RUR Dreams, Hopes and Plans Quotes

Domin is criticizing old Rossum for a lack of imagination. He could have made a jellyfish with the brain of Socrates, but he just makes a human being. The joke here is in part, though, that a jellyfish with a superbrain and a human being are pretty much the same thing. Think about it: what's a person if not a smart jelly creature? People have trouble thinking of, or creating, non-human things. That causes most of the trouble in R.U.R.

Old Rossum's dream is to dethrone God by showing that you can create people materially—no soul or spirit necessary. Atheism is often seen as material, or practical, but Čapek suggests that it's actually a kind of pie-in-the-sky idealism. Atheists have their heads in the clouds. It's the agnostics who don't care about God at all who build the factories and rule the world.

Domin's name is derived from "domination"; he wants to rule everything and control everything. That control is in the name of utopia—everyone will have tons of stuff. But it's also a little creepy there at the end. Do people really want to live to "perfect themselves"? And perfect themselves according to whom? Who has decided that they need to be more perfect, anyway? It's like Domin wants to make everybody over, just like he makes his own robots.

Domin is saying that he predicted massive war, revolution, and bloodshed as a consequence of creating robots. To Domin, this is all part of an inevitable transition to a new utopia. Domin here (and elsewhere) sounds a bit like Marx or Lenin (the Russian Revolution occurred just a few years before Čapek wrote his play). Marx also thought you needed bloodshed before you got to utopia. As it turned out, bloodshed in Russia led mostly to, well, more bloodshed. That's what happens with the robots, too.

Domin's dreams have led to sterility and death, at least according to Alquist. Note that Alquist calls Domin's utopia "Sodom." Sodom was a city destroyed in the Bible; people often claim that the sin of the people there was homosexuality. Domin's "sin" also involves interfering with the "natural order" between men and women. He has replaced procreation with reproduction. The evil of the robots is that they threaten to upset gender roles—men will no longer work, turning them into women, while women need no longer bear children. Robots are dangerous because they're sexy, or… not sexy enough.

Dr. Gall is arguing that Domin has caused troubles because he has ideas. But Young Rossum was against any kind of ideology—and he's the one who produced the robots and arguably caused all the troubles. Is it even possible not to have ideas? If so, then you're a robot yourself, which doesn't seem to be a good outcome (unless you're a cute robot like R2-D2, maybe—bleep, bloop).

Domin has a dream, and it's a nice dream! He doesn't want anyone to have to work. But, he also wants man to be master—but master of what? The desire for power and the desire to help people seem like they all get mixed up together. Can you want to help people without also wanting to control them? Maybe you can, but not if you're named Domin.

Busman is the financier. He says, first, that he thought of a new economy, built around robots. But then he decided that great dreams aren't the thing—which is a Busmanish thing to say as well. It's all about money and selfishness; that's what economists always say. So, in refusing his great dream, Busman is maybe just dreaming a different great dream—a great dream in which all dreams are worthless.

This sounds like a happy awesome dream—mankind will return (yay!). But it's also a dream of genocide, that imagines all the robots dead. Notice that no one, anywhere, seems to be able to imagine a happy future with robots and humans living peacefully together as equals, rather than as master and servant. The problem in R.U.R., in some sense, is a failure of imagination, or dreams.

Primus had a dream. One of the first signs of humanity, or of having a soul, is being able to dream. Dreams for Čapek lead to bad places (with all humans dead), but they also are what defines humanity.