If you're in power, it's fairly simple to convince most people that this is the best of all possible worlds. The key is that word, “possible.” If you can convince them that nothing else is “practical,” that thinking of a better world is for fantasists and children, that “realistic” people ask for nothing better, then you've made acceptance of the world as you've created it, and everything you've done in it the only “mature” option.
Note that none of this relies on a logical, rational, or fact-based appeal. Whether you have any evidence that your status-quo is the only “practical” way to live is irrelevant. You are not appealing to rationality, you are appealing to self-image.
If you are the one in power, who seeks to preserve the system that benefits you the last thing you want is for people to start exercising deliberative reasoning on the problem, and thinking seriously about the possibility of change. So you don't make an argument, you make a statement, something along the lines of “the desire for change is childish. Impractical. You don't understand how the real world works!”
You can allow the idealists to tinker with their Utopian visions all they like. You can even point to their constant woolgathering as evidence of the tolerance, and the intellectual diversity you support and foster. But “at the end of the day,” as they say, you define, not what is rational, but what is possible. Practical. Mature.
You can let the idealists spin their theories, and nod your approval - “Yes, it would be nice if we could do better.” You can even concede that their position is morally and intellectually sound. But “in the end, that's not the world we live in.”
The trick here is a simple one. If you wish to control how things are done, and for whom, you must separate the world of ideas from the world of action. You don't really need to control the ideas, or suppress those that you disagree with; even those that would be dangerous “out in the wild.” You need only confine the influence of those ideas to a reservation – a sort of zoological park for the intellect. These ideas, as dangerous as they might be to your carefully constructed, self-serving world are harmless when confined to the limitations of “practicality” that you control on your own behalf. You need never explain why the idea you dismiss is impractical. It simply is. And anyone who would disagree is just an ineffectual idealist who doesn't live in “the real world.”
Never try to disprove. Only dismiss.
Human nature is your ally in this. The vast majority of people when presented with a choice will not choose the right choice or the wrong choice, they will choose the easiest choice – the one that affirms their self-image while requiring very little of them. Accepting the world's current state as an eternal truth is easy. You need not wonder, or do the work of either envisioning or enacting change. And you will be called “practical,” and “realistic” for rejecting any idea that proposes change.
Change is harder that acceptance. Turning ideas into actual work is harder still. Given a little encouragement – being told that their unwillingness to look at a problem and think of solutions is “mature” and “practical” is all the motivation most people need to avoid that difficult mental work.
Those who profit from the status-quo, those whom the “way things are” favors don't want change of any kind, since the current system is most convenient for them. Failing to trap civilization in amber, they will seek to confine that change to what is “practical,” while maintaining control of what “practical” might mean.
There is an effective rhetorical response to the “that's not the real world” argument. It is: “Yes, I know that's not how things work at the moment. I think that should change.”
When the paladin of the status-quo recovers from having their rejection rejected, they will respond with something like, “that's not practical!”
You can point out the circular nature of that argument, which reduces to “Things can't change because that's the way things are,” by saying, “Yes, we are where we are. Let's discuss where we want to go.”
They'll still call you an impractical idealist – a “dreamer” if they don't think you’re dangerous to their profitable status-quo, an “extremist” or a “radical” if they think you are, but push against the “practical” anyway. Only “idealists” and the “impractical” can effect change. Let them have the way things are. We will give our efforts to creating what shall be.
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Another essay for hope, so onward to what may be, for what we have just doesn't feel just.
"Change is harder that acceptance." ???