Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

How to Build a World - Coggle Diagram

- - - - However, in Jemisin's short story, the people notice the way their world is on the brink of dystopia and they don’t ignore it or walk away – they have the choice to stay and fight.
        
        Jemisin depicts the utopia, Um-Helat, as a possible future. The past "America" is barbaric to a point that shocks the citizens who know of it. This place is suggested as a real potential for our world, described as a place we could get to if we worked hard enough. "To achieve this future "where numberless aspirations can be fulfilled" (1), the story argues, "history" must be "actively, intentionally corrected," and to correct it, we must become like the Um-Helatians, "learned enough to understand what must be done to make the world better, and pragmatic enough to actually enact it." https://muse.jhu.edu/article/803697
- - - - Dehumanization for Benefit & Profit
        
        Capitalism, Money & their Consequences
        
        Definition and Control of the Definition of a Human/Life
        
        Marginalization
    - - "Yet when his classmates put their blades to a colored cadaver, they did more for the cause of colored advancement than the most high-minded abolitionist. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man’s equal." (Whitehead 2016:141-142) By dehumanizing enslaved African Americans, slave owners and other white people are able to do whatever they wish to them. And when the enslaved are freed in death, they are seen as human once more when they cannot fight back or change anything.
- - - - Node maintainers - functional enslavement: The orogenes that are not deemed worthy of further training under a Guardian are forced to maintain nodes, effectively being used to help control the seismic activity of the planet against their will. Not only are they forced to do this task, but their immobilization also enables adult orogenes to abuse them for sexual satisfaction.
        
        Abuse justified for function
    - - Communities/Comms
        
        Marginalization of both the orogenes and the comms that are farther away from the capital, Yumenes.
        
        People in marginalized groups are forced by the institutions that control them into lives where they only know how to function and exist in one setting. Because they only know one kind of way of living and are provided with no better alternatives, they have no reason or chance to leave. This is an act done to create dependency and structure as well as an “effort to monetize the value of care” (Casid 2012: 112). http://www.jstor.org/stable/23362776.
      - When people fear that they are in danger, they are quick to turn on people and groups they see as a threat. This highlights how humanity possesses both a “necessity for the cultivation of empathy,” and a “necessity for knowing its limits” (Whitehead 2017: 160). https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1tqx96m.9?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
- - - - However, the label of 'perfection' is subjective. Single view of happiness -> distorted view of happiness
        
        The idea that the feeling of happiness comes from the same source for all people creates a very single minded way of thinking, and enables assumptions to be made based on the group whose ideals & wants are valued more. In following this way of thinking, someone will always be unsatisfied.
      - Raphael explains that the policies and institutions of the Utopian people are better than those of the Europeans, but the Europeans will continue to think that the most vital concept in Utopia--no private property, communism--is ridiculous.
        
        "Among [Utopians], virtue has its reward, yet everything is shared equally, and all men live in plenty. (More: 1516: 38)
        
        While not everything in Utopia is perfect, the idea of communal resources seems to be the cornerstone of building a perfect society. This is something that harshly contradicts modern ideals.
        
        More himself voices objection to this part of Utopia: "My chief objection was to the basis of their whole system, that is, their communal living and their moneyless economy. This one thing alone utterly subverts all the nobility, magnificence, splendor, and majesty which are the true ornaments and glory of a commonwealth." (More 1516: 110)
    - - The name 'Utopia, from ou-topos, was a pun - the almost identical as the Greek eu-topos, which means 'a good place'.
- - - - Kathy explains that, once they left Hailsham and were given opportunity to be in the real world, they “rarely stepped beyond the confines of the Cottages” (Ishiguro 2005: 118). It was not out of fear but rather because they did not know anything else.
    - - People can pay for survival, causing another group to suffer.
- - - - Climate Change -> State of Environment
        
        Both the resources of the world and certain peoples that live on it are abused for profit.
      - MFTF depicts how economic systems like capitalism are responsible for the climate devastation and depicts how the natural environment was brought to its tipping point
  - - - "Possibly some of the richest two percent of the world’s population have decided to give up on the pretense that “progress” or “development” or “prosperity” can be achieved for all eight billion of the world’s people. For quite a long time, a century or two, this “prosperity for all” goal had been the line taken; that although there was inequality now, if everyone just stuck to the program and did not rock the boat, the rising tide would eventually float even the most high-and-dry among them. But early in the twenty-first century it became clear that the planet was incapable of sustaining everyone alive at Western levels, and at that point the richest pulled away into their fortress mansions, bought the governments or disabled them from action against them, and bolted their doors to wait it out until some poorly theorized better time, which really came down to just the remainder of their lives..." (Robinson 2020: 57)
- - - - Exploration of ideas of how even the most perfect societies can seem flawed. if the thing holding their institution together should fail, there would be great suffering and pain for all.
        
        It is easier for one person/one group to suffer while others benefit.
        
        Every 'utopia' is a dystopia for at least one person.
        
        The literal translation of 'utopia' comes from the Greek ou-topos meaning 'nohere' or 'no place' - implying that a utopia can never exist.
        
        Utopia VS Dystopia
      - "They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery." http://sites.asiasociety.org/asia21summit/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/3.-Le-Guin-Ursula-The-Ones-Who-Walk-Away-From-Omelas.pdf