Cheers for the mention. I still haven’t worked out if Divergent is meant to be a dystopia or utopia (somewhere in between I think?). Its an interesting world.
I think it’s dystopic that they see the virtues as rivalrous instead of cooperative (wouldn’t you want someone to have as many virtues as possible, and to ‘graduate’ from various groups?). The post-apocalypse part is hard to measure; less alienation, but also less trade.
I would suggest, though, that a real teen dystopia is one in which everything is perfect and you are not needed- and so the existence of an obvious defect that you can change (and become important by doing so) seems like a component of a teen utopia.
I think you’ve got a good point regarding having as many virtues as possible.
On the idea of perfection being dystopic, this reminds me of an argument I sometimes hear along the lines of “evil is good because without evil, good would just be normal”, which I don’t find very convincing. Still I guess a society and its people should always focus on betterment of themselves, and perfection is probably better thought of as a idealised goal than some place we arrive at.
Cheers for the mention. I still haven’t worked out if Divergent is meant to be a dystopia or utopia (somewhere in between I think?). Its an interesting world.
I think it’s dystopic that they see the virtues as rivalrous instead of cooperative (wouldn’t you want someone to have as many virtues as possible, and to ‘graduate’ from various groups?). The post-apocalypse part is hard to measure; less alienation, but also less trade.
I would suggest, though, that a real teen dystopia is one in which everything is perfect and you are not needed- and so the existence of an obvious defect that you can change (and become important by doing so) seems like a component of a teen utopia.
I think you’ve got a good point regarding having as many virtues as possible.
On the idea of perfection being dystopic, this reminds me of an argument I sometimes hear along the lines of “evil is good because without evil, good would just be normal”, which I don’t find very convincing. Still I guess a society and its people should always focus on betterment of themselves, and perfection is probably better thought of as a idealised goal than some place we arrive at.