When thinking of Utopia, most people picture a world with no evil or suffering, instead everyone would be happy and successful. Most people who describe this ideal world don’t understand what evil and happiness mean. They think happiness means feeling good rather that being fulfilled. The idea that it could be necessary or that we allow inhuman things to happy isn’t any easy pill to swallow. If someone were you ask “Do you think evil must exist?” almost everyone would say no. If fact US citizens would like to believe the government is trying to stop evil by outlawing the sale of certain guns, banning violent video games/movies, and placing ‘evil’ people such as rapists and murders in prison. Due to the fact society does so much to try and …show more content…
eliminate evil it’s hard for people to accept that evil must exist. Without the presence of evil no one would be able to recognize good. Freedom is very important to discuss when it comes to happiness. Psychological freedom is in a way what makes us human. Even while in jail you can have psychological freedom, despite having no political freedom. Do we want freewill? Of course! After all, even our national anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner, said we are the ‘land of the free’. However, evil is necessary to have free will. Free will also means choice, you have the power to do otherwise, no if ands or buts. If the only option is good since evil doesn’t exist, then there is no free will because there is no choice. Choosing evil must be a possibility, if you want to have free will. That doesn’t mean you have to choose evil, in fact I hope most people would choose good, but have the option of evil is what make free will achievable. When it comes to suffering there is an approach supported by people lacking sympathy and empathy. The approach would make natural selection the law of human society. Rather than trying to heal people who are sick, injured, or disabled they would be allowed to pass away creating a stronger human race. This is called the dark side. The dark side divides society into two different categories: winner and losers. The winners would consist of the powerful, healthy, and lucky people. People who are small, sick, and unlucky would be categorized as losers. This division is alarming and to some may be seem barbaric. No one likes the idea of their family or friends with cancer or ADHD being labeled a loser. Unfortunately, creating this separation is natural. Most people think this way without even knowing it. For example, think of everyone that went to your high school. Don’t you automatically assume that the ones who didn’t go to college are losers? Then you have the other people in your high school who moved out of their parent’s house and went to a big university, those are the winners. We aren’t horrible people for thinking this, it’s a fact. Just look at the job opportunities available to college graduates in comparison to the ones available to people with just a high school diploma. Or even the average income for college graduates and people who only have K-12 education. The job opportunity and wage gap creates the difference between the winners and losers unintentionally. While obviously the dark side is an issue because allowing the ‘losers’ to die out in society is inhumane, but illusion is also an issue. The illusion you are a winner when you aren’t. Most people would view white middle aged males and females as winners in comparison to middle aged Black and Hispanics in the US. Economic Nobel prize winners Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton discovered this illusion after analyzing data gathered from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wonder Compressed and Detailed Mortality files, individual death records, the American Community Surveys, the Current Population Surveys, and the Human Mortality Database. Through this research they discovered what is now called an epidemic of despair. They try and destroy the illusion of the seemingly white middle aged group in their article “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century” The article analyzes the “marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013.” This epidemic of despair single handedly reversed decades of progress in mortality and it’s unique to the US; no other rich country is experiencing this issue. Had the white mortality rate held its 1998 value, 96,000 lives would have been saved between 1998 and 2013. If it had continued to fall at the rate of decline seen from 1978-1998, 488,500 deaths would have been avoided between 1999 and 2013. These numbers definitely don’t agree with the illusion of a fortunate age and race. The epidemic of despair is not caused by a virus or disease, the deaths are caused by behavioral reasons, drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, chronic liver diseases, and cirrhosis. Black and Hispanics certainly do not have it easy and are viewed as less privileged, but they don’t have these high mortality rates for their middle aged people. In fact, their mortality rates are falling. What’s causing this life ending behavior? Case and Sir Deaton believe that financial stress may also be a trigger. “Median household incomes of white non-Hispanics began falling in the late 1990s, and the wage stagnation that began with the economic slowdown of the 1970s. Coupled with the changing nature of the financial risk Americans face when saving for retirement as well as the recent financial crisis, economic insecurity may weigh heavily on U.S. workers, and take a toll on their health and health-related behaviors.” Although there isn’t as much data to support it there is a large decline in mental health, more and more people are losing the ability to cope with daily living among middle-aged whites. So while society appears to be winning with advances in health care and quality of life, we are experiencing mortality rates increase that can only be compared to the AIDS epidemic. We do what is natural and separate ourselves from someone else’s suffering. Addictions are hard to treat and pain is hard to control, so a group of people are now being see as a “’lost generation' whose future is less bright than those who preceded them." Appearance and reality play a key role in creating an illusion like the one we see in “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century”.
In the epidemic of despair, the group with high mortality rates appear to be happy, they are more likely to be educated and the median wealth of a white households is 13 times greater than the median wealth of black households. But the reality is they are miserable. The fraction of people showing serious mental illness rose from 3.9 percent to 4.8 percent between 1997-1999 and 2011-2013. More and more middle aged whites report that they are having difficulty socializing, a risk factor for suicide, rose from 6.3 to 8.7 percent. A larger number of white middle-aged Americans reported that they are unable to work or even continue on with simple tasks required for daily living. An illusion can truly be dangerous. Everyone buys into the appearance and thinks being born White makes you a winner, when in reality it means you have a smaller life expectancy. Due to the mislabeling no on is proactively trying to fix this problem. Researchers are trying to get tighter restrictions on prescription painkillers, but social and economic issue are also involved and nothing is being done about
them. Sartre is a libertarian meaning he too believed the definition of free will must include “I could have done otherwise no if ands or buts”. The main anguish Sartre struggled with was the realization we could only fight pain and suffering so much. He is not wrong, but the reason we cannot eradicate it completely is because evil is what allows us to have good and free will. Without the bad pleasure would never change because the good in connection with the bad is what causes pleasure to evolve. I, like Sartre, am troubled by pain and suffering. Just because I know evil is necessary doesn’t make me coldhearted. I don’t wish evil onto others and most importantly I don’t choose it when exercising my free will. We should always be striving for a better society, that can be done my tearing down appearances to reveal reality and by shattering illusions.
In Utopia, hubris is believed to the root of everything wrong in the world. In both book 1 and 2, More tells how hubris ruins everything and causes people to become greedy and uncaring towards others. Hythloday believes that people in Utopia are happier because they do not worry about food and are concerned about the public. While people of other places are full of greed and are too prideful to help another person in need.
“Inside each of us, there is the seed of both good and evil. It's a constant struggle as to which one will win. And one cannot exist without the other” (Eric Burdon). People do not think they are doing good or evil, they just think that they are doing the right thing. Evil comes from within each one of us. You just need to something to bring it out.
Huxley implies that by abrogating dreadfulness and mental torment, the brave new worlders have disposed of the most significant and brilliant encounters that life can offer also. Most remarkably, they have relinquished an abstruse deeper joy which is intimated, not expressed, to be pharmacologically out of reach to the utopians. The magical foundation of this assumption is dark. There are clues, too, that a percentage of the utopians may feel a poorly characterized feeling of disappointment, an irregular sense that their lives are trivial. It is suggested, further, that assuming that we are to discover correct satisfaction and importance in our lives, then we must have the ability to contrast the great parts of existence with the awful parts, to feel both euphoria and despondency. As vindications go, it’s a great one.
Evil is in this world today.No matter how much good happens in the world ,evil always rears its
In recent years racial disparities in health status have received increasing attention. The relationship between race, poverty, and health is complex. Something to consider is that people suffering from mental illness and members of minority racial populations are disproportionately concentrated in high-poverty areas.(Chun-Chung Chow) Disparities in health status in these areas are believed to reflect a lack of access to care because of an absence of insurance coverage, a tendency to attribute certain health concerns to religious and culturally sanctioned belief systems, and a shortage of culturally compatible health care providers. (Chun-Chung Chow) Because of the lesser access to medical treatments Blacks and Hispanics ...
The Utopia Reader defines the word utopia as “a nonexistent society described in detail and normally located in time and space.” (p.1) I would best define utopia as a fictional dream- paradise land where everything is peaceful, perfect and all runs smoothly. There is no crime disease, or pain. People are happy, kind and fair and have each other’s best
Thoits highlights how inequality results in differences of health outcomes among different groups of people. For example, African Americans and Hispanics generally have higher morbidity than whites. However, Thoits also focuses on the relationship between mental health and stress. Adolescents – who tend to be more stressed than older folks – more often suffer the onset of psychiatric disorders, a factor that becomes curbed with increased age (543). Thus, this shows how stress causes adverse mental health. In addition, Thoits also ties social status to stress levels in a way that is similar to the findings detailed in Stress: Portrait of a Killer. Highlighting previous studies, Thoits notes how there are cumulative stressors that particularly affect females, young adults, and members of racial-ethnic minorities (544). These “cumulative stressors closely paralleled inequalities in rate of physical and/or mental health problems by social status” (544). Once again, this shows how people who are disenfranchised or simply fall lower on social hierarchies are also those who experience more stress and, consequently, worse health outcomes. Finally, Thoits also argues that “stress can proliferate across generations” (545). In other words, the negative effects on health due to stress may be intergenerational.
Since the dawn of modern civilization the terms good and evil have been used to describe the world and the various things within it. Things ranging from the concepts of the Devil, to the kid the cut in front you in the lunch line in the third grade, evil can be defined in many ways, however, evil is generally defined as something that goes against a single set of moral principles that society has defined. This is not true because evil is something that an individual perceives that they believe will cause them harm and goes against their individual moral beliefs, not some universal concept accepted by everyone.
Imagine a life where everyone living in a society is happy and prosperous, without a worry in life of something called pain. A society where people could live caring for each other, live on the same level, and enjoy what they already have. A place where people would work together and try to soar to higher peaks and achieve the impossible out of their free will. Unfortunately, there will never be a society similar over even close to similar to the society that seems so full of satisfaction and dreams since man exists. Man exists only to indulge and act for his self benefit and ambitions. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Old Major tries to pass on this utopian ideal to his fellow comrades
In our culture, money, status, and social power all play a part in how individuals think that others perceive them. There is growing evidence that shows the link between socioeconomic status and unhealthy psychological outcomes in mental health. When looking at higher levels of socioeconomic status for youth it shows a more positive and healthy psychological outcome for youth and their mental health. Studies have shown that there are higher rates of attempted suicide, cigarette smoking and engaging in episodic heavy drinking (“Pardon Our Interruption”). Other studies have shown that lower levels of socioeconomic status have been linked to emotional and behavioral difficulties, like anxiety, depression, attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder and conduct disorders (“Pardon Our
A utopia is a society that is characterized by being one in which everything is perfect or ideal. The opposite of a utopia is a dystopia, a society where everyday life is less than perfect. These concepts are widely subjective for varying parties, as some may view the utopian society they live in as a dystopia and choose to leave to find true happiness for themselves. This is demonstrated in the novels, Into the Wild, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, and The Warmth of Other Suns. These three novels each demonstrate the same underlying themes. The main protagonists in each novel must deal with a realization that they are unhappy with the current state of their lives, they had to leave in search of a better life, and they must deal with the changes brought by there actions as it affects the state of the society they left. These various accounts serve to form a concept for the most ideal utopia within the three texts.
Human sacrifice killings is a horrific but devastatingly true reality for some that come too close to the jaws of the Matamoros cult. People usually think of a utopia as an amusement park or just an amazing dream. The dictionary version is often defined as “any visionary system of political or social perfection” (“Utopia”). A dystopia is quite the opposite though. Think of your worst nightmare and that is exactly what a dystopia is. The professional definition is “a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding” (“Dystopia”). As it goes in 1984, the whole book is based on a dystopian society. Citizens have horrible lives which leave them dehumanized by the central government. They are also being under
Each person has their own vision of utopia. Utopia means an ideal state, a paradise, a land of enchantment. It has been a central part of the history of ideas in Western Civilization. Philosophers and writers continue to imagine and conceive plans for an ideal state even today. They use models of ideal government to express their ideas on contemporary issues and political conditions. Man has never of comparing the real and ideal, actuality and dream, and the stark facts of human condition and hypothetical versions of optimum life and government.
First, Utopian Thought argues that “Social perfection is an illusive ideal…perfection will never be attained; it is only possible to work toward it” (Hertzler 307). Rulers over utopias believe their ideas are perfect; however, they are only a passing thought of that time. Eventually, another social perfection will rise to the top, and then another. Not one ideal will endure through time as societies increase their knowledge and reason (Hertzler 308). Hertzler claims utopias alienate themselves from the world to take full advantage of the intellect that the rest of society cannot understand (Hertzler 310) because utopias are based entirely on attainable facts (Hertzler 312). Societies based on facts alone are societies lacking sensation.
Do economic classes affect the percentage of suicide rates? All types of people, rich and poor commit suicide, but suicide and suicide prevention are growing. The lives of about 4600 young people are lost because of suicide every year (Center for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2014). So what is the country offering to help? There are many programs and treatments to help those who have resorted to or contemplated suicide. Specialized programs have been created, but not all are accessible. Money issues make it hard for some to access treatment. Economic classes are important factors in success rates of suicidal teens who receive treatment and those who do not. For young people between the ages of 1024, suicide is the third leading cause of death (CDC, 2014). Suicide is preventable, but we need to be aware of the causes, treatments and solutions.