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.
