Dystopia: Coming to Terms with a Broken World

“If chance be the Father of all flesh, disaster is his rainbow in the sky. And when you hear,
State of Emergency!
Sniper Kills Ten!
Troops on Rampage!
Youths go Looting!
Bomb Blasts School!
It is but the sound of man worshiping his maker.”

- Turner, Creed.

For whatever reason, I grew up with a deceptively pacific view about my surroundings, for a majority of my life. Reading history that made it to my textbooks, being the 90’s Indian kid, i felt I was a lot safer and better off than somebody who lived through an era of world wars, British imperialism, famines and a holocaust. But maybe it was time I woke up from my ignorance and started smelling the coffee. It takes a pair of eyes and little awareness to be overwhelmed by the madhouse we have turned this place into.

The poets of the Romantic era called it “the burden of full consciousness”. That when you have truly opened your eyes, you will look into the face of a humanity in utter despair screaming for help.

Because Children starve in a “third world” while 1.6 trillion dollars is spent every year to get boots on the ground and defend imaginary borders. While we drown our natural reserves in toxic gases to fuel our motorways, America bickers over their fundamental right to carry a gun. Kids will shoot their moms, teens will rampage their schools and the police will play counter-strike with the Black American. The promise of Capitalism was that wealth would trickle-down to the common man. It was always a lie. The rich will only get richer, and the money will trickle across the oceans to Panama and beyond. We are left with a wealth divide and 158 trillion dollars in global debt, as the economy teeters on the brink of a precipice. One day it will implode and our money will be worth its weight in paper.

The ruins of Damascus and Aleppo bear witness to the savage uprising of an “Islamic State” in retaliation to a civil war that has robbed the sanity of an ancient civilisation. Hospital beds are full of the maimed, women with broken limbs move to the floor to make way for little children with organs in view. While “responsible” democratic powers play chess, the sidewalks showcase the innocent dead and puppets on feet staring into oblivion. Our Presidents and Prime Ministers will orate loudly and eloquently in the name of peace, their stirring messages of hope and a safer tomorrow. But ironically, like no other period in history, have we pursued peace so vocally while hoarding stockpiles of weapons in our backyards so devastating in their effect. Devices that can flatten whole cities into desolate ruin and the moon if we were to live there. According to the award-winning investigative journalist John Pilger, “The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1 trillion.” Yes, this is Barrack Obama, a peaceable man, since he took over office in 2009. Change is coming.

In alternative reality, as the nuclear doomsday clock approaches midnight, Rorschach writes in his journal, “Now the whole world stands on the brink, staring down into bloody hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth talkers and all of sudden nobody can think of anything to say”. Pilger goes on to talk about the invisible government and the intelligent manipulation of democratic societies. Another World War has already begun. It only awaits it’s first big mistake, the first missile.

Quis custodiet
ipsos custodes.
Who watches the watchmen?

- Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347

The establishment is a product of the medals of honour that we have conferred upon the elite, the scholarships that we have subsidised, the academies we run, the votes we have casted. They are our definition of successful people, and we have applauded them to the top. We are collectively accountable as much as they are culpable. In this failure to introspect, we get carried away with the rhetoric that we are limitless, we are divine, that the human is grounded in ethics and essentially good. Admirable and as inspiring as it may sound, if we are truly honest with ourselves we will find our good behaviour relegated to moments, our noble deeds rooted in ulterior motive.

We have proven time and again that we run ourselves into the ground in the frantic conflict of our own needs and interests. We only wait for the right price to compromise.

The apostle Paul in the first century talks of the reality of this existential struggle in his letter to the Romans, “For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?” We are at constant war from within ourselves, and yet, the Palestinian will blame the Jew, the Jew will blame the Iranian, the Iranian will blame the American, the American will blame the Russian and the Russian will blame the Ukrainian. India will blame Pakistan, the Middle East will blame Western oppression and the freethinker will blame religion. The believer will blame the godless establishment, and the world keeps spinning on its axis. Polarise, ostracise and prepare for mutually assured destruction.

In her psychiatric folk song, Anna Russell sums it up in haunting lyric:
“At three I had a feeling of ambivalence toward my brothers,
And so it follows naturally I poisoned all my lovers.
But now I’m happy, I have learned the lesson this has taught;
That everything I do that’s wrong, is someone else’s fault.”

We have toiled long and hard to build a better world, only to find it populated with horrors. After twenty centuries of academy and diplomacy, all the intellectuals and the smooth talkers have little to show for their efforts. Muggeridge says, “The depravity of man is at the same time the most empirically verifiable fact even as it is the most intellectually resisted.” We have used science merely to achieve our ends, not advance us. In a continuum of human history, progress in panoramic view does not indicate that we move forward as a species, but only demonstrates recurring patterns of gain and loss. We have covered ground, yet we are worse off. Through blind evolutionary drift, the human will learn more, but the human animal will stay the same, it’s nature red in tooth and claw. Fiscally, morally, socially and environmentally we are at the precipitous edge of civilisation, masters of our own making.

I felt I must say these things, before I become another cog in the wheel of the system. While I drift into the stream of circumstance and moral conundrum, I will blend like a chameleon into the hypocrisy of my being. In time, the behavioural paradoxes will take over, my tongue will be tied and my pen will run out of ink.

We don’t claim to have all the solutions, but we are called to disrupt the tide. To break free from the oppressive powers of greed and materialism that man return to a right relationship with the environment, changing his ways before it changes him forever. Let our petty notions of justice make the radical shift from the norm of retribution to a justice of restoration, slow to condemn, swift to forgive. For all of us have come short, and the rest of us will when the scales fall from our eyes. In this vulnerability, we stand truly human.

“We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other.”

— Teilhard