Utopia vs. Dystopia

Societies

Utopia vs. Dystopia

Graphic Organizer

Use the organizer to take note as you read through the lesson (you can recreate it hand on a piece of paper or on a doc). Use these notes help you on the last question!

Utopia

A UTOPIA is a community or society that has highly desirable or near perfect qualities. It is an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect. For thousands of years human beings have dreamed of perfect worlds, worlds free of conflict, hunger and unhappiness. But can these worlds ever exist in reality?

TYPES OF UTOPIAS:

• Moral - Explore questionable morals or behavior.

• Political/Economic/Social

• Ecological - In an ecological utopia, humans live in perfect harmony with nature.

• Religious

  A religious utopia is one based on the precepts of a particular religion. 

• Science/Technological

  In a technological utopia, scientists and engineers have worked out technological development. In these stories, human problems are treated as technical glitches, to be resolved solely through technology.

EXAMPLES OF UTOPIAS

• Cloud Cuckoo land where there are no limits!

• Meet the Robinson's futuristic setting

• Garden of Eden - Genesis - The Bible

• The central worlds of ‘The Federation’ in Star Trek

• Hunger Games Capital- where the rich don`t need to worry

DYSTOPIA 

A community or society that is in some important way undesirable or frightening.  It’s a society in which everything has gone horribly wrong and injustice or chaos holds sway.

 

Dystopian stories are almost always about problems that we already have in this world. In literature, seemingly utopian societies often turn out to be dystopian.

Multiple Choice

Dystopias

• People are usually happy

• People are usually sad

TYPES OF DYSTOPIAS:

• Post-Apocalyptic dystopias are the aftermath of some horrible crisis. The disaster is always an expression of society’s greatest fears – during the Cold War, post-apocalyptic dystopias were depicted as the aftermath of nuclear war. In the 21st century, we are less afraid of nuclear war but more afraid of disease and climate change, so we imagine dystopian futures stemming from ecological collapse or the outbreak of some horrible virus.

• Statist dystopias are the opposite of post-apocalyptic ones. In these dystopias, the government has grown to the point where it controls everything and suppresses all individual freedoms, especially freedom of thought and expression.

EXAMPLES OF DYSTOPIAS

• Divergent Series

• Tron Legacy

• The Giver

• 28 Days Later, The Walking Dead and other zombie apocalypse storylines

• Each of the BioShock games explores its own sort of dystopia

Open Ended

Think of an example of a dystopia I did not already mention?

UTOPIAS THAT BECOME DYSTOPIAS

• Can a seemingly perfect world actually be a dystopia in disguise?

Example

• Pixar’s WALL-E has another ambiguous utopia on-board the Axiom. The people have all their needs met by robots, and live entirely in comfort and ease.

• However, this life is also dystopian in a sense – because they have all their material comforts, the people on the ship are fat, lazy, and immature.

Open Ended

Do you think the robots are living in a Utopia or a Dystopia? Why?