Utopia: Then and Now

           In this class, we learned about utopias, intentional communities that were seen as utopias, and finally dystopia. When we learned about utopia, we debated if utopias are possible and if they can prosper in any manner.

            Now, three weeks later, my opinion on utopia has not changed. Utopia is a figment of the imagination, which people create to show what THEY believe is the perfect society. Utopia differs for everyone and no two people will have the same idea for their utopia. The main concept that tends to be shared though is the idea of total equality. In Thomas More’s “Utopia” and Plato’s early writing on utopia, they wrote of total equality in which all people have the same rights, the same economic benefits, and live the same lives. No matter the society, while utopias differ, they have the tendency to be characterized by total equality.

            Most utopian societies are created because there is something the writer believes needs changed in society which is contrasted with the idea of something not being able to be fixed in a dystopia. In this class I learned that while dystopia and utopia are contrasting ideas of perfection, they both have the characteristic of total equality. The big difference is that one has total equality where people gain things, while in dystopia, when someone has more than another person, they get there advantage taken away as seen in “Harrison Bergeron”.

            In conclusion, my idea of utopia has not changed over the course of this intensive; I still believe that utopia is an imaginary idea that would not be possible in the real world. Also, in this class I have learned that although utopia has no singular definition and dystopia contrasts this idea, there is a similar quality of total equality present in both types of societies.