Tyler Cowen: prediction

Transcript context

…By the end, he is so enamored of the horse society, which he views as so full of reason and so full of goodness and does not even have, I think, words for lying, because why would you communicate to lie? The whole point is to explain and get across ideas to one another. He’s so disgusted by his own species that he faints when he’s told he has to go back. I think he considers or he attempts suicide when he’s being taken home, even though the person who’s helping him is displaying all of the virtues that he’s just said he loves about the horses. They’re giving him their clothes off their back. They’re giving him money. They’re transporting him all the way back to England. He gets back to his wife, and she embraces him, and he faints again because he’s so disgusted by her. Again, obviously, it’s satire; it’s extreme. But even by the end, he’s meant to still retain this extreme disgust towards humanity because of this experience with the horses, but the horse society is not good. They’re enslaving a bunch of people — Yahoos, who are probably descendants from Europeans, right? But I take Swift to be quite critical of the Houyhnhnms. There he’s being satirical, and he’s so over the top in his praise that you just start thinking, “Come on.” It’s a bit like how the problems in the communal society in The Dispossessed are revealed more and more. The horses, it turns out, have this caste system, like how light or how dark a colored horse are you? Today, certainly in Swift’s time, obviously, you realize what he’s talking about, and they don’t make any progress, unlike the scientific societies, which at least try to make progress. All they’re good at is poetry. They’re entirely conformist. I think he’s just saying, this is how things would have to be for these supposed utopian visions to be realized. Maybe it’s a commentary on Thomas More and other such writers. To get to a utopia, things would have to be like this, truly communal. That would be horrible because a communal society is wonderful at oppressing each other. I think the best you can do for now Swift, and even Gulliver, is actually the family unit. Is Gulliver happiest in the family unit?…

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