For Ben

Above: Romanian Revolutionary. Sprayed by Banksy.

The disappearance of utopia brings about a static state of affairs in which man himself becomes no more than a thing. We would be faced then with the greatest paradox imaginable, namely that man, who has achieved the highest degree of rational mastery of existence, left without any ideals, becomes a mere creature of impulses.

Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 1936