What Bear Attacks on the City of Grafton Teach Us About Utopias

Grafton is a small city in New Hampshire, in the northeastern United States, with just over 1,300 registered inhabitants.

As of 2004, it was the object of a political experiment that wanted to turn the city into a liberal paradise.

The promoters hoped that it would serve as an example for the whole country that taxes are theft, that state interventionism brings poverty and that the government should not interfere in whether I smoke marijuana, how many weapons I have or whether or not I can sell freely my organs.

But the initiative also brought with it an unexpected consequence: bear attacks.

It is explained by journalist Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling in

title that can be translated as "A liberal meets a bear", but also makes a pun on jokes that start with someone (or something ) walking into a bar.

Just published, the book explains that the promoters of this idea had a future in mind like that of

by Ayn Rand, a novel in which a group of businessmen organize a rebellious society in a hidden valley that is governed only by the free market, and whose success contrasts with a country mired in bureaucracy, interventionism and, therefore, chaos and poverty.

Despite the literary reference, while the United States continued to do its thing, in 2011 the roads of Grafton had been filled with potholes, the streets were left almost without lighting and the first murders recorded in the town were committed.

Not only that: the town received more and more visits from bears that attacked chickens, cats and, in some isolated cases, people.

Yes, bears: the liberal and anarcho-capitalist inhabitants of the city either refused to respect the regulations on garbage collection or tried to solve the problems on their own, without calling to report that there were huge animals in their garden.

And that's not to mention Donut Lady (the donut lady, one of the characters with the most presence in the book), who fed the bears that came to her house and, therefore, encouraged the animals to come closer. to the people more and more frequently.

After all, why can't I do what I want in my garden?

On top of all that, and despite running out of services and being attacked by these animals, Grafton's residents didn't even save so much money on taxes: Hongoltz-Hetling compares their situation with the neighboring city of Canaan, where there were roads. paved and services such as swimming pools, museums and parks.

In this city, each neighbor paid, on average, 70 cents more a day for these services than in liberal Grafton (about $ 250 a year).

After reading the book, one may think that this experiment may not be representative.

Or it may not have been well planned.

Or maybe it didn't run well.

But it is quite probable that this experience simply suffered from many of the problems common to utopias.

A problem of method

Hongoltz-Hetling speaks in her book of liberals as cerebral and logical people who in some cases go to extremes that sound absurd just by following this logic to the end.

If liberalism defends that any free and voluntary agreement is valid, this means that I have the right to sell my organs and that I can even sell them to someone who wants them to eat them.

I can also fight a duel, organize fights between homeless people or fill my garden with garbage (whether or not there are bears around), because they are decisions made freely and, in the last case, on my property.

In his book

Karl Popper, a philosopher close to liberalism, criticizes precisely this rational appearance of utopias, which makes them especially dangerous.

According to Popper, utopian thinking often starts from a supposedly ideal society, which is the one to be achieved.

For the philosopher, the problem is not that the goal seems unattainable (in his opinion, today we enjoy many things that at the time seemed unattainable), but that utopias propose to completely rebuild society.

This often brings with it “practical consequences difficult to calculate, given our limited experience” and despite the supposedly logical approach.

In other words, the problem of utopias is not necessarily the goal, but the method, which involves many changes at the same time with unpredictable consequences.

It is, in fact, what happened to the inhabitants of Grafton: probably none of the defenders of this "free city" thought that criticizing interventionism and cutting taxes would lead to animal attacks, but, as Hongoltz-Hetling writes, it is more easy to solve problems on the internet than in person.

A bear walking so calmly through New Hampshire.

As it is said (several times) in the book, it is very rare for bears to attack people.

Don Emmert (Getty Images)

If the experiment goes wrong, do we try it again?

John Babiarz, one of the protagonists of Hongoltz-Hetling's book, admits that Grafton's experiment did not go as well as he wanted, but that has not made him give up his ideals.

In fact, throughout the book, its protagonists complain that the problem is not that their project has defects, but that they still do not enjoy enough freedom, with aggrieved characters, for example, because they are forced to put out bonfires that they consider safe.

They are not alone: ​​there are liberals who argue that the problem with capitalist economic crises is that there is not as much freedom as there should be and there are communists who believe that Marx's ideas were not applied correctly.

Could Grafton's utopia have worked if they had been allowed to apply it fully (or better)?

After all, the public library was still open three hours a week.

Would they have achieved a just and free society by closing it forever?

It seems unlikely, at least if we pay attention to what the philosopher Robert Nozick wrote more than 30 years ago, when he commented on the gulf between political ideals and their practical execution.

In his

, Nozick reflects on this difference between the ideal and the real.

When a utopia fails (or even a political proposal that at first seemed realistic), its supporters defend themselves by saying that it was not applied well or that "too little" was applied.

For Nozick, this is cheating because it omits that the difference between what a theory proposes and how it ends up being applied is also something that we have to take into account.

For example, capitalism may propose an ideal of free and voluntary exchange, with countries cooperating through trade and with individuals obtaining for their work what others believe they deserve.

But all this has also been associated in practice with the exploitation of workers and, in many cases, support for dictatorial regimes.

Nozick even takes the opportunity to point out a criticism of his best-known book,

, in which he precisely laid the foundations of contemporary liberalism.

Of course, this difference between the ideal and the real does not only exist in liberal capitalism: Nozick dedicates a few lines to religion and communism, whose ideal of cooperation without classes or privileges in practice has also implied totalitarianism and censorship.

"This is not the whole story about how the communist ideal operates in the world, but it is part of that story."

From utopia to protopia

Does all this mean that we must renounce utopian approaches?

Are the ideas raised in utopias not inspiring?

Isn't the philosopher Francisco Martorell Campos right when he thinks that without the motivation of apparently utopian social change we would tend to conformity?

In

, published in 2019, this philosopher admits that the criticisms of utopias are legitimate, since they have given rise to “closed, static, centralized and standardized societies”.

He also recalls that we owe the term "dystopia" to John Stuart Mill, who in 1868 already warned that "many utopians propose social models so terrifying that they deserve a specific qualifier to nickname them."

But Martorell Campos also recalls that utopias delivered "numerous ideas to social progress."

He points out that it is often forgotten "that democracy was originally a utopia" and that "social progress is only achieved through protest and citizen mobilization, sometimes after decades or centuries of insistence."

In

, the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman proposes ideas that today seem almost unattainable, such as the 15-hour work week or the universal basic income.

In a line similar to that of Martorell Campos, Bregman considers that utopian ideas are “alternative horizons that activate the imagination”.

Without utopian dreamers who defended equality and freedom, "we would still starve and be poor, dirty, fearful, ignorant, sickly and ugly."

There is

a middle ground possible between conformism and the threat of dystopia: the protopía term coined by Kevin Kelly, cofounder of the technology magazine

, which defends the essayist and popularizer Michael Shermer in his book

(arch moral).

These protopies are projects of gradual and continuous change.

We can aspire to the society that we consider the most just, but it is not necessary to run the risk of inventing it from scratch.

This is an idea that is also included in his book Popper, who, remember, was not against setting supposedly unattainable goals, but against the methods to achieve these goals.

Instead of trying to create a new society, we can gradually make progress.

This allows us to check the effect of these decisions, correcting if necessary and counting on the opinion of all citizens.

So after one or two bear attacks we could backtrack and admit that, well, maybe the idea wasn't so good.

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