Essay On Dystopia And The Giver

“Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice—the power of change, the essential function of life” (Ursula K. Le Guin). Preservation of individual freedoms and choice is paramount to preserve what makes humanity unique: the ability to choose one's own actions. Utopian societies often attempt the impossible: to create a perfect life for all of its inhabitants. Their attempt comes from the elimination of choice, such as the Alliance’s actions on Miranda in Serenity and in Lois Lowry’s The Giver, where society has adopted a Sameness model. In both of these contemporary examples, the elimination of choice allowed for a utopian society to flourish, yet soon they showed their true colors: dystopia. In these two works, what makes a seemingly utopian society actually dystopian is a loss of individual liberty and human emotions.

The first example of a dystopia hidden within a utopia occurs in Serenity on the planet Miranda. Here, the Alliance, the ruling government, decides to calm the population and create a world without sin, which is for them, a utopia. Miranda was a world deep in sin, its inhabitants constantly fighting with each other. They were too violent, too aggressive, but there was a solution through the use of a drug. And so the inhabitants became peaceful, and it worked perfectly, but this peace came with a cost. They lost their ambition in life: no work, no play, no interaction, no eating. A world without sin; a world without life; welcome to Miranda (Serenity).

Miranda at first was a success to the Alliance who were seeking to create a peaceful society. The Alliance had eli...

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...hemselves unable to be fulfilling human beings in a world where they cannot even see color.

Due to the loss of individual liberty, human emotions are also eliminated. To the rest of his society, emotions are the definitions that they learn about in class, however, Jonas discovers that true emotions cannot be explained but must be felt, such as love or loss. In many cases, Jonas finds himself at odds between his own emotions he is feeling due to the effects of receiving the memories and his own knowledge he has accumulated from his society. He often finds his emotions are found as being wrong, such as when he tries to convince the Giver that love is a dangerous emotion to feel. Yet, Jonas chooses love in saving Gabriel, and by the end, he chooses to embraced all emotions, the good and the bad. In contrast, the other citizens of the community do not allow their emotio