Vocabulary: Protopia

[ysabetwordsmith]

I came across a new term for a society: protopia. This means a society that steadily improves. I find it a useful addition to the set.


The common terms are:

dystopia -- a bad place

utopia -- a place that's too good to be true


I found this insufficient, so I added a couple:

pseudotopia -- a place that purports to be good but is actually awful

eutopia -- a good place that is just flawed enough to be plausible; a place where it is easy to live a happy life


In analyzing the quality of a place, fictional or historical or extant, you need to examine its structure and gather facts. There are things which can be measured with statistics. What is the average lifespan? What percentage of population has access to enough nutritious food, decent housing, the health care they need, and whatever education that society expects? How high or low is the rate of mental illness or injury vs. mental health? How much trust do people place in major institutions like government, religion, health care, or education? And then how high is the system reliability for each of those?

Some places are factually bad to live in because they fail to meet people's survival needs. Others are good to live in because they not only meet survival needs, they also include many things that support happiness. Some fictional societies do an exceptional job of explaining how they work and why their characters are mostly happy. Aside from my Terramagne (see Polychrome Heroics and how to make your home town more like Bluehill) I also recommend Storyteller (which maintains a positive culture through storytelling) and Dinotopia (which integrates humans and dinosaurs, thus has accommodation for many different body types). Of those, many cultures in Terramagne are protopic while the other two are more stable and probably eutopic.

Regardless of how you choose to classify a given place, you must be able to back your description with facts.

For example, I can point to facts that show why America is a dystopia. It fails to provide adequate care for its members, even though it holds 30% of the world's wealth. I can also point to ways in which climate change is making the whole world worse for everyone. So if you are standing anywhere on this planet, you have a credible argument for dystopia. That's not pessimism; that's science.

Conversely, look at Bhutan, widely considered the happiest country. That's not an accident; they measure Gross National Happiness and use that as a tool to make improvements aimed at raising happiness further. Bhutan can point to facts that demonstrate how and why it is the happiest country. Because it uses GNH as a tool for policies, and it has a goal of increasing happiness, I would describe it as a protopia. That's not optimism; that's statistics.


People can feel however they want about a culture. All feelings are valid. But sometimes feelings lie to you. Neither claim nor dismiss a culture's topic status unless you can back it up. Get the facts -- especially if you plan to make any decisions based on your classification, such as where to live or even go on vacation. Finally, make sure you have a good range of descriptors that fit the diversity of cultures you may encounter and need to analyze.

Comments

[warriorsavant]

Interesting. Thank you.