Utopia
Utopia. What does this word bring to mind for you? Maybe a perfectly manicured garden full of singing birds. Or maybe a world in which there are no starving people and everyone is loved. For individual people, the idea of utopia can differ.
Utopia is an ideal. Hard to define yet perfect in essence. Typically, the idea utopia is associated with a social or political community. This idea stems from Sir Thomas More’s book Utopia which contained a perfect social society set on an island. His book literally birthed the genre of utopia as it was the first of its kind; and in the year 1516, no less.
A utopian political community offers equal power and status to every member of that society. Does this sound familiar? It should. Karl Marx, “the father of communism”, believed that a utopian society would be achieved through communism. According to Marx, the Proletariat were to rise up against the Bourgeois. This revolution would ensure that everyone in the society is equal. From the experiences of today’s world, we know that this is not always the case in communistic societies. In theory, a utopian political society is plausible; in practice, it often leads to suffering and injustice.
I must, in this instant, dispel the idea that the concept of utopia only applies to a political society. In fact, the idea also applies to ecological, economical, and religious societies. The idea of a “green” world in which everyone recycles, reduces, and reuses is a utopian ideal that strikes at the heart of an ecological society. A utopian ideal in an economical society is everyone not wanting for material goods. The idea of Heaven is a religious utopian concept. Heaven is a place where everyone lives in harmony and happiness, the epitome of utopia. Ecological, economical, and religious societies each have a component of utopia present.
In literature, utopian fiction typically consists of a political society. Utopia has inspired another genre, dystopia. Dystopia is the yin to utopia’s yang. Dystopia shows the dark, seedy underbelly of a utopian society. A controlling, repressive state posing as a utopian society is the mainstay of dystopia. Individuality, creativity, and thinking are all squashed in a dystopian society.
