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Dystopia
Dystopia is a vision of a society in which conditions of life are characterized by poverty, misery, oppression, war, violence, disease, pollution, nuclear fallout or an abridgement of human rights resulting in widespread unhappiness, suffering and other kinds of pain.
Dystopia is the opposite of Utopia, a perfect society where everyone who lives in it is blessed with bliss, contentment, harmony and happiness. John Lennon expressed this so well in his 1971 hit, “Imagine”, whose lyrics embody the state of being free from suffering.
Dystopia in Books and Film
Dystopia is a favorite theme of some writers with a very prolific imagination such as George Orwell who wrote the book “1984” in the middle of the last century. Released during the cold war, 1984 hitches on the paranoia prevalent at that time over the evils of communism in the age of uncharted technology. Orwell wrote about a classless society where its ruler, “Big Brother” monitored everyone’s every move on a “telescreen”.
Many of those who read the book when it was released in 1949 must have shaken in fear at prospects of a totalitarian, repressive future that awaited mankind upon the collapse of basic liberties. 1984’s portrayal of an upcoming evil order was a “speculative fiction” but its possibility was acceptable to a world freshly scarred by World War 2.
Of course for the present day reader Orwell’s vision of the years to come is non-threatening to say the least. Some may even find his scenarios of an oligarchical, oppressive and futuristic world ruler a little tacky.
Orwell was a good read, despite the exaggerations. The one possibility that he seemed to have gotten right is the breakdown of society as a result of discord, disasters and greed. The same insight is echoed by Canadian writer Margaret Attwood’s novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale” which is also about unimaginable suffering under a fascist military junta.
Subsequently filmed starring Faye Dunaway, Natasha Richardson and Robert Duvall in 1990, “The Handmaid’s Tale” tells the story of Offred, a woman kept as a concubine for reproductive purposes by a ruling class who governed the Republic of Gilead. The very few fertile women there were kept as slaves as 90% of the women population could not bear children due to an ecological catastrophe that affected fertility. This justified the need for the systematic impregnation of slaves to propagate humanity.
Both Orwell and Attwood wrote about dystopia as a result of a fallout of governments, society and human decency.
Dystopia in History
A classic example of a dystopian reality would be the Holocaust where the lives of millions of Jews were made miserable by the Nazis.
Throughout human history, dystopian cycles disrupted peace and unity among civilizations from the slavery in the time of Moses, the dark ages when Crusaders raided Muslim communities and the Inquisition when millions suspected of being witches were tortured and burned at stake by the church.
Small dystopic events recur in some parts of present day Africa where famine, poverty, disease and corruption (or a combination of all of these) make life miserable for the people.
Dystopia Today
Conditions are rife for human misery in the near future with climate change as trigger. In fact in many countries, human suffering due to natural disasters is already happening. Typhoons, floods, tsunamis, earthquakes and drought due to climate change will incur horrendous casualties and render survivors impoverished.
Terrorism which has taken its toll on world peace has set the stage for a war without end. Terrorism unleashes the kind of bedlam that will displace, torture and kill people across the globe.
The onset of killer diseases such as AIDS, AH1N1 and all its mutations has already underlined global incapability to contain a pandemic or develop cure in time.
The recent global financial crisis has cast doubt on established economic and banking policies resulting in bankruptcy, collapse of economies causing hunger, crime and war.
Literature and Hollywood almost always portrayed the end of the world in one bang, Revelation style. Mostly one-time devastation would come in the form of an astronomical catastrophe such as a meteor impacting the earth leaving a cocktail of calamities (of Biblical proportions) that could wipe out life in a second. Some picture doomsday via a plague or a lethal disease that would simultaneously kill mankind painfully.
Folly. The world is not really making a grand exit. Not in our lifetime. But mankind shall gradually see its demise, one man-made catastrophe at a time, and in waves of dystopia.