Zsanelle Morel's The Fine Line Between Utopia And Dystopian Society

All utopias have dystopian attributes. Our societies are too complex to remain entirely perfect. A single society has many characteristics such as language, ethnicity, religion. These differences cause separation among humans and are ultimately the reason why a single idea of utopia could not be decided upon. In the article The Fine Line Between Utopia and Dystopia, author Zsanelle Morel discusses the utopian and dystopian themes among popular literature. Morel eventually reaches the conclusion that, “Although the idea of a utopian society can be briefly imagined, this society could not sustain itself due to the unpredictable nature of life,” with unpredictability being key. Human lives are not always stable and not every minor event can be foreseen when making decisions affecting an entire society. In an article, Jetse de Vries writes about the contrast between utopias and dystopias. Additionally, de Vries describes other authors’ tendencies to categorize fictional societies as either utopian or dystopian whereas many of them in reality are a combination of both: “a lot of utopias are basically dystopias in disguise:

For example, the novel called The Host written by Stephenie Meyer takes place in a seemingly perfect world, not inhabited by humans but instead aliens called “Souls” who have taken over the bodies of almost every human on the planet. These souls are far less brutal than humans and have restored the planet. They are almost like the sheep being kept in good shape for slaughter as the quote states. The wolf in this story is the few remaining humans whose bodies aren 't being controlled by a soul. The survivors reveal the flaw of the utopian society, that “the Souls ' need to inhabit hosts - recently dead, physically perfect humans - to survive. To create hosts and achieve "total peace", the souls commit total genocide”. Thus proving that there is no way for a society to be entirely faultless, only as close as