John Lennon Flawed Utopia Essay

John Lennon's Flawed Utopia John Lennon’s Imagine was released in 1971, just one year after the Beatles’ parting, but halfway through the Vietnam war. Almost as an uproar towards the happenings of the war, to inspire people to live a more peaceful life without war, Lennon tries to depict the ideal world, a utopia of sort, in which everyone can live in harmony and peace. As benevolent and noble of an idea this might be, it’s hard not to question what the price to pay might be in order to achieve Lennon’s ideal view of the world, and most importantly, what exactly would be at stake. In the first verse the author asks the audience to imagine a world where there is no Heaven nor Hell; no religion, no countries, and in which everyone just lives for the present day without a plan for the foreseeable future. While at first this might seem like a reasonable ideal, in reality Lennon’s view strips the world of its culture, its heritage, which has been growing since the beginning of history. People are deprived of their identity, that is intrinsic to the different nationalities and cultures around the world. Imagining this version of the world is, like Lennon puts it, “easy if you try”. What isn’t easy however, is forgetting who we are and where we come from: our identity. It is burdensome to forget our differences, which is what makes the world vary and

Nonetheless he goes ahead to propose a world in which there are no possessions; suggesting that such world would have no place for neither greed nor hunger. However that also implies it would be a one in which people would not be able to buy and own their house or car and anything in between, a world without needs that however also lacks of any will to succeed in the things that we do in life; the basic instinct that drives us forward as a