/lit/ - Literature

The outcome of utopian Pinker's world is pic related.

I found this in Hopscotch of Julio Cortázar, perhaps it's related to the post.

Until we take away from time its whip of history, until we prick the blister made of so many untils, we shall go on seeing beauty as an end, peace as a desiratum, always from this side of the door where it really is not always so bad, where many people find satisfactory lives, pleasant perfumes, good salaries, fine literature, stereophonic sound, and why then worry one's self about wheter the world most likely is finite, wheter history is coming to its optimum, wheter the human race is emerging from the Middle Ages and entering the era of cybernetics. Tout va très bien, madame la Marquise, tout va très bien, tout va très bien.
As far as everything else is concerned, one must be an imbecile, one must be a poet, one must have a harvest moon in order to spend more than five minutes on those nostalgias that can be handles so perfectly in just a moment. Every meeting of international tycoons, of men-of-science, each new artificial satellite, hormone, or atomic reactor crushes these false hopes of a little more. The kingdom will be made out of plastic material, this is a fact. And the world will not have to be converted into an Orwillian or Huxleyan nightmare; it will be much worse, it will be a delightful world, with enormous eighteen-footed hens most likely, each foot a thing of beauty, with tele-operated bathrooms, a different-colored water according to the days of the week, a nicety of the national hygiene service, with television in every room, great tropical landscapes for example, for the inhabitants of Reykjavik, scenes of igloos for people in Havana, subtle compensations that will reduce rebellions to conformity, and so forth.
That is to say, a satisfactory world for reasonable people.
And will any single person remain in it who is not reasonable?
In some corner, a vestige of the forgotten kingdom. In some violent death, the punishment for having remembered the kingdom. In some laugh, in some tear, the survival of the kingdom. Beneath it all, one does not feel that man will end up killing man. He will escape from it, he will grasp the rudder of the electronic machine, the astral rocket, he will trip up and then they can set a dog on him. Everything can be killed except nostalgia for the kingdom, we carry it in the color of our eyes, in every love affair, in everything that deeply torments and unties and tricks. Wishful thinking perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.

Doesn't Pinker's ideal condition of civilization and humanity mean spiritual death first and later extinction? What's the point of a society of atomized individuals with nothing to pursue or do, just waiting for death? How can humankind find meaning and reasons to keep going while living on this state of complacency?

The great irony of the "Enlightenment" is that it's ultimate end-point was Nihilism.