Life in the Dust
What makes a dystopian world
This will be tricky as there is a lot of constant talk and debate and argument and circular logic about whether or not Americans are living in a Dystopian society. But I’m not here to dissect current events and speculate if they warrant the declaration that our government is allowing economic and social segregation to expand while utilizing tyrannical tactics to promote a power structure of bullying and dominance. There’s plenty of content out in the maelstrom of social media and splattered through the archaic and oblivious Mobius strip of spin that is main stream media to cover such speculation. I am not a media persona in terms of current events; I am not a journalist nor some armchair analyst here to plague the bandwidth of this online world and devour your time with hyperbolic opinions nor regurgitated research with some kangaroo leaps to conclusions. I am a fiction writer with some philosophical opinions who wants to make sense of these chaotic times.
With that clarification disclaimed, I am going to breakdown my views and understandings of dystopian societies as portrayed through literature and how they compare to history. Because the present is hard to keep up with and current events can become stale in the public conscious and, as I clarified about, I AM NOT A JOURNALIST! This is just my critical opinions about what makes a dystopian world and how fiction portrays it in this essay. From this elaborate and exhausting musing on living in a society of injustice that only makes for great science fiction but shitty reality. I will then have following posts to look into three books that are considered great staples of the dystopian world. 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451.
But Ratidox, you are quick to argue before pushing up your glasses, hasn’t there been a multitude of speculation, review, analysis, and comparisons for those three novels to the trends of the modern world? Of course, and I don’t have any delusions that this essay, nor will my upcoming reviews on those books stand out greater than others. But this is my Substack, and I feel the need to comment on this topic and those books. It compels me to weigh in on this subject. If you want to see what this contradictory commentator has to contribute to this collection of content with the hopes of some collaborative commentary from their constituents, then please read on.
Starting with the priming term of dystopia, defined by the oxford dictionary as an imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as possible. Or the inverse of utopian where everything is as good as possible. When these fictional terms are applied to reality there is imperfections in the translations because humans are flawed and contradictory creatures, take it from me; one who wants to write about it. I always found anyone who unironically strives for a utopian form of society is foolish and naïve, because even if it were possible to achieve perfection, which is a myth. If such a state of reality could be perfect it then there would be a plateau of existence that would turn into a nightmare.
Religious zealots always claim to be working towards an afterlife of some kind that is considered paradise for their loyalty to their faith (with the exception of those that deem reincarnation or some amorphous state of enlightenment as a potential afterlife process) but that goal seems more unpleasant when you think about it for more than two minutes. If you or anyone else were promised to be given your favorite food, say a cheeseburger, it would sound wonderful. Should delivery of that cheeseburger come, bliss would follow and your faith for obeying the rules to achieve that juicy Jimmy Buffet muse would be validated. But by day three or four most people would be sick of eating the same cheeseburger again and again. There are some who may hold out longer or lack and insightful skills to recall that they are tasting the same food every meal for every day. Disregard the health risks for this thought experiment and realize that when we are given perpetual comforts, we will lose appreciation for them and become bored which leads to more insidious emotional outlooks. But I will set aside my views on the utopian fallacy for another essay. I want to get back to its mirror which appears horrific because it is, which is made all the worse when it goes from being imaginary to real in some manifestation.
Since our definition is clarified, what constitutes bad circumstances in existence? Would that be solely subjective? No, because we all have base needs that are universal, which must be met as anyone familiar with the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs. Basics such as food, shelter, and safety take up the first step(s) of ensuring quality of life, then comes external and internal satisfaction where we have to find satisfaction wit those who we share our life with and then ourselves. When these basic needs are not being met or are being removed or blocked, then we are in dire conditions. When all of them are hindered in some way, then we are in dystopian situations. This is often done by lack of consideration or (worse) intentionally when we find ourselves in a tyrannical dystopian setting.
Allow me to fine tune my explanation from the abstract to the specific. When it comes to a universal basic of food, we can all agree that we need to eat to live. Food is a precious resource that was once the driving factor of civilization and is still a crucial pillar because if any person was cut off from any form of nutrition they would be in lethal jeopardy within a week. Fortunately, our modern world has solved food scarcity to the point where we have a different problem, food waste.
It’s wild but we have the ability to feed people throughout the world at adequate levels, but the problem arises when we don’t allow accessibility or quality to factor into the equation of ensuring people can eat. Yes we have the ability to give anyone in the developed civilizations of the world food, and modern farming has given us more resistant crops and better forms of storage has reduced the risk of spoiling food. Yet people in parts of the world have access to food with low nutritional value, often due to the phenomenon of food deserts where either a single store dominates the area and keeps out the competition or the area is not lucrative enough to allow for more options of food to be sold. There is also the challenge of food being priced in the majority of the world, which is a fair argument when cultivation and harvesting and transporting food involves labor that will require compensation to keep it sustainable.
But when there is abundance to the level where landfills have almost a third of the waste be of food that could have been eaten, is it really a logical argument to put a paywall on a meal that a person needs to survive? Most sensible people would say no but the trick of control can come when hunger takes priority over any other concern. Hence, why many dystopian worlds throughout literature utilize the strict of access to food to compel the plausibility of an imaginary world (e.g. 1984, The Hunger Games, Make Room! Make Room!, etc. ).
After food comes safety and security, often going hand in hand where you need to have the means to survive in your environment. Humans have evolved in a way where our physical means of tempering the elements is not inherent, so we developed clothes, mastered forging fire, and sought or built shelters to protect us from harsh weather and hungry predators. Over the millenniums of our existence as home sapiens we have extended the threshold of safety and security into the home. Our essentials are now a given that we take for granted, so long as we have the means to hold onto it. In dystopian fiction, either the conditions are drastically reduced to where living in slums is the norm for the majority or resources have reached a scarcity to where the having a mechanized form of producing heat or light is not sustainable. When this happens we have to resort to the archaic fire methods of warmth and keeping the darkness at bay.
When a society intentionally makes resources of safety and security scarce or unobtainable, you see a more authoritarian form of dystopia. This type will be looked at in my upcoming literary reviews. But I want to put a pin in that form of fiction writing that is starting to be imitated by our real life, for some insane set of reasons that I struggle to accept. Up the shrink hierarchy of needs is the self-esteem or self-worth aspect where our identity needs to be in a healthy status to carry on with benefiting from our existence, after that comes social relationships. Those aspects of needs are often addressed when the first three needs I mentioned (food, safety, and security) are already met, so when the first three are hindered, your focus on identity and social connections get set aside because you are in a survival mode that needs to be catered to. There are dystopian works that go more into the identity and social needs, which I intend to cover in later examples, but there is another part of dystopian writing to go over.
There are other types of dystopias, but two specific variations I want to go over are wasteland dystopias or regressive dystopias. Wasteland dystopias are really easy to explain and comprehend; they are the result of some cataclysmic disaster or set of disasters that has left the comforts of our modern society in ruins. Where the modern world is destroyed in some way such as nuclear fallout, a global pandemic decimating the world population, a sudden lost of essential resources, or some other imaginative speculation that makes the money in your bank account worthless and the power grid to shutdown. From there it becomes a matter of who can maintain resources of survival (e.g. food, shelter, medicine, transportation, etc.) and how people interact in each other when the primary drive is to stay alive and the intellectual nuances of modern society are not deems top priority.
We see variations of this wasteland dystopia in books like The Road, I Am Legend, “A Boy and His Dog”, Cat’s Cradle, The Girl with All the Gifts, and The Day of the Triffids. These examples look into a world past the comforts and show the reduction of values in people. The Road is my favorite example because it follows a father and son who are trying to survive and maintain their humanity in a dead society where you can’t trust strangers now that cannibalism has become a viable option. I Am Legend shows how the shift from humans dominating the planet to vampire like beings that first seem ghoulish but then a more advance version of them forms to take over and our protagonist becomes the monster through his methods of trying to combat this relenting hoard at his door. The other examples I can get into, but you get my point. Either a lone character or small group of survivors have to carry on through a harsh environment. This has become a tiring trope in film and television with the zombie apocalypse subgenre. I may visit some of those titles in my review newsletter (oops, shameless plug).
The other type of dystopia I mentioned is the regressive form. This one sits in between the wasteland and the authoritarian forms, where society has shifted backwards from the progressive laws and values we see in the modern world. Often under the rule of a new form of government or cultural norm that can certainly be oppressive but, focused around a specific theme that gets explored more than the social power dynamics. Examples that I would point to are The Hunger Games series, The Handmaid’s Tale, The World Made by Hand, and *retching* Ready Player One. These novels and series have their place in the discussion of dystopian fiction, but they are what I would consider mid-tier when it comes to exploring the impact of such a world existing and the mechanics of the world tend to seem very flawed when explored. I find that happens because the spectacle is in the pitch rather than in the characters or the central application of the books, with the exception of The Handmaid’s Tale since modern America is promoting shades of such a dystopia in the current social/political discourse. But I find that the other examples get lost in their world building or in something more superficial (e.g. nostalgia, economics, entertainment, etc.), rather than develop the core message that the book puts out. Along with having derivative aspects1 that one can’t help but compare it to the authoritarian or wasteland dystopia, which seem to hold a lasting impression.
With those specific branches of the subgenre of dystopia fiction, let me go back to what I want to explore with the authoritarian style. I think it gives the strongest emphasis and has the most lasting examples because art imitates the real world and now, generations later, the inverse is happening. We are seeing methods of totalitarianism, censorship, misinformation, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, and displacement of quality social interactions. If some of these themes have struck a resemblance to our modern world, well that’s because we don’t like to take enough critical lessons from our speculative fiction that warns us of the ills of our hubris and often takes inspiration from real events. I could go into detail, but that is not my interest nor job to be the literary journalist who compares a specific government practice to 1984 or Brave New World, or Fahrenheit 451.
But I will go into those three novels in the coming weeks on my review newsletter to share my analysis and thoughts on those works of dystopian fiction. I plan to give my tangential and contradictory opinions to help elaborate why I regard them as important works in this subgenre and if you haven’t read them recently or at all, I hope that changes. Nothing helped me gain awareness and look critically into the real world practices that march towards a terrible future for the majority of humanity than reading works of fiction that show what can happen, especially when current powerful practitioners seem to have taken away the practices that make those stories so horrifying.
Happy reading, everyone!
The Hunger Games is just Battle Royal and The Running Man for tweens. Ready Player One is just Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with VR and 1980s pop culture, and The World Made by Hand is just terribly dull.