The Fake Utopia and the Real Dystopia

With unadorned but accurate description, a steady, tranquil, and balanced world was sculpted. The provocative, profound, and sarcastic ethos were conveyed through subtle and self-evident metaphors. The Giver depicted a without-conflict perfect community based on the relinquishment of differences, choices, and freedom. To avert the confusion and the competition between twins, they would rather abandon the weaker one. To dodge the fear of the horror of the death, they attempted to control the appearance and the time of the demise. To preclude the inappropriate personalities and abilities, they accepted the allocation of opportunities and even their families. Alarmed at uncertainty and disagreements, people waived their freedom and memories, creating an ideal world flooded with vacuous rituals, reluctant behaviors, and phony emotions.

Terrified and disgusted at the hideous foundation of a utopia constructed in the Giver, we eulogized the values of democracy and freedom, pursuing a genuine, empathetic, and multicultural world. However, there seemed to be little difference between the two situations of the fiction and the reality.

Our society sets the standards for different ethics, genders, and occupations as we are taught to be obedient when we meet with invalid requests, to express ourselves as what people imagine, and to live a life as the society expects in order to maintain a peaceful world. We are forced to accept and comply with a criterion that shores up the superficial harmony of the community. For the equilibrium of various individuals, we gradually paralyze ourselves in bearing the rules, passing them down to the next generation, and pretending the ignorance of our rudeness as what Jonas’ father and people did in the Community.

Ironically, medical technology even helped fortify the social criterion with more gorgeous approaches via diminishing genetic diseases and producing the babies with particular features. The advanced techniques provide us with fields and abilities to construct a world we prefer, which people glorify and view as the symbols of progress and the higher level of civilization. When all the worthiness defines and the figures decides the meanings of the existence, collision and cooperation of different groups seem to become slogans and hymns people chant in vanity rather than the beliefs and values people bear in mind.

Like the Release in the Giver, we shroud the greedy and deformities of humanities with sophistication and achieve a world satisfying our own desires in the name of the harmony of the society, which is far more horrifying than the community in The Giver. People in the Giver exchanged their freedom and affection for the equilibrium and safety while people in reality impose their frames on others, extort power from others, and lie that we are struggling for a better world. Without the courage to face the difference, dangers, and inequalities, we both decorate our feebleness and foulness with rules and traditions.

A genuinely democratic world contains people with different personalities, cultures, and opinions. The real harmony is supported by respects to difference rather than decided formulas. The utopia people today are hoping to achieve is the society with balance among every ethics, with conflicts, and with coordination instead of groups of people yelling for individual expression and enduring the pressure from the community but bogusly erecting the harmony. The Giver was constructing an imaginary community; nonetheless, it also reflected the distorted inner essence of the real world.