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Once I gave my Gothic fiction students an exercise: I divided them into two teams, with the first team asked to argue why it would be nice to live in a utopia, and the second team asked to do the same for a dystopia. The latter team, upon hearing they needed to argue how great it would be to live in a dystopia, began to murmur – in the style of “oh man, how are we gonna argue for that?”

During the exercise, feelings changed – which had been my plan all along. The team that had to argue for the dystopia began to realize how horrible a utopia would actually be: no change, no possibility to make things better, no real progress. The other team, instead, had real trouble coming up with arguments.

Careful what you wish, you just might get it – and it’s not dystopia

What can we learn from that?

That humans aren‘t supposed to be perfect. We couldn’t be humans if we were. You would have to remove everything worth living for, including independent thinking, determination, struggle, effort. On a personal level, I can think of nothing more horrifying than being perfect – whichever way you understand it. If you’re perfect, there are only two possibilities:

1) stagnation
2) deterioration

In other words, either you will remain unchanged and frozen, or you will change in the only direction available: downwards. Perhaps that’s one reason why fictional utopias so easily disintegrate and become dystopias.

Utopia: The Horror of Being Perfect

It’s not unlike heaven and hell. As the character of Edmund in Blackadder told the dying Lord Craveney, “heaven is for people who like the sort of things that go on in Heaven, like singing, talking to God, watering pot plants. Whereas hell, on the other hand, is for people who like the other sorts of things: adultery, pillage, torture”

Click to display the embedded YouTube video

If you think living in a place infested with zombies or robots is bad, wait ’till you have to live in a garden doing nothing all day but listening to hymns!