Dystopian novels: Warning, not blueprint
It’s horrifying that I wrote this three years ago and now that I go to republish it in my new age of Substack I realize that it needs updating because things have gotten… worse! Footnotes detailing the changes I made offer further reflection.
I love a good dystopian novel. I love the ones that end with a glimmer of hope. I love the ones that make me angry. I love the ones that illuminate the path our society is on.
But let’s get this straight: Dystopian novels are not a blueprint for how the future will look—they’re a warning to change lest our future go wrong.
We seem to be missing the point…
We do not need screens in every room in our house telling us what to do (1984)
The advance of technology is happening at a staggering pace. Looking at the world of 1984 in the actual year 1984, I remember all the relief that the media expressed. “See? It’s 1984, and our screens don’t control us. They can’t see what we’re doing. They aren’t in every little corner of our lives!”
1984 shows us a world in which the British (assumed) government surveils its population day and night. The government lies to everyone—even changing their lies from day to day—and the population largely takes it. What else can they do? Screens are in control.
Yes, it took a little longer than Orwell thought, and until this year it wasn’t the United States government that was pushing the surveillance.1 But Orwell’s vision is coming true: Have you looked at the videos that an amusement park enthusiast took before and after the smartphone revolution? It’s…shocking. We are now living in our screens. We do what they tell us to do. And our government spouts full-on Newspeak: tariffs don’t raise prices; we’re only deporting ‘bad’ people; it’s OK for our national security team to know nothing about national security.
The warnings that I take from this book:
We should not be complacent like a frog in a slowly heating pot of water. We must always resist—thoughtfully but forcefully.2
Humans should be able to escape the trappings of modern life and, in order to be healthy, should do that on a regular basis.
We should view anyone in a position of authority with a healthy dose of skepticism.
The blueprint that people seem to be following:
Screens everywhere? Why fight it? In fact, let’s have Alexa in every room so we can’t even have a normal conversation without a machine listening in.
It’s private companies, not government, that’s doing this, so it’s OK.
Talking heads on TV or my favorite YouTube podcast tell me that MAGA isn’t doing it to me, just to people who deserve it, so it’s OK.3
Governments will always be manipulative. Politicians will always lie. Not only should we accept this, but let’s embrace it and elect people who don’t even try to hide that they’re lying.
Remember that the free exchange of ideas should not be limited without very, very good reason (Fahrenheit 451)
In Ray Bradbury’s dystopia, there are no books. Knowing what I do about Bradbury, this was probably the scariest future he could imagine. But somehow, though [almost] all of us find Bradbury’s vision as frightening as he did, we still argue about access to books.
Neither the left nor the right is solely in charge of this particular failure of imagination. Parents of all stripes fear what words can do to their kids. And when politicians and other “influencers” use that fear, it can be potent. As I write this, laws in conservative areas are trying to make sure that children won’t feel “ashamed” of their cultural legacy—as long as those children are white.4 And the left has been making trouble of its own (though less effectively), trying to balance whose suffering is worth highlighting by trying to assess the relative “power” of groups who have suffered. As if suffering can be relative!
It’s a tiresome project no matter who does it. Children need to be challenged, and need to feel secure in their ability to respond to those challenges. We need to value but not assign relative value to all human histories. It seems pretty straightforward, but it’s not. I know that I read books when I was younger that I wasn’t ready for. But I also know that I did not need anyone to save me from those ideas—I was challenged, and I rose to the challenge.
The warnings that I take from this book:
You can’t just take away some knowledge; if you start taking it away, you’ll find that there’s no clear line where you should stop.
Human history is valuable, whether we like it or not. And we usually don’t like it.5
The blueprint that people seem to be following:
Banning books, ideas, and historical fact is OK as long as my side is doing it.
We can trust ourselves to know which information is damaging to kids.
We should not devalue physical intimacy to the point where it becomes simple currency (Brave New World)
I’m not going to say that I have any insight into current young people’s sense of sexuality and relationships. But all measures seem to be showing a decline in people who even believe that having a committed physical/spiritual/emotional relationship is worth it.
In Brave New World, sexuality has been co-opted as a tool by the government. (Once again, a dystopian fiction gets the bad guy wrong, since the reality is that governments are nowhere near as good at fooling people and making them do what they want as the private sector.6) Although our government isn’t explicitly promoting the use of sex as currency, isn’t pro-natalism, getting rid of workplace protections for women, and forced pregnancy something like that? (I’ve always wondered, if they really wanted more people to get married, wouldn’t they get rid of the marriage penalty in our tax code? But that would be sensible and MAGA is anything but.)7
I believe that the so-called sexual revolution was a necessary step. Women were not allowed full agency over their bodies and their lives, and that was wrong. Frankly, if two consenting adults want to exchange sex without emotional involvement, who should care?
But it seems that many people ignored Huxley’s actual warning. As of this new writing, we now have the rise of incels, thus turning Huxley’s warning back on itself. Many straight men, having failed to find women who are willing to play the part of sex toy, think they have found ways to replace women. They have no idea how they are harming themselves.
The warnings that I take from this book:
Humans need love. Period.
Without love, humans lose their humanity.
Sexual relationships cannot and should not be forced into a norm. Within the bounds of respecting the rights of others, we should all seek and find the fulfillment we need.
The blueprint that people seem to be following:
There is no point to love and commitment—it’s so old-fashioned.
Besides, young women and young men are so far apart in what they want, they can get sexual satisfaction without all that messy physical interaction.
People who want love are pathetic outsiders who should just go live in a shack somewhere.8
We do not need to separate our country into warring regions willing to kill each other to keep our little bit of land to ourselves (Hunger Games)
It is inevitable that humans will have disagreements. It’s probably inevitable that we will always be tempted to separate ourselves into “us” and “them”—though I think some people are making progress on resisting that tendency.
But it is very much not inevitable that different areas of one country (such as in the US) or different cultures around the world should literally fight to the death in the arena, a la Hunger Games, to solve our differences. In this series, humanity’s in some trouble. We don’t know everything that happened between now and this future, but it was pretty disastrous. Our heroine is supposed to go and kill other people simply because they are representatives from other regions of the country.
The warnings that I take from this book:
Don’t screw up the world so badly that humanity is nearly wiped out, OK?
If you do, remember that we’re all in this together and only by helping each other will we all climb out of the hole.
The blueprint that people seem to be following:
We’re gonna screw it all up anyway so don’t bother to keep the bad stuff from happening.
While we’re at it, tribalism has always worked so great for humans, right? So let’s make sure to spread hatred of people in places we don’t approve of!
In conclusion, I’ll just say it again:
Dystopian novels: warning, not blueprint.
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This is the first edit I had to make to accommodate the excesses of the second MAGA administration. When I first wrote this piece, I wrote simply, “Yes, it took a little longer than Orwell thought, and it’s not actually the government that is doing it, but here we are.” It is truly shocking to look at your own thoughts on a topic and see how the world has changed so quickly, and so much in the wrong direction.
Another change I made: I added forcefully because, frankly, purely being thoughtful is so 2024.
I had to add this as well. I have many thoughts about MAGA adherents who were the teen boys I went to high school with. Those teen boys were all about “independence” and “government can’t tell me what to do.” Yet here they are, voting to take away their own rights.
I had to edit the word “new” out of this sentence because now, we’re taking it for granted that Republicans are all for book banning. In fact, as of this writing, the removal of books by Black people and queer people from the library and curriculum at West Point is particularly shocking. Any conservative worth their salt can tell you that the best way to defeat your enemy is to know your enemy, so if they think they are molding future culture warriors by not letting them read “the enemy’s” books, they are sorely mistaken.
I added that last note. The fact is, well-written human history has to show us how awful we’ve been. If we feel shame, all the better. We need to be motivated to improve, and we can’t find that motivation if we think that everything was hunky-dory in the past and that enslaved human beings were “happy” and “grateful” and got really great on-the-job training!
I kept this note about governments being less effective than the private sector, even though I’d say that the MAGA government has made great strides, at least in convincing the less-educated.
This originally read: “It is true that our government isn’t exactly telling us to use sex as currency (though, heck, if they really wanted more people to get married, wouldn’t they get rid of the marriage penalty in our tax code?).”
Here I added point #2 and removed: “OK, boomers! * PS: I’m not a boomer…” Funny how that phrase died so quickly!