Nowadays, when getting into political discussions with friends, family members, or some random guy on the internet, it can often be difficult for you to get through to other people. It can seem that no matter how articulate and knowledgeable you are, Uncle Steve just isn't willing to see that Obama wasn't actually a shape-shifting reptilian who feeds on human blood (which is a real conspiracy, by the way).

There are many reasons for this; the brain has a litany of biases and shortcuts that make people cling to their deeply held principles, but these days, we can't even agree on what world we're living in.

While part of this is due to the emergence of "fake news" as well as the increasing polarization of mainstream media so as to retain as many customers as possible, it is also to do with the fact that when people debate politics, many of them are not debating about the world we live in now, but of a utopian vision of the world.

A utopia is defined as "an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect."

When it comes to the utopian view in politics, it varies wildly depending on who you ask.

Liberals, for example, would describe a world of big government, economic regulation, and the infrastructure of the welfare state, which they believe would solve many, if not all of the problems facing the country today.

Conservatives, on the other hand, would describe their utopia as a free market, small government kind of world. If you were to ask a communist, they would give you a vision of the world where all wealth was distributed equally among everyone.

A libertarian would describe a world free of government meddling, where personal freedom of individuals was paramount, and a fascist would imagine a society developed around absolute, unquestioning loyalty to the state.

These utopias are all vastly different from one another, and that's the problem.

Nobody can agree on what a "perfect society" would even look like, as it is entirely based on the beliefs of the individual imagining it.

This is the entire reason that political disagreements exist in the first place, as everyone is trying to drag society in the direction of their respective utopia. These utopias, however, all have one thing in common - none of them are actually real.

That hasn't stopped many people from attempting to forgo the real world in favor of their idealized paradise society.

Utopias, by their nature, are idealistic.

They're imaginations of what society could be, and they completely disregard what the society that we live in actually looks like. If political discourse is ever going to reach a conducive level again, we all need to live in the real world. Utopian societies are a falsehood; none have ever existed and none will likely ever exist.

All societies have problems of varying types and degrees, and I don't see that going away anytime soon. While the western democracy we live in has many problems, this is the best society in terms of equality, freedom, and economic prosperity that the world has ever devised. We don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. While it certainly isn't perfect, it's the best we've got, so I say we work with it.