Thoughts on "Ustopia", "We" and relation between "Self" and "State" (I)

Dystopia is Anti-Utopia
Which in turn means anti- "imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect."

First used in Utopia (1516) by Sir Thomas More. Literally "Nowhere" ("Erewhon"), the title of his book about a an island and it's inhabitants.

To this place doesn't exist.

More recently, Margaret Atwood has coined the phrase "Ustopia" which is her creation where qualities of dystopia are embodied in utopia, or utopia in dystopia. The word she uses is "latent". Personally, I think it would be a Utopia for anyone until you found out what you were missing - so technically, there would be no traces of one in the other.

Or one can imagine it as a completely white room where the walls and floors are the same and people walk around like on the Moebius strip or an unending staircase. There are no shadows. Everything is the same colour. Newtonian physics don't work properly in this space but people don't question it. That might be described as Utopia, in the most reductive sense.

People are walking from A to B. 

Dystopia would be the moment they realised that something is not perfect. One person inside this vast, white room realises that there is a corner. He is walking perpendicular to the floor but also to another wall. Or he realises that there is gap in the page which he has never seen before. This suddenly gives the person perspective and realization that he has been walking around but trapped in this room, walking.

So this person realizes that they are walking from A to B but actually in the same place. They have not moved. Therefore they have been tricked into this.

And so on. It's a fairly simple way to imagine Utopia/Dystopia. For me, Atwood appears to be saying that "Ustopia" is the moment when you realize that you have realized that one cannot be without the other. You are on the threshold of understanding that you live in Dystopia but recognise this because you realise what is missing, which would make this place a Utopia. Or viceversa. Technically, this "threshold" point doesn't exist because as soon as you realize your lacking something, you will be living in a Dystopian world.

It's like the "points of change", "maxima" or "minima" on a curved line in planar geometry.