Sometimes I wonder at animals, especially the peaceful-grazing-on-the-meadow-ones; is life awful for them? Or are they unaware of their own boredom because they have witnessed nothing else?
Isn’t the human idea of utopia something like this uneventful existence - world peace, and no justice to fight for because we have it already. What would life be if we were all satisfied? Like a herd of cows in a quiet, flowering valley?
Maybe a sustained utopia will end up being dystopia.
Utopia means perfection, which means that there is no need, or even chance, for change. A utopian society would be one where we would all know that we are living in the closest thing to paradise on Earth; it would be a society where we wouldn’t have ambitions or secret desires or dreams. Actually an unchanging, satisfying utopia sounds a lot like dystopia…
Reaching a society of justice and fate sounds hard enough, but imagining sustaining it. The world would be so scared of backsliding into the terrors of war and injustice that it would stand frozen so as to not fall off the narrow platform of utopia. It would a world that is stuck in a perfect condition - a beautiful, flowering meadow if you will. But what is a flowering meadow to one generation may the fires of hell to the next. Imagine the children of a society that has fought its way to the pinnacle of perfection - a peaceful world; imagine how they will feel in a society that has taught them that there is nothing better than what they now see, and nothing to do other than their meaningless (at least to them) jobs that will help maintain a perfection that they do not understand. Imagine these children in their yearning for change, and their failure to encounter it. They will feel like birds caught in cages, fish trapped in blocks of ice. To them, the utopia of their parents’ is a meaningless machine that they must keep running without understanding its significance; to them, their parents’ utopia is their prison, their dystopia.
Would you want to stay in a quiet valley, skipping among the daisies (and dandelions), having everything you need, if that is the only place you can ever be? Would you want to be imprisoned in a perfection that you cannot understand?
Reaching a society of justice and fate sounds hard enough, but imagining sustaining it. The world would be so scared of backsliding into the terrors of war and injustice that it would stand frozen so as to not fall off the narrow platform of utopia. It would a world that is stuck in a perfect condition - a beautiful, flowering meadow if you will. But what is a flowering meadow to one generation may the fires of hell to the next. Imagine the children of a society that has fought its way to the pinnacle of perfection - a peaceful world; imagine how they will feel in a society that has taught them that there is nothing better than what they now see, and nothing to do other than their meaningless (at least to them) jobs that will help maintain a perfection that they do not understand. Imagine these children in their yearning for change, and their failure to encounter it. They will feel like birds caught in cages, fish trapped in blocks of ice. To them, the utopia of their parents’ is a meaningless machine that they must keep running without understanding its significance; to them, their parents’ utopia is their prison, their dystopia.
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| It's only beautiful for a while (Source: deviantart.com) |
Maybe a sustained utopia will end up being dystopia.
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