El Dorado is a mythical city of gold that was dreamt up by the Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s. Tales of the city’s wealth inspired countless expeditions in search of this city of gold, but of course it was never found. This is the reason Tom, Teva, Cashel, Nash and I decided to use it as the title for our Utopia.

In class we read 1984 to get an idea of a dystopia, or an anti-utopia, we then discussed the use of utopias in music, poetry, and literature.  My personal favourite being by Sir Elton John:

Our task for this unit was to create our own society with the rules and policies that we thought a utopia would have, and though I don’t believe my group had the best project I think I know why we earned enough votes to win. As we were writing the charter of rights for our society we realized that it was nearly impossible to satisfy the beliefs and values of everyone in our classroom, let alone an entire nation of people. Our solution was to create a society that was incredibly vague instead of diving deep into what we believe in, and how we plan on solving the problems we are passionate about. A lot of other groups did this and while they did it incredibly well there was always room to argue either side of their issues. In a sense we tried to focus on building a bulletproof pitch (not saying it ended up that way), instead of a bulletproof society. We tried to create statements that no one could argue with, even if that meant giving them little to no information. (I mean look at the type of meaningless filler we added in to distract people)

our national flag ft. our national animal:

The mistake many other groups made was trying to plan out every little detail of their society. When one group proposed their solution to solve gun violence it became the main target when it came to attempting to dismantle their whole society, and because we associate conflict with dystopia I think the class wrote it off as being imperfect and “not a utopia”, despite being a minute detail of their pitch. When it came to our presentation there was little conflict during the question period because of how we didn’t choose a stance on any issue, I think this lack of conflict then falsely translated into most people thinking our society would also be free of conflict. When in reality we only “achieved peace” by not bringing up the issues with society in the first place. Which I think I is an interesting concept in itself, in relation to how governments run their countries.

Other groups created a society that like every other society, was flawed in some way or another, and of course ours would’ve been too if we went into anymore detail. Much like El Dorado, utopias are only to exist in our minds, no matter how much we search for them they cannot exist outside of our own ideas. The reason “El Dorado” recieved the most votes was not because we created a utopia, but because by not mentioning any real aspects of society we managed to not create a dystopia.