Why Utopias Are Evil

POSTAL ADDRESS (if you're kind enough to send me a letter or something!)

Tim Hickson
PO Box 69062
Lincoln, 7608
Canterbury, New Zealand

Script by meeeeeeeee
Video edited by Lalit Kumar

Artist who did the pieces for this video:

The artist who design my cover photo:

Stay nerdy!
Tim

[manuelka]

"Utopia is in the horizon. I take 2 steps, she moves away 2 steps, and the horizon moves 10 steps further. Then what's an utopia good for? For this very reason, it makes us walk." Eduardo Galeano

[Dominic-Noble]

One of the things I found profound about Omelas was its positive aspects had to be multiple choice because no two people can ever agree on perfection.

[ellicurus]

The magic school arc in Magi does a good job of explaining this concept. The whole city is run by magic and everyone has anything they could need or want and no one has to go any hard labor and everything is fixed and provided for automatically. But the magic comes from the energy siphoned from the non-magical people, the commoners, who are kept in camps underground. The common people are also physically provided for and are plied with hedonistic pleasures to keep them “happy”; but they’re still prisoners who never get to see sunlight and have shortened lifespans.

[sabrinamcclain]

I usually think the ones who walk away from Omelas is about how we can't imagine a perfect utopia without suffering, but in the mood I'm in now, I'm leaning towards the suffering child being a metaphor for how prosperous, wealthy societies export suffering to other countries and disadvantaged groups within their own country.

[jesschristiansen]

The thing to realize about Omelas is that it's not just 'one' child. It's one after another after another, because children can't survive very long like that. So who is selecting all these children to be dropped down the hole to expire of hypothermia, diarrhea or pneumonia, and why has nobody dropped THEM down a hole?

[noahbaden]

The Le Guin story to me is much more about confronting the fact that, No. This society doesn't *have* to be contingent on the suffering of a child. It's completely separate to the systems put in place that can make people's lives better. But "it has to be this way, otherwise we stop being as prosperous" is the same excuse people give in the real world, and in the real world, the suffering is just as unnecessary, but its obfuscated, so the story is a refutation of the fact that society has to be any way specifically, in order to work.

[guilhermesavoya]

In The Matrix, human minds are so fundamentaly broken by the very idea of a perfect world, so much so that most humans in the First Matrix (which was designed to be a utopia) basically drove their own minds to death by simply existing in it.

[iisotter]

At the time these books were written there was a fascination with understanding how the 'Nazi society' came to be. Milgram, Zimbardo and so on. In a philosophy degree you usually cover Utopia's, and it's inevitable coercion, conformity and so on. The stories mentioned could be viewed as what would you have done if born into a society akin to the 'Nazi' one? Many joined in, many walked away, and some fought. What would you have done? Most believe they would fight...but most would not. H.G. Wells Time Machine is often used as an example of many philosophical ideas it's an amazing book.

[isaiahdenver]

I love the fact that utopia literally means “no place.”

[Da__goat]

I feel like the book, The Giver, sums it up nicely. You need the agreement and cooperation of everyone. The second a few people disagree with the social norms the entire system collapses

[IAmTheAce]

The Le Guin story feels more like an exercise in our _lack_ of imagination as to what it takes to make a utopia, or what our possible responses can be.

Must a child be subject to unending suffering to uphold utopia? Without an attempt to experiment with that circumstance or trying anything else, it's left as either an unquestioned postulate upon which all other logic follows, or an author fiat.

So, is the contract real?
Take the child out of the hole and find out.
Does the child really have to suffer?
Make them comfortable and find out.
Does the child really have to be alone?
Join them in that hole and find out.

[PraetorPaktu]

"Isn't every utopia somebody else's dystopia?" - Frosptunk 2

[davidfwooldridge]

You can look at StarTrek for that cynicism that a better world can’t be made without dirty secrets. Roddenberry posited that humanity could just decide to build a better world where no one suffered and was fundamentally moral and then StarTrek writers spent decades putting in things like Section 31 because they couldn’t accept that Utopia could exist without a dirty tricks department. Some of it works, the conspiracy at the heart of StarTrek 6 was that you had people in StarFleet and the Klingon empire who were willing to work together to ensure a final calamitous war rather than face a unknown future where the Federation and Klingons found peace (hence the title “The Undiscovered Country”). That movie worked because it was also a Cold War parable, the franchise is plagued with writers who have a lot of trouble accepting the premise.

[freelancerthe]

"Things were Great. And then the Aldari got very VERY bored...." (some stuff happens) "And thats where Chaos gods come from".

[cavemaneca]

I think the tropes of "Utopia but with a dark secret" exist for the same reason as "Immortality has a price/is undesirable" type tropes. It makes for an interesting and easy narrative that _feels_ like it has something more important to say.

We have so far been unable to achieve either, so it's a coping mechanism to say that there would be such and such downside to it anyway. To tell people, you don't want immortality because it has some price, or you'll eventually want to die and can't. You don't really want a utopia because secretly someone will always suffer.

[Radhaun]

"Unless *all* of us are free, none of us are"

Suffering will always exist. Our goal should be to minimize it with compassion and empathy. For everyone.

[jjkthebest]

I can't imagine a perfect society, but I can imagine one that is better than the one we're in right now. And once we've reached that better society, I know I'll be able to imagine a society that's even better. If we keep going, there will be a society that looks like a utopia to us. Perhaps not perfect, but much closer than we are now. And if they still keep going, then perhaps, one day, there will be a society that looks like a utopia to them. I don't know if it's possible to reach a truly perfect society, but I do know that we can keep getting closer.

[Sting-mehz]

I think a fairly clear reason why we expect some hidden evil in utopia stories is because otherwise the story has nothing to say.
Unless there’s some external force changing the status quo, there’s no conflict to discuss or form a story around in a utopia.

[XJaEchtMan]

We read “the ones who walk away from omelas” in English class last year (non native) and the more we talked about it, the more I was able to appreciated the story.

[DerpsWithWolves]

I knew The Ones Who Walk Away was going to come up within the first few lines of dialogue. I read that story two different times, at two different schools, and it stuck with me both times.
When I was younger, it made me feel weird, and creeped out, but I was too young to really articulate why.

But when I was older? I saw a society of hypocrites. An entire city where every person is individually made aware that children are ritualistically sacrificed, but not permitted to die quickly, and each one of the residents that chooses to stay in that city endorses this behavior through their apathy.

My knee-jerk reaction on the second reading, older in years, was a desire to bash the captor over the head with the nearest piece of furniture, take the child, and flee. That evolved into feigning acceptance for a better plan later, and waffled between dismantling the city's leadership or burning the whole place to the ground because what good could really come of a city filled with people that take no issue with such atrocities? "But I did not speak up, because I wasn't the child in the hole" is a pathetic excuse.

Of course, the story is metaphorical, and so were my emotional responses to it. By the time of my second reading in College, I'd joined the military, and gained a more adult perspective on my family roots during the Second World War, which have quite intimate scars about just this sort of thing. Some survived years in Nazi prison camps, while others fought for the resistance, so I shouldn't be surprised my initial reaction to learning a government was starving and torturing people in captivity for no reason other than 'it's what needs to be done' stirred up a guerilla sentiment.