John Lennon Imagines the Future

www.rusbasan.com

Bob Rusbasan
August 5, 1998

Many of of look back to the Sixties as a magical time: Hippies, riots, crazy fashions, optimism, the "Establishment" challenged (at last!), peace given a chance, and so on. The powers of evil in this country were finally defeated, leading to a bright new day for all of us. Well, perhaps not. Still, there is no denying that the ideas of the Sixties continue to influence attitudes today. Just how good were those ideas? What can we learn from the hippie movement?

In 1971, John Lennon, Sixties icon, released a song called "Imagine" that described what the Sixties were all about. In it, he invites his listeners to imagine how things would be in the ideal society. I am a big Beatles fan, and I especially enjoy John Lennon's work. I am also a political conservative. As such, I thought I'd evaluate John Lennon's vision in 1998 and see how well it holds up to the test of time.

"Imagine" starts off on an atheistic note:

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

The "living for today" clause is the key to understanding this verse. There is a philosophy known as humanism that encourages people to try to create the best world possible for themselves and their fellow humans. Humanism is not necessarily antagonistic toward religion (there many people that describe themselves as religious humanists). Some humanists, however, feel that religion can cause people to neglect the world in which we live by encouraging them to focus solely on the world to come. Because of that, and because "secular humanists" lack any religious beliefs, many religious people react negatively toward humanism.

"Imagine" was a very popular song. People do not pay much attention to song lyrics, and I imagine many of them would be quite shocked at the anti-religion sentiment in John Lennon's lyrics here. Though I cannot argue with Lennon's apparent wish that people try to improve life on this planet today, it will become clear that in this song he is parroting communist dogma. In the first verse of "Image" he endorses the communist view that religion is "the opiate of the masses" and presumably endorses the view that it should be forcibly eradicated. I cannot agree with that.

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

Here is where things start to go awry. No countries? Regardless of what Lennon thought, that doesn't mean there will be "nothing to kill or die for". People that have brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, husbands, wives, or close friends understand that there are things to kill or die for. Do countries cause murderous feelings? Sometimes, such as during wars. Can we therefore conclude that eliminating countries would eliminate murder? Hardly.

Lennon, unfortunately, seems to have fallen prey to the idea that if communism eventually succeeds, government will eventually become obsolete, and a peaceful anarchy will reign on earth. Anarchy is certainly possible, but it is never peaceful. Countries -- and, more specifically, governments -- do much more to contain violence than they do to cause it.

Who could possibly believe that worldwide anarchy could lead to worldwide peace? Believe it or not, quite a few people could. This idea was articulated in The Communist Manifesto, and it goes roughly like this: The oppressed people of the the world will unite and take over. Property rights will be abolished, and everyone will work together for the common good. Eventually people will become so used to this way of life (the idea behind "the New Soviet Man" that was promised) that the governments erected to enforce it will become unnecessary.

In many ways it is a beautiful idea, elegantly expressed in the phrase "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". Given what we know about human nature, it is also completely unrealistic, especially on a global scale.

A modified form of this idea agrees that peaceful anarchy is impossible and instead proposes a world united under one government. This idea is also fatally flawed. Even if we could create a near-perfect government, what would happen if it went bad?

If there is any doubt what Lennon meant by the second verse, he eliminates it with the third:

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

This "no possessions" stuff is, again, communist philosophy. The idea is that everyone will will happily share everything. That sounds good in some abstract sense. In reality, can you imagine personally owning nothing? I can't. If your grandmother gave you a family heirloom, and someone else took it so they could use some part of it, would that be just fine with you? I doubt it. How about a family house? Is there nothing that you would not trust with anybody else?

Lennon apparently believes that if nobody owned anything, then nobody would go hungry. I doubt that is true. Who would farm if they had to accept the fact that at any time any person could come along and take the product of their work? Is it greedy to make sure you or your immediately family does not starve before worrying about a random stranger? For all you know, that stranger is taking food from you farm because he could not be bothered to plant anything on his.

Even back in 1971 people might have thought that this was all crazy. Lennon, however, hopes that he is on the right side of history:

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

It's 1998, seventeen years later, and things did not quite turn out the way Lennon had hoped.

Communism is all but dead. China, North Korea, and Cuba are the last major holdouts, and for many years their success have been directly related to how willing they are to back away from communist doctrine. The Soviet Union has broken apart. Its satellite countries are no longer communist. Latin America has increasingly turned toward democracy.

Meanwhile, the communes (shared living areas practicing communism -- commune-ism -- on a small scale) that many hippies founded have vanished.

John Lennon would not be pleased.

The legacy of the Sixties is still with us. One of the ironies of communism was that a system that was to eventually lead to no government inevitably started with a large, powerful government controlling as much as possible. The idea, again, was that until we learned to give freely to our fellow human we would be forced to do so by governments that redistributed our possessions.

In the Sixties, Lyndon Johnson bought into that plane when he called for the creation of a "Great Society". By pitching in (paying more taxes), "we" (government agencies) could cure most of society's ills. After thirty years of programs that seldom helped and often worsened the problems they were attempting to fix, we have just recently begun to clean up the mess. The ideas that held sway in the Sixties, as well-intentioned as their advocates may have been, have been a disaster.

I imagine we will be struggling with the legacy of the Sixties for a long time to come.