Utopia

When I started reading Book II of Utopia, I instantly thought it was better than the first section that we read because it was much easier to read and understand. Book I is very dull and boring, and I just found it difficult to get through because it is so wordy. I felt like Thomas More was just rambling a lot of the time, which makes it difficult to find the point he was making. I found Book II easier to read because More was describing this so called “perfect” world, and it wasn’t as hard to understand. At first, Utopia sounded interesting to me—not in the “I would like to live there” way, but more because it was a different take on what an ideal society would look like. But as I read on I realized that it’s not as perfect as Thomas More makes it out to be.

My cons list ended up being much, much longer than my pros list. The first aspect that hit me that I didn’t like was the fact that in this “perfect” society, there were still slaves. I know that during the 16^th century, slaves were a common thing, and were different from how we think of them. That doesn’t stop me from thinking that a utopia should not have slaves, because then this would not be a perfect world for everyone; only some. I also didn’t like the same routine every single day, no privacy, and the fact that everybody wore generally the same clothes. There is no individuality in this, and to me it seems like this world would get very boring, very fast.

Thomas More’s version of Utopia feels like the world itself is trying too hard to be perfect, if that makes any sense. Like someone just thought “Hey, if we make everybody look the same and have the same job, then there won’t be any problems in the world.” This reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 because in that world, the government made books illegal and burned them all to prevent the people from having individuality or having any opinions and beliefs of their own. To the people in the book, other than Guy Montag and Clarisse, this was a perfect world because there were no problems, and nobody argued or had a different opinion, but it was really a dystopia. I feel like More’s Utopia is going to eventually become a dystopia, because it is not, in fact, perfect.