Essay Failure of Utopia

Submitted By Yanwen-Shen
Words: 881
Pages: 4

The Failure of Utopia
One evident feature of Utopia is that, the Utopia can infinitely provide support for the existence of all tangible and intangible needs and wants, without any required effort to obtain those provisions.
Tsau was a utopia in “Mating”. It was a project for women, in which the power and the rights enjoyed by female far exceeded that of males, without any required effort:
1. The vesting of the homestead as an asset, and the entitlements that went with it, would always be in the female line. meaning that the charter women owned the individual homesteads
2. Female have right to choose jobs firstly, and male are arranged to do worst job. Men are arranged the worst jobs, tannery, which can be stinky and toxic.
3. Clothes and foods are taken after female. Chairs are made according the average height of female.
The second feature is that giving Utopia a chance, humanity can have a better existence.
Female living in Tsau mostly came from the northwest, where they cut off from their families and lead very poor life before. But in Tsau they lived much better than before.
The third feature is that Utopia is a place of freedom. People living in Tsau lead a free life without the government’s restriction.
The forth common feature is about “equality”. People living in Utopia can enjoy the same right and bear the same responsibility. Similarly, inheritance of the homestead would be restricted to female offspring and female collaterals or designees in Tsau. From this, we can see that female in Tsau can enjoy the same right as the male outside in a certain degree.
To be honest, though utopic cannot exist in the real world and fail at last, but I still love it. In certain extent, the utopic like Tsau describes a kind of life that people willing to lead. This kind of living condition will become an ideal goal for people to pursue. So, with time went by, although they still cannot achieve, their life will giant progress.
There is no utopia in the real world, but it still exist permanently in our heart.

Different reasons for the failure of Utopia

1. elitism
(From the journal “Utopia and Its Enemies”, which was written by Kateb, George, and published in 1972.)
In his opinion, “there was no true social equality was possible without universalizing material conditions of intellectual life.” He supported his idea mainly from several aspects as follows:
On an individual level, every people has basic emotion of humanity, such as ambitious, jealously and so on. Their desires of improvement will push them to learn and think much more than common people, which helps them become "elites". Then their individual actions can affect the whole society and attract more people to be “elites”. Gradually, the development of “elitism” is sure to promote the class differentiation, which agonists the feature of Utopia.

2. “institution”
(From the journal “Anarchism and Utopia”, written by Peter Seyferth )
"The Whole Cannot exist Without the Parts and the Parts Cannot Exist without the Whole" Anarchists are against authority, against hierarchy, against domination. They are the enemies of the state. And Utopia is their ideal place where people are extremely liberal without classes and control. However,“This is the Pollyannaish anarchist's dream: just smash the state and everything will be fine. Unfortunately, there is strong evidence against this simplistic revolutionary theory. We notice socalled failed states like Somalia, Congo, and Liberia (to name just a few), which