Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia
I took a philosophy course on Utopian and Dystopian literature last year. The takeaway I had from the course is even more stark than this headline: Utopia and Dystopia are two names for the same concept.<p>In all of the utopias we studied -- from Plato&#x27;s Republic through Thomas More&#x27;s Utopia and including Marx&#x27;s Communist Manifesto -- the question that kept ringing in my ears was &quot;utopia for whom?&quot; Every utopia makes assumptions about people that naturally divide them into identifiable groups. Some of these groups end up happy, others not so much. A utopia which purports to make everyone happy (shouldn&#x27;t they all?) is one that assumes all people are the same or it endeavours to make them so. Either way, we lose our humanity in the process.