A utopia is an imagined place or state of being in which everything is perfect. Opposite to that is a dystopia which is an imagined place or state of being in which everything is unplesant. The first time that a utopia was invented was in 1516 in the book Utopia by Sir Thomas Moore. Two present day examples would be an Omish Community, because of the set rules that everyone must follow to make the society perfect, and Heaven, which is the definition of perfection.
Depending on what your opinion is, in my opinion most dystopias began as utopias, but something goes wrong or someone beats the government at its on game and it instantly becomes the other. For example, you have Panem in The Hunger Games, a typical utopian society until Katniss comes in and defies all they created. In the book Divergent there are five different factions of life, you are born into them but when you reach a certain age you can change factions but you have to leave everything you have ever known behind, and that is when the society turns dystopian.
Finally, the Society in Matched the citizens live in separate burroughs and are very limited on what they are allowed to know. In the story the main character, Cassia Reyes, literally lives in a world of perfection. Atleast, that is what the citizens are lead to believe. Each person will live a long life, have a perfect job suited exactly to them, and the best mate, all of this is orchastrated by the Society. The day of the matching ceremony falls on Cassia’s seventeenth birthday. She is surprised to find that her match is her childhood best friend, Xander.
But then something happens which makes her realize that maybe her society is not all that perfect after all. She sees another face on her screen, only to be the face of another friend, Ky Markham. This moment is a catalyst for her journey of discovering exactly what choice is. “Its one thing to make a choice and its another thing to never have the chance. ” In the world before the society everyone basically had everything. They had technology, too much of it, and the end result was disastrous.
So, when the Society was created citizens got the basic techonology that is NEEDED – such as ports, scribes, and readers- the intake of information is now more specific. Citizens are assigned a job, like nutrition specialist, or air tram programmers, and aside from your job, you do not know anything else. Nutrition specialist do not need to know how to sort things. The same way that air tram programmers do not need to know how to research diseases. This specialization keeps the feeling of being overwhelmed away. Understanding everything is not necessary. “The society reminds us, there’s a difference between knowledge and technology.
Knowledge doesn’t fail us. ” The hundred best of everything was chose by the Society when the “culture became too cluttered. ” Hundred Painting, Hundred Songs, Hundred Stories, and Hundred Poems. Everything else was eliminated. In the Society you are forced to wear the same “plain clothes” as everyone else in your Burrough, eat food that is “for health and performance not taste”, get matched and be told who you have to love, and get a limited amount of things to read. It makes you wonder, “Is it okay to wonder? ” Afterall, “How can we appreciate anything fully when overwhelmed with too much? “
To compare the Society to a real world utopia I chose an Omish Community. In an Amish Community every aspect of life is dictated by a set of rules. One of the main things that people will notice about the Amish their very conservative and plain wardrobe. This is like the Society because each person wears plain clothes and looks like everybody else. Another similarity is the hatred of technology. The Amish thing that it weakens the family and the Society believes that technology is what failed the world. No matter what type of community or world you live in we are all people, we just live different lives.
