-like-95% approval rating in the autumn of 2001. And as for the liberals? They handed their imaginations to Barack Obama twelve years ago and their gray matter hasn't been disturbed since. There was a watershed year -- 2009. That was the year self-described American conservatives stopped imagining environmental policy.

Castoriadis' critique of the "atrophy of political imagination" even extended to ordinary culture. He lamented, for instance, that imagination in jazz music died when Miles Davis died in 1991,and that innovation in physics today is nowhere near as meaningful as what it was in the first half of the 20th century.

Globally you might make a minor exception to the regime of drab intellectual conformity with some of the marginal populations of South America. The victory of MAS in Bolivia is encouraging, though Venezuela's PSUV still has yet to think its way out of its current trap, and we lost Julian Assange because Ecuador failed to innovate when it counted.

Any chance this might be related somehow to my most recent rant?: https://caucus99percent.com/content/latest-viral-anti-biden-video-makes-...

I have definitely been personally feeling - and suffocating under - an atmosphere of aggressive conformity unprecedented in my own experience. There more people talk about "inclusivity" (I like how our spellchecker here doesn't even think that's a real word) and "diversity", the less there actually is of it. It doesn't feel like there's any room for me to exist anymore. It's like Marxist-Leninist ideology at its absolute worst, combined with Roman Catholicism (also at its worst) and American sports-jock culture.

I predict a resurgent interest in Ayn Rand the next time the screw turns...which sucks, because that will probably just start the entire ping-pong match, which is wholly based on a fallacy that I SOMEHOW managed to grow up in an environment that was free of it even though it seems now like nobody is even aware it ever existed, all over again.

My life has started to feel like the Parable of the Cave...in REVERSE (the "hypnotic smoke" scene from The Silver Chair also comes to mind, not to mention an obscure short story I read in middle school that partly inspired my signature). Nobody listens to me, though: I try to tell people what I've seen, and people just insist it doesn't exist, and that I'M the ignorant one.