On John Lennon's 'Imagine'

John Lennon's Imagine is recognized the third song of all times by The Rolling Stone. It's also considered antireligious, anticapitalist and antinationalist. Young people have liked it since it was created, because it has a nice (some claim beautiful) melody and noble yet rebellious message. When I was a teenager I didn't pay much attention to the lyrics and when some Catholics criticised Lennon's hit as Satanistic, I shrugged my shoulders. Now the song is part of the English textbook New English File. As a teacher and a person who used to like John Lennon I decided to 'analyze' the lyrics with no sentimental rubbish. I still love the tune, so I'll focus on the message.

Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try

OK, no sweat. One can imagine the worls without the trandenscental dimension. The question is why should I... but OK.

No hell below us

What an absolutely great idea! However, what to do with the hell in us?

Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

We can definitely imagine people living for today. We usually call this lifestyle 'from hand to mouth' and do not respect such people.

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do

The world without countries is quite imaginable. There used to be such a period in the history of humankind. On the other hand it is much harder to imagine the world without tribes. People will always gather around some individuals who convince them they are worth being gathered around. If such an organization has a territory or not, doesn't matter.

Nothing to kill or die for

Very nice indeed, people normally never want to die, although they like to succumb to their own aggression. Although they don't kill as often as they would like to, it is absolutely unimaginable that human beings would ever stop finding pretexts to release their negative engergies. Moreover, in extreme situations, like famine, people are ready to kill for a slice of bread...

And no religion too

OK again. It is possible to live without religion although in the cases of most people an ideal sense of emptiness is inconceivable. If they overthrow their gods, they usually create others, usually worse (Hitler, Stalin). Hardly anyone can imagine the whole world full of Socrateses.

Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

Yes, I can imagine peace in an international dimension. Regular people, if they don't have enemies feel lost in the chaos of the world! What's more, an ideal peace is like enthropy, a perfect stillness, an ideal death!

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one

OK, John, you were!

I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Well, no, thank you. And I don't want the world to bo a perfect unity. What would it be like? Like Mao's China? People wearing identical uniforms, and eatig a bowl of rice every day? No! It's definitely not for me.

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can

Yes, I can but I don't like it! I want to have and use my things.

No need for greed or hunger

Ha ha ha! No greed or hunger? Maybe, but we can't forget about the need for multiplying our genes, so what about access to representatives of the opposite sex? Should they always reciprocate somebody else's desire? What if not? What about, for example, alpha males? Wouldn't they try to have sexual intercourses with the highest possible number of partners? Who will have sexual partners? The one who has resources such as food! Greed and hunger will never disappear.

A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

A brotherhood or solidarity? Well, for a week or a month yes... but no longer. Nobody would be able to stand it. It's against our nature!

When I was a teenager and didn't speak English, I didn't even bother to understand John Lennon's lyrics. I lived under the communist regime and whatever came from 'the free world' was unconditionally accepted. The fact is that what Lennon wanted was very close to the utopia the communists tried to instill in us. Even today there are people who claim that the principles of the real socialism were good but the people who tried to implement them screwed everything up. The people of course screwed it up because they were just fallible human beings and, in contrast to what they preached, they didn't want to share what they had with anybody else! Another question is whether the imaginery ideal world proposed by John Lennon is really worth pursuing. Listening to Imagine today, I can't resist the comparison of Lennon's humans with a school of seals or a horde of chimpanzees, but even these animals suffer from mutual aggression. Another association that occurs to me is Shakespear's line in As You Like It describing the last stage of human life in Jacques's soliloquy:

... second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything

In this state of human body are John's proposals quite imaginable...