A Dystopian Nightmare: When Our Fiction is Real
The word ‘dystopia’ may fill our heads with pictures of the grungy city streets and Tokyo neon-noir of a cyberpunk future, or perhaps a grandiose vista of a shiny clean metropolis and oppressive technological wonders. Hollywood mostly paints a drastically changed and stylised future, but closer to home, closer to the bone are the worlds of Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury. These are worlds where you may not recognise you are slipping into until it’s too late.
Loss of personal agency and prolific use of mind-altering chemicals; liberation through and enslavement to technology; corporations bigger and more powerful than the government; a birth-debt-work-death pipeline hidden underneath consumer choice and mass media in a subscription-based life — sound familiar? We might be closer to our dystopia than one can imagine, and three prominent works of fiction can help show this.
George Orwell — 1984. This book is so prolific that people use ‘Orwellian’ as an adjective, even though they might be using it wrongly. 1984 is often said to be a book about fascism and state control, but it’s a bit more than that. It tells of a vile and gritty world where a totalitarian government wages perpetual war against a changing enemy. 1984 is also a world where all actions and even thoughts are under inescapable surveillance only to be used as weapons of destruction against the individual. Words have no meaning and history no longer exists.
Now I won’t paint our present as bleakly as this, but doesn’t the concept of inescapable surveillance seems familiar? Instead of a totalitarian state of Big Brother, we might have sub-contracted this control to tech giants who can read your emails, hear your conversations, and monitor your search history. Even Winston Smith had a private notebook. Between WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook (Meta?), Google, Apple, and Amazon, you could probably learn more about a person than Orwell could have imagined the Ministry of Love would be able to do.
And what of Orwell’s perpetual war, the constant energy to keep the people focused, hateful, fearful and afraid — a war on terror. An endless existential threat that helps preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. The necessity for a constant conflict or a constant enemy may not be unfamiliar to the millennial generation, nor for any generation for that matter.
Brave New World — Aldous Huxley. Whilst Orwell portrays a dehumanising grey future of drab poverty where control is maintained by Stalin-esque secret police and surveillance, Huxley creates a vibrant and glowing world where birth to death interventions and drugs control people by changing the very essence of who they are.
Brave New World is about agency and freedom of choice and the sacrifice of autonomy for personal comfort — happiness at the expense of truth supplemented by soma; the universal drug of self-delusion. Soma clouds the realities of the present and replaces them with happy hallucinations, and is thus a tool for promoting social stability. The role of soma is relatable to social media in our world, or any device that gives you a reality over reality. As Huxley’s characters look at the world through a narcotic lens, so do we — you observe people through stylised and fictitious social media filters of self-delusion and eventually might mistake this for truth.
Huxley’s world is also a world of labour and intelligence-based classes, not unlike 1984, and not unlike the real world. Yes social mobility is possible and we are moving towards equality in many areas such as race and gender, but the divisions in wealth are more apparent now than ever — this is only exacerbated when you look at the global arena. Whilst billionaires blast off into space we still rely on social processes of abjection and slavery (p.27–29) just to exist in our current state.
Roy Bradbury — Fahrenheit 451. Beyond the symbolism of book burning, the world of Fahrenheit 451 is a fast-paced, life-is-cheap society. Each home is planted with a giant screen in a parlour, not unlike 1984; but in this world, the TV isn’t endlessly watching you, you are endlessly watching it. The screen is blaring a cavalcade of gratuitously violent and mindless shows. Guy Montag’s wife, Mildred, is always plugged into an inherently anaesthetising and destructive stream of adverts, noise, and music. She is a vessel for the consumption of entertainment… Does anyone else spend too much time on Instagram?
Guy Montag himself spends his days as a fireman, a reversed role where he finds and burns books to destroy knowledge and promote ignorance amongst the masses. Fahrenheit 451’s society depends on the compliance of people, and as long as they are ignorant and entertained they’ll be happy. As long as they are happy and compliant the state can go on.
Another key theme is clearly censorship, where Bradbury outlines a challenging implication, that the most important factor leading to censorship is the objections of special-interest groups. It’s interesting to note how perceptions of censorship can mutate and the burning of Harry Potter books in 2001 was seen as fanatical religious nonsense, but aligned to progressive movements in 2020. How can a free society square the circle of censorship for any reason? Fahrenheit 451 tells of the slippery slope awaiting those who cave in to the demands of the offended and highly vocal minorities.
Information, Truth, and Media. The biggest direct comparison between these three books, these three worlds and our own is the way in which information, truth and the media are categorised. They are a tool of escapism, sedation, and oppression. In Brave New World characters have everything they need to avoid facing the truth about their own situations whereas the antipode of this is in 1984, the absence of education and lack of information veracity hide the truth. As a combination to these, in Fahrenheit 451 people are simultaneously denied the truth and bombarded with mass saturated media to distract them.
We can easily see ourselves in Bradbury’s TV parlours or Huxley’s world where endless media is churned out to distract us, advertise at us and numb us from reality. Yet we also can easily find ourselves at the whim of the “Ministry of Information” where our freedom of knowledge is a gift of corporations that are so integrated into our society we have to rely on them.
Whilst the rich ‘truth’ of the real world is preserved in books (for now), and can not easily be revised, cultural negationism is becoming more and more simple. Orwell and Bradbury talk about censorship, rewriting truths and gaslighting — all of these are already not uncommon. Books, media and music that go against a quickly evolving social acceptance disappear to ‘Room 101’ — but is it better to pretend it never happened, or acknowledge we have changed? We are far from mass book burning but look how accustomed we have become to removing actors from films when they are revealed to be problematic. And whilst vile actors are thankfully vilified and being held accountable, what about actors or people who are actually innocent, or who go against the desires of powerful autocrats or states? The problem with ‘problematic’ is that it’s not objective.
Reality. None of the authors discussed could predict the shape of our reality, and none of them could imagine how the individual reality we know would be curated specifically for us. Each person lives in their own polarising, anaesthetising, radicalising and defining echo-chamber of news, media and groupthink — your very own reality. Your connection to information through the internet and therefore ‘truth’ is different from everyone else’s, and this is a complex societal development.
I haven’t really discussed personal agency and freedom, these are big themes in dystopian stories and interesting issues to explore. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale explores both concepts from the female perspective and whilst the loss of control over one’s body and even reproductive cycle is a hellish fiction, to some people, even in a liberal western society, we are already in the periphery of it.
Overall, we are not in one dystopia, we are not in a dystopia at all. We are in the most liberal, peaceful and progressive time in global history; but there are frankly quite scary existential concepts in fiction that are becoming real. Rejection of modernity, technology and progress is not the cure, but one must be wary of such quickly evolving societal norms, for what today seems progressive may turn out to be Orwellian.
Written with some help on literary interpretation from SparkNotes
