Why Is Dystopia Wrong

It's wrong to deprive someone else of a pleasure so that you can enjoy one yourself, but to deprive yourself of a pleasure so that you can add to someone else's enjoyment is an act of humanity by which you always gain more than you lose.

Thomas More

On utopia and dystopia

Utopia as we could read in the Oxford Dictionary is: “An imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect”; but would that be even possible? Is it possible for humans to overcome our own selfishness and want nothing more than our part?

Let’s imagine a society where neither private property nor money exists, but slavery is common, where euthanasia is practiced, providing the individual a lethal narcotic, a society that organizes the day of its inhabitants

and where, if someone wants to travel, must ask permission from the authorities. What kind of society is this? Is an ideal world or a nightmare?

The society above depicted, seeming to us ideal or not, is taken from the work Utopia(1516) by the Christian humanist Thomas More, who first used the term, which comes from Greek and means "no place", "place that does not exist", or " good place".
Since then, utopia has been used to describe a perfect but unattainable social order, an intangible paradise opposed to the existing world.

Although More was the first to give a name to a type of literature that mixes sociology, philosophy and fantasy, it is difficult to locate in time the first utopia, since man has spent centuries imagining ideal societies. One of the most influential is the one created by Plato in his dialogue The Republic (IV century BC.), who argued that, in a perfect society, politics should be subject to morality.

On the other hand, John Stuart Mill , an English parliamentarian, employed the term dystopia for the first time in 1868 to refer to a negative utopia.

Dystopia describes a clearly undesirable imaginary world, which tends to sacrifice the freedom of its citizens to benefit other purposes, usually little altruistic.

The utopian literary tradition was practically replaced in the twentieth century by this skeptical trend, that we call dystopian. This change occurs mainly because the idea of "future" as a representation of a possible social improvement enters in crisis indefinitely . Friedrich Nietzsche, who depicted in his works his distrust of science as an absolute solution to all the problems of humanity, anticipated many dystopian arguments, criticizing the excessive mechanization of life as a result of scientific imperialism; humanity worships as if it were new religion.

Utopia or dystopia, both models come from the commitment and discontent of the author, who feels uncomfortable with the society he lives in. That is why they use prospective fiction to expose their commitment, criticism, and hope for change, sometimes taking their premises to the extreme, building a framework in which they locate their stories.

Swift: Gulliver and his

Utopia

In his prose satire Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, commonly known as Gulliver's Travels (1726) Jonathan Swift explores different kinds of societies. If we analyze the different chapters of the book we would see how the author depicted various imaginary models of societies. Some of them have traits of utopian narrative but none of them is flawless; only one could be considered an utopia: the Houyhnhnm’s land, depicted in the fourth book.

One of the major characteristics of utopias is the tendency to privilege the collective group over the individual. The children of Plato’s Republic (IV century BC.) are raised communally, with no knowledge of their biological parents; this system, in the author opinions , enhances social fairness.
The Lilliputians similarly raise their children collectively but we cannot call the results exactly utopian, since Lilliputian are divided between conspiracies, jealousies, and backstabbing. However, they tend to make ‘official’ edicts concerning the lives of the citizens and have well-established systems of granting rights to their virtuous citizens: “Whoever there can bring sufficient proof that he hath strictly observed the laws of his country for seventy-three moons, hath a claim to certain privileges.”