How Things should be Utopia?

It should be the goal of every living individual to ensure the prosperity and security of the human race. A coherent and civilized society is one in which we can trust each other, work together rather than compete for survival, and enjoy prolonged peace. We are the incarnate of the descendants that came before us, molded by their evolutionary adaptations to the world that surrounded them. Our existence means we came from the best. Generations down the bloodline had to survive everyday, before life would become routine and monotonous for most of us. Daily life does not necessitate that we fight for our survival so we shouldn't be fighting each other. We should compete to leave our mark, and live for the realization of a utopia. How things should be.

Comprehending a Utopia accompanies the understanding that anything is possible, that the future is not predicated on the past, and that everything we've founded our lives on can mean nothing. One cannot dwell in the confines of what is and expect to understand what could be.

Thomas More defined a utopia as an island community with an ideal mode of government (Hodgkinson). It is from this interpretation that all others have arisen.  The word itself means no place in Greek, alluding to its status as a fantasy. Utopia is a catalyst for social change because it is the realization of every solution. Through idealizing our world we get a clearer sense of what's already wrong, we get in touch with the issues we have, and in writing our perfect world we address them. Utopia should address issues of inequality, issues of freedom, and of security. All the while there has to be an understanding that there will always be issues. We won't agree on everything nor will we always get along, but pretending that we will only magnifies the issues that do emerge. People discredit ideas of Utopia for not being founded on reality, forgetting that anything ever created began as a thought. Anything ever brought into fruition started off as something intangible and therefore, was never based in reality during its inception.

Dreaming of a better life is an innate part of being human, it's how they sold the American Dream. This is what we aspire to. A false sense of identity, one fueled by the thoughts others have of us despite the fact these thoughts may never be accessible to us. We value wealth and admire others for acquiring it because the system we were born into dictated that. We rely on money for survival, spending the majority of our days working for it. Consequently material objects have gained significance based on the environment we live in. The greater the disparity between those at the top and the poor, the greater the importance placed on material objects. We live in a material society, a culture that embraces an idealized image more so than reality. In pursuit of this image we chase riches and wealth, dividing ourselves by the cars we drive and the clothes we wear. When material objects are given cultural significance over others having them inherently makes me better than those who do not. Money is a piece of paper we trade for commodities, services, experiences, and things we want. All with a piece of paper that was assigned value. Usually, this is something people never ponder. We were born into a world that valued money, that taught us to aspire to attaining it. Because of this we rarely question its existence. Money is a cultural universal; we all understand its use and the ramifications of not having it. What we fail to realize however, is that our livelihood should not be limited to a piece of paper or a checkings account.

Society punishes thieves while at the same time denying men a proper means of livelihood. Would-be thieves are marginalized from the outset, their hands forced to commit crimes. All we're taught is that the goal of life and fulfillment is monetary, that it lies in obtaining wealth. Wealth is man made, it can't be the meaning of, or give meaning to life. This isn't how we should be living. The answer to all of this isn't a state where resources and commodities are rationed off equally to every citizen, the answer is abundance. The answer is in every single one of us, it's how we strive everyday to get closer and closer to this realization.

WORKS CITED:

1. Hodgkinson, Tom. Culture - How Utopia Shaped the World. BBC News, BBC, 6 Oct. 2016, www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160920-how-utopia-shaped-the-world.
2. Levitas, Ruth. SOCIOLOGY AND UTOPIA. Sociology, vol. 13, no. 1, 1979, pp. 19??“33. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42852063.

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