Opinion about the community

Would you like to live in this kind of community? Why or why not? Does the absence of bad feelings compensate for the sacrifice of choice and the sacrifice of positive feelings?

The community in which Jonas lives superficially seems perfect. No war, fear and pain can be found in this community. Everything is well-organized and well-selected for people in the community. In fact, this community is far from perfect because people have no freedom and they can't make a decision for themselves.

I couldn't imagine myself live in this kind of community, where people have no freedom and no control over their lives. Everything is selected and chosen by the government (The committee of Elders) in every aspect from the trivial things to the crucial things such as name, the way they dress and even their assignments. As you can see, the Committee of Elders will name the newborns not their parents and the Twelves can not choose the assignment, which they have to work for the rest of their lives. I can't live in such an authoritarian and dictatorial society like this.

Freedom is one of the most imporatant things that I value. Without freedom, life has no meaning. We just follow what the government tell us to do, we live for them not for us. Once we have no control over our lives, we lose the sense of being a human. We are a robot that follow the order of people who program us. As a result of controling from the government, we'll lose our own identity and won't be different from an object, which is categorized into each group. As you can see, people in the community are classified into a different group according to age and occupation.

There's no way that the absence of bad feelings can compensate for the sacrifice of choice and the sacrifice of positive feelings. For me, I prefer to have both negative and positive feelings although negative feeling always spoil my mood and makes me feel unhappy. I think life should have bad and good things to balance each other.

Moreover, as I have said that freedom is one of the most important things that I value, so nothing can compensate that. Without freedom of speech, freedom of choice and freedom of thought, we are like a prisoner. We can't say what we want to say, we can't make a decision for ourselves and we can't have our own idea or our own thought. It's our lives, we should have the right to decide what we want to do by ourselves.