Humans are a species to always look forward, creating goals and innovating, looking toward a superior tomorrow. For centuries, humans have philosophized upon the journey toward achieving perfection. As a result, we have tried to create a utopia, a society in which everyone coexists peacefully. Many different methods of reaching a utopic era in the world have been proposed, yet people still war, starve, and manipulate one another.
The differences between regions, nations, cultures, communities, and individuals create conflict, and a utopic society is only possible without conflict. Thus, it has been proposed time and time again that a utopia may be achieved through means of minimizing the desire for a human to give in to their flaws with discipline and more rigid discouragement of vices via society itself. However, this implies that people are able to be made uniform, and that there will be no revolution against the idea, even if it is one of perceived goodness, as humans do not like limits.
Utopias require a certain oneness and uniformity of the people who live within it. A certain set of ideals must be asserted through education and emphasized throughout everyday life. This was successful in the Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong-era China, by convincing the energetic youth to propagate his purist ideology and to eradicate any differing thoughts violently. Chinese who lived during his reign even feel nostalgic for the simpler days of his rule, feeling like he fought for them.
Brainwashing can work very well if done through a manner of force. However, people find ethical issues with such methods of creating a utopia, deeming such a strict society of famine and poverty to in fact be a dystopia. Everyone may have thought purely, but they were deprived and abused. This is not the land of perfection nor maximum satisfaction so desired by utopic thinkers.
Perhaps the tradition of forcing an ideology from the top downward shall not work. May a people collectively choose a way of life to follow and a person to enforce it? Infamous dictators have often been elected, like Adolf Hitler, responsible for the genocide of millions of Jewish people. The Germans, in their low, desperate state, elected Hitler who promised to rebuild and to ameliorate Germany’s position in the world. He wanted to create a master race, innovated to his design. Even when people choose an ideology to follow, it may be faulty, for we are inconsistent and lack efficient foresight.
These are examples from the previous century, though. Surely, such societies no longer exist, one would think. However, one may look at any continent and find a corruption of people. Infamously, North Korea has a nation completely cut off from the true current events and state of the world. There, the people have been manipulated to abhor the United States of America, to appreciate their state of poverty, and to unite as the largest portion of its citizens in its army in the world. North Korea exhibits humanity’s experiment with extreme isolationism in a world so connected. So, yes, the facet of a utopia where everyone works in uniform tandem may succeed, but it requires isolationism and conditioning to a degree that is immoral, thus negating the desired positive perfection, perpetual glee, and content idleness among people, embodying a dystopia.
What if we implement such a uniform way of thinking promoting what people of developed nations find to be beneficial and ethical? That is: selfless generosity, minimal egocentrism, fierce determination, untainted habits, riveting intelligence, and constant kindness – this is the ideal human. This is often promoted in capitalists societies with socialist institutions, or democratic socialism. Such societies also tend to promote individualism. A utopia of the Western vision would tell all its people “to be oneself,” “to find oneself,” “to find one’s place in society from which to contribute,” “to make a new discovery,” and “to make one’s own living.”
These are broad terms in which to think. Such vague social goals cultivate the conditions for diversity, thus making the limits, barriers, and control from a utopia more difficult. Much of the factionalism that exists in the United States and Europe is due to their economic success allowing for idleness, breeding cultural explosions and obsessions to fill the leisure time of the people. As a result, corralling such fickle, different, vindictive creatures in an attempt to perfect their system shall only result in tension. One could argue that this is exactly the problem with such infighting and race relations in the United States. With such diverse backgrounds and cultures combined into one country of theoretical liberty, without knowing how to avoid prejudice or discrimination, the nation is nonexistent, lacking any identity. It is thus in danger of implosion, breaking into smaller concentrated sovereign states.
Still, marginalizing the flaws of humans requires definition of what is a flaw, what is bad, and what is disadvantageous. It is proposed that human selfishness is what causes things like class war, national war, poverty, and discrimination, but selfishness is also what fuels capitalism and innovation, on account of humans’ desire to have something better than what they already have.
In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels propose that global trade and the global market are what have birthed the power of the bourgeoisie of the world. Thus, they had thought that so long as class struggles were nonexistent, a more peaceful society was possible. Yet, capitalism is the system to best propose the diversity that people promote and find most humane; Westerners view capitalism as the modern way of life that could best lead to a utopia. However, the penal system has been used to punish what are considered to be crimes and to rehabilitate its inmates. However, inmates have immense trouble with recitivization and finding new work once released:
“Our society has cast as its utopian ideal a world free of crime. For those who commit crimes, we want them punished, and when they've paid their debt to society through the penal system, we expect him or her to have their act together by leaving lockup ready to live as an upstanding, taxpaying, hard-working American citizen.
Yet the irony is that very few companies are willing to hire felons… It's risky to take a chance on a criminal's word that he's clean… Where do you go for work when you've been incarcerated for years, have a felony conviction, and have only worked as a drug dealer? How do you prove yourself? How do you get someone to take a chance on you?” (Lucas)
How can the flaws of human behavior be marginalized when a penal system makes it so difficult to assimilate back into society due to giving in to the flaws we were simply trying to correct. Criminalizing acts creates stigma, even for things that could be harmless. For example, say one attempts to minimize the effects of human lust, so society rids itself of sultry images, pornography, open discussion of sex, and limits the way people may dress. This is what life was like centuries ago, and still remains so in certain cultures, like those of fundamentalist Islam.
Constricting what is innate in human nature and shaming what is normal only illustrates regression. If a society embraces sexuality, then the people are more free, which is closer to a utopia. However, some people become indulged in sexuality to a degree that society disapproves of, and that person is now viewed as deviant. People accuse the liberty of media, fiction, and people for acknowledging sexuality too much, and say society has lost its morals. Yet, what is considered too much? What is the degree that is in need of correction by society? Because people are so diverse, because cultures differ, because people have different ideas, morals are subjective.
What one person thinks is justified, another thinks is punishable by death. For instance, the whistleblowing of Edward Snowden. Some people praise him for notifying the American people that they are being spied on, while others think Snowden should be punished for treason. Are such latter attitudes characteristic of a utopia?
There is a short story called The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula Le Guin. It illustrates a society where everyone is happy, and no one knows negativity. It is a fictitious utopia that is an advanced society where everyone is happy and survives without social or political institutions. However, there is one hamartia to the joyous city: a young child is bound in a basement, malnourished, mistreated, and neglected.
"They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.”
The people accept that there is one glaring, immoral flaw in this wonderful city. Some people, once they learn of it, leave the city. They know they shall never find a city as perfect as Omelas, but they seek something more. They reject a paradise whose perfection depends upon one glaring flaw. There is such a flaw in every society – usually more.
A utopia is fictitious. Humans are too self-interested and diverse to be able to work together to form a more perfect society. There shall always be something inhumane about a society. Poverty and hunger continue, war persists, as that is reality. We may try to minimize the extent of these existences, but the world only has a limited amount of resources, and the diversity of people leads to inevitable conflict for the rest of human history.
Factions shall always exist. Even if the world comes to be blind to ones’ race, nationality, gender, religion, and sexual orientation, we will come to resent each other’s ideologies. Uniformity capable of creating a utopia may only be accomplished through immoral means, which serves as the tortured child in the basement. Just as even the nicest person may have one glaring tick, so will such a society.
