Utopia and heightened consciousness

Utopia should not be seen as the end‐point of a continuum of material progress, but as a society whose members enjoy a consciousness raised to its highest attainable level of intensity and value. The urge towards heightened consciousness is seen as a primary, pleasure‐driven human impulse, comparable in scope and intensity to the sex drive and perhaps still more fundamental, in that it emanates from the primordial human organ, the brain. The article explores ways in which an ‘inhibition barrier’ at present limiting the intensity of individual and general consciousness and arising from survival‐orientated modes of perception and feeling, might be raised or removed by a specific modification both of basic mental structures governing perception and conceptualization, and of economic structures, enabling a more efficient but non‐competitive mode of generating and distributing wealth. Insights derived from the psychology of art are thus applied more widely to the process of social living, to generate a concept of an attainable Utopia which would redirect human motivation away from ecologically destructive preoccupations.