Utopia and Dystopia
I have missed the first lecture of this term, and because the subject discussed was utopias and Dystopias, I have done some personal research into this subject.
Oxford dictionary defines Utopia as : an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect. The word was first used in the book Utopia (1516) by Sir Thomas More. The opposite of dystopia.
So, basically, Utopia is an imaginary IDEAL world. A lot has been discussed on the subject, and of course, everyone seems to have their own opinion in relation to the possibility of even imagining what an ideal world would be like.
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| Utopia-dystopia by Dylan Glyn - http://dylanglynn.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/utopia-dystopia.html |
My opinion is that it is practically impossible to create a Utopian world for more than 1 person, as people, by definition, are different, they all have their own visions, ideas and ideals, so the moment anyone will try to create a Utopian society or place, is the moment they will instantly fail.
Of course, I might be contradicted by many, as history proves that there have been many who attempted creating utopias through books. The very first example of a Utopia was created by Plato in his work of literature called Republic, where he tried to "envisage an ideal state, and to lay down concrete parameters as to the activities of each and every class within society."
(guardian.co.uk, Toby Green's top 10 utopias and dystopias)
However, every single idea (ideal) suggested in the book by Plato can be taken individually, analysed, through today's society's eyes, mind, but nevertheless can be broken into pieces and proven wrong. The fact that he suggests the society should be tieredin order to create happiness all around, is not something that can be accepted nowadays, even though, the society we live in, IS tiered, everyone HAS its place and fulfils a certain role. however, if we were to do a social study, I am pretty sure, more that half the population would like to do something else rather than what they are doing, and this is all down to human nature. I believe that no matter what anyone will offer an individual, there will always be something missing, there will always be something that he would rather not have or do. I mentioned during the lecture that Utopia is most probably possible only for a very short period of time, probably seconds, or we are being very optimistic, minutes, and this is exactly down to my previous idea: human nature, does not allow one person to stay happy for too long, they will always desire or long for something else.
During our lecture, the idea of Utopia being associated with an orderly society was brought up, only to be immediately rejected, and for good reason, through the example of George Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the society is completely controlled by a Big Brother style system, everything is in complete order, however, the reader will not aspire to live in such a society, on the contrary, everyone would probably avoid it, if given the choice.
Unfortunately (or fortunately - depending how you look at it), I grew up in communist Romania before the 1989 revolution, so all through my primary and junior high school, we were fed all sorts of idealisms. The main one, which I still remember quite vividly, was that if, as a country, we would reach the state of socialism, that will be the ideal world, where everyone would be equal. That is what we were "aiming" for, and to think that this is what were taught in the early stages in school, that was brainwashing worked out to absolute perfection. A Utopia was being presented to children in their most innocent and mentally absorbing times of their lives. That's possible the only you could attempt a Utopian society, I guess: brain wash children, separate them from adults from an early age, not to be fed any other ideas, keep them in an enclosed parameter with no access to the outside world(in order not to have their ideals tempered with), and so on, and create basically a new breed of humans.
And this has now made me think of animals in Zoos... Do they live in a Utopia, for the simple reason that they don't know ay different? Most of them were born there, grew up in the same enclosed space, have not experienced any other klife, so cannot compare their way of living with anything else, so probably, in their mind, they are leaving in an ideal world?!?!?
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| anonymous image |
And this is what brings me back to what Doris Lessing said in her book The golden Notebook that brought her the Nobel prize for literature in 2007.
"What seemed to me important was that it could be read as parody, irony or seriously. It seems to me this fact is another expression of the fragmentation of everything, the painful disintegration of something that is linked with what I feel to be true about language, the thinning of language against the density of our experience."
Indeed, everything can be fragmented and analysed, and given a lot of different meanings, including the idea of a Utopia, or Dystopia for that matter.
I would like to make this following quote from Robert Musil - a nominee for a Nobel Prize for literature for his work: the Man without Qualities. In this book, he says:
"Nowadays we call good whatever gives us the illusion that it will get us somewhere"
And this should be, probably the definition of any Utopia, short or long lived: "if anyone has the illusion that by doing something, they will get somewhere (where they want to get), they are basically living their own individual Utopia." (Robert Musil - The man without qualities)
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