Imagining a world without lying is almost impossible. We’d have to believe that every word every person says lacks the cryptic underlying self interest that we hear on a daily basis. As far off as this world may seem, the movie “The Invention of Lying” is based on such an idea and builds a world around it. Staring Ricky Gervais, the movie progresses through showing the utopia that is created from the lack of lying. This Utopian world lacks lying for self gain. Any self gain is blatantly obvious to everyone as the person doesn’t hesitate to cover it up. The world is as it really is to the naked eye. I found this ideal world very interesting. For one, the world that exists without lying is more rationally and logically motivated. Instead of being fed misinformation on purpose, we can rise above it with total honesty. However I found that in the vibrancy of absolute truth the true reality is people seemed less human than anything. Instead of white lies used to bolster an individuals mental and emotional state, the lack of lying in its most simple form removed what is a vital part of human nature. A consequence in the film of this void is that people lacked empathy. Ricky Gervais, who also wrote the script, managed to produce a world that points out how much we rely on lying to show emotions. The absence of lying went through from the most basic functions to the most complex. An example would be the situation involving religion and his mother passing. Gervais removed every concept in the movie that did not have factual evidence, and consequently religion became a victim of that. As he stood by his dying mothers side, he began to show emotion due to loosing his mother. The doctors had no hesitation in telling him how excruciatingly painful her death was. This is one of many examples in the film describing key situations lacking the ability to lie and how it removes the humanity from people. As I watched the movie, I couldn’t help but imagine myself living in a world like that. Many of the problems that i’ve faced have stemmed from being lied to in some way. But just the same, this lack of lying induced problems seems almost inhuman. Even in a Utopian society lying seems to be a vital organ to the body of human nature. Much like “The ones who walk away from Omelas” I found myself wishing I never lived in a place such as this. Lying is ironically an important part of being human, and a utopia is only good if we can be who we really are.

After reading Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, I turned to literary journals to explore the various concepts readers have brought forth regarding the individuals who chose to leave, the child in the room, and the components that make up Le Guin’s utopia. I found several articles which focus on gender in utopian societies. In “Beyond Omelas: Utopia and Gender”, Lee Cullen Khanna discusses how Le Guin’s short story has scenes that “evoke rather than challenge patriarchal norms”. She has several examples that she feels illustrate her argument. Le Guin writes of “grave master workmen” and “quiet merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked”. I do agree that these two examples do emanate patriarchal values of women primarily child rearing and men being masters of craft within the society. However, I do not think that it necessarily proves this is a patriarchal society. Khanna argues that Le Guin overlooks these details and that “none of the actual descriptions in ‘Omelas’ of scene or of citizenry, depict or suggest racial, cultural or linguistic diversity.” Other scholars argue that this is simply a fault due to the real world Le Guin lives in. Rebecca Adams writes in “Narrative Voice and Unimaginability of the Utopian “Feminine” in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” that Le Guin demonstrates her preoccupation with cultural foundation. In other words, Adams seems to be arguing that those scholars “social dreaming” of a utopia are limited to the institutional and societal norms existing in our current world. This prompted my memory about a conversation that my roommate and I had recently. She explained that some sleep scientists have claimed that every person that exists in our dreams, we have actually seen at some point in our real, awake, life. She said that it is beyond our cognitive ability to “create” faces and people who do not exist. I just don’t buy it. Beyond the fact that there is no way to actually prove this theory, I felt that just as people invent new technology and create art and images that do not already exist, we must be able to also “create” people within our own minds. You may be wondering what this has to do with Omelas or utopias at all. During our conversation, we both agreed that while we create new “things”, every thing we create is dependent or somehow based on something that already exists in this world. Even the most abstract thoughts, ideas, art, and inventions are in someway inspired by an already existing object or thought. The same must be true for creating utopias. We can imagine places, laws, and leaders that will exist within our own utopian societies, but they will always have some basis in the existing world. In fact, as we have discussed in class, it seems that is the reason we dream of utopias: we are attempting to solve existing problems in our society. So while some scholars criticize Le Guin for notions of patriarchy in Omelas, it seems to me that some of these details are simply a result of the world in which she exists. The simple detail of describing “grave master workMEN” probably did not even occur to her as emanating a patriarchy because certain aspects, especially language within our society, is so normalized. I am looking forward to reading more authors over the semester that perhaps dig deeper into creating a non-patriarchal society.

I recently watched an episode of Star Trek in which crew of the Enterprise encounters a Utopian planet. I use the world Utopian hesitantly because, like many Utopian storylines, this planet’s society tiptoed the line between Utopia and Dystopia. The world is lush and colorful. All the inhabitants of this word are open, kind, and inviting. Their society is sensual and peaceful. They lack inhibitions towards making love with one another and the children are raised communally. The crew is astonished by how perfect the world seems. They fail to comprehend how everyone obeyed all of the laws so diligently without any kind of police force. They discover that the reason for this obedience is that the consequence of breaking any law is death. It is through this radical and absolute form of dealing justice that peace had come to exist on the planet.

This catch, or little string attached, immediately reminded me of  “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” In both stories Utopia exists at a price. They reinforce the idea that you cannot have Utopia without sacrificing something. The isolated child in Omelas is sacrificed for the rest of society. In the case to the Utopian planet the citizens’ freedom to exist outside of established laws is sacrificed. The recipients of these Utopias realized their happiness came with preconditions. If humans where given a Utopia for free one might wonder if they would even accept it. This was the case in the Matrix trilogy. When humanity is placed in a computer simulated perfect world and reject it as being false. It is only after the simulation had been restructured to incorporate flaws that humans could exist instead it. All of the examples mentioned support the established notion that Utopia cannot exist in reality and if it did exist people would be very slow to accept it.

The idea of utopia is both a cornerstone for political thought in general and is, in particular, a motivation for thinking about how to make the world a better place.  That does not mean that my (or your) utopian vision will be seen as desirable by others — this is part of what makes the idea of utopia frustrating and fascinating.  This semester we will be reading utopias from other times (More’s Utopia, Butler’s Erewhon, Bellamy’s Looking Backward) and more contemporary utopian visions (LeGuin’s The Dispossessed) and novels that seem to be both utopian and dystopian (Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake and Octavia Butler’s, Parable of the Sower).  In addition to these fictional utopian and dystopian accounts we willalso readtheoires about utopia and examine life in intentional communities — what some might consider lived utopias.  This blog will be a place for students to share ideas, insights, frustrations and wrestlings with the works that we read and the world in which we live.