By: Josie Huang
Utopia equals a perfect world. But is a utopia possible? Definitely not. If a utopia was possible, it probably wouldn’t be a utopia for EVERYONE. Maybe we could get a group to be in their own utopia, but definitely not everyone since we are all different.
Take The Giver for example. In The Giver, all the citizens see everything in black and white and abide by strict rules that make them all dress the same, and get assigned partners in life and jobs. This pretty much means that nobody gets choice or the ability to see in color. Just by listening to the above, it may sound like a utopia, since nobody is above anybody else. But this is not a utopia. The community made a mistake. The Giver. The Giver is the one and only person who know about colors, emotions, and everything that we know but their community doesn’t know. This might seem good since there are so many good memories such as love and friendship, but there are also many bad ones, such as war and death. All of these contained inside of one person who is not able to talk about these things with others would drive a person crazy. Since there is still suffering, even if it is a minority, this world is hopeless in becoming an utopia.
Another example would be in a short story called “Harrison Bergeron”. Many of you have probably not heard of this story before, but you should go and try it. This is another story of a failed utopia. Instead of limiting colors and choice, the people limit talents. For instance, being pretty would result in wearing an ugly mask all the time. Being strong would spring you needing wearing heavy weights all day. Sure, this is making everyone equal on the outside, but honestly, isn’t wearing masks or weights just showing others talented you are? This cannot be a utopia because the people with real talents are not happy. In fact, there is a small group of talented people group that is trying to escape the rules. If everyone was happy, nobody would be trying to escape anything
The examples above already are pretty desperate to make a utopia. But this next example is even stranger. This example is from an episode from an old television series called “Half Life”. If you’re interested in sci-fi you should watch it. Basically this community has a machine that can separate the good and evil from a person. When a person gets separated, the good side gets to stay and the evil side gets kicked out. The thing is dividing people in half isn’t really going to work to make a utopia. How would you get rid of all evil? If you’re going to throw them out and isolate them, these humans will still have feelings and are bound to try and get revenge on the good people. Killing the “evil” side is not going to work because any type of human needs to have good and evil mixed. Dividing them just makes two flawed humans instead of one flawed. Therefore, the evil people are actually not very evil and the good side is not completely good. One obvious way you can tell this is because if the good side was completely good, they wouldn’t be throwing people out, and if the evil side was actually evil, they would all be killing each other, but that’s not what they’re doing. In fact, they’re working together to get revenge on the “good” people. The “evil” people are not happy, so this world cannot be a utopia and has become a dystopia just like the other examples instead
The examples above are all proof that it is not possible to have a utopia. Utopias may seem good at the beginning but if you actually lived in one, you probably wouldn’t like it for long since it most likely would become a dystopia.
