Blog #2

Dystopian stories present several interesting ways at looking at how humans behave. There are populations that are kept in check through violence, populations that are controlled through propaganda and promises of protection, and populations that are given all of their possible desires, so they want for nothing and have no reason to leave. Of these three, violent subjugation is the most straightforward, with The Hunger Games being a particularly brutal example. Once a year, the people give up 24 kids, chosen at random, to let them kill each other until one remains. If you try to stop them from taking your child, you get shot and killed. It's a very clear "Don't fuck with us" that can't be ignored by the people being oppressed, and it makes fighting back that much harder, as the regime clearly doesn't mind killing your entire family. They were kind of planning on doing that anyway.

A subtler example of violence being used to control is the totalitarian Britain from V for Vendetta, with trigger-happy secret police and an incredibly unreasonable curfew. That also combines elements of the propaganda state, like that in Nineteen Eighty-four, where propaganda and mass media are used to scare a populace to keep them complacent, and mass surveillance is justified as being necessary to keep the populace safe. This is the thinking man's alternative to simple brute force, as there doesn't need to be any actual violence for people to be controlled, just the ever-present threat of violence. Eventually you might have to blow up a bridge or something, just to make it believable.

The dystopia that requires the least violence is the one that is also the least likely to occur, and not for the obvious reason. By providing the people with everything their hearts could desire, making them young forever and healthy eternally, and presenting them with what would be considered a paradise, they can be trapped there. This is the society of Brave New World. The people continue to live their lives, supporting those who oppress them and exploit them because their every need is attended to. As a poor college student digging myself further and further into debt, I can see the appeal in living in a society where everything is provided for me and everything is perfect. However, this premise is flawed in two ways. The obvious one is that it's an unsustainable ideal. Resources aren't infinite, and eventually something would run out, and the jig would be up. The second flaw is the fact that humans would probably never agree to that arrangement. Life is sweeter when you know that you could die at any second, and the fact that I could be a syphilitic leper makes it that much more fulfilling that I'm not.