Broomstick, You are not understanding me correctly.
I don’t think asking the question is insane. I think it’s insane that in this world, at this time, there exists a country for which you can meaningfully ask that question.
I do know that there is surveillance and torture in North Korea, and you are not totally free to marry whomever. I was merely comparing by degree. The surveillance is more constant in 1984, the torture is more severe, and the limitations of marriage were even more strict.
OK, fair enough.
Though by that standard the world has been pretty much insane for all of history.
I disagree. Well, the surveillance matter is hard to evaluate given that different types of surveillance are used.
However, I’d say current North Korean torture is every bit as severe as what’s depicted in 1984. Amputation of digits and limbs, beatings, burnings, forcing people to wash themselves in caustic chemicals… really, check out those documentaries I’ve mentioned on Camp 14 and some of the other information out there. It’s appalling.
I’ve heard reports that when their prison camps become overcrowded they simply kill off masses of prisoners, rather like a Nazi death camp, until the population is at a level they find more acceptable. (I heard one report of “acid showers” rather than poison gas, so some difference in details) I have not been able to substantiate these tales. I’d rate them plausible but unconfirmed. If anyone could provide factual evidence either for or against I’d appreciate it.
Marriage limitations… well, it depends on where you are. In some places it’s not so important. In the total control zones not only to inmate “marry” who they are told to marry, they only have sex when granted permission to do so, which is infrequently. Women are coerced to have sex with guards, then publicly executed when visibly pregnant.
Really, everyone here is convinced that everything awful you say about North Korea is true, often because we know of worse than what you mention. We also know that the consequences of attempting to force change could be even more horrible than what is currently going on.
It’s coming back to me now - yeah, those books are quite terrifying, and I agree that she described a fairly realistic way we could get to dystopia.
Everything you just wrote is preposterous.
Big business is backing religious fundamentalists? On EVERY social issue, big business is on the LEFT! Big business gives a fortune to Planned Parenthood. Big business gave tons of money to FIGHT the religious conservatives who opposed gay marriage in California.
That’s largely how civil rights erode in a modern society. People allow it because they would rather be safe and have the trains run on time than be “free”.
I think what you describe is more of an *Idiocracy *than a Brave New World or 1984. The future world of Idiocracy is depicted as being caused by dysgenic pressure. However I think what’s more realistic is a world where everyone can be an idiot because largely self-maintaining automation does all the work and thinking for them.
People find dystopian fiction terrifying because it’s written to take one trait of current society that people find repulsive, and then extrapolating it to a society based on that trait. For example, extrapolating a highly youth-oriented culture in a *Logan’s Run *where people are summarily executed at a set age.
Orwell’s 1984 is scary because it’s so universal. I’ve pointed out in other threads that it’s not about totalitarian institutional bureaucratic procedures or surveillance. In many ways the concept of “Big Brother is watching” seems absurd in a modern society where people post their entire lives voluntarily on Facebook and YouTube. It’s about human nature.
The scary think about 1984 is how it is so universal to all societies:
The Big Brother, Inner Party, Outer Party, Proles structure mirrors our own 1%, upper-middle and professional classes and the vast worker bee classes struggling to make ends meet. And no matter what point in history you look at, people adopt a similar structure. Someone on top. An inner circle who keeps them there and controls everything. A larger outer circle who actually runs everything, aspires to be on the inside and will dutifully fulfill any tasks no matter how abhorrent in order to get there. A vast underclass who is content at their lot in life so long as they are taken care of somewhat and feel they are part of the winning team.
There is no ideology in Big Brother. Oceania wasn’t taken over by religious fanatics or Communists or anything like that. The class system isn’t fixed by birth or occupation. Big Brother isn’t part of some hereditary dynasty (he might not even actually exist). The whole point of 1984 is that humans naturally create these power hierarchies and fight furiously to enforce conformity to those structures. “Big Brother” represents any ideology. All that matters is that everyone follows it.
Interesting movie trivia. John Hurt played Winston Smith in the film adaptation of 1984 and he played the “Big Brother”-ish High Chancellor Adam Sutler in V for Vandetta.
What, like go to war with Eastasia?
Good point.
Eastasia is our friend. We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been in war with Eurasia.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Ask ALEC.
There are a few things that I obviously didn’t clearly address last time. Your replies imply that you think that I’m a raving lunatic. I suspect that a large part of the difference between our perceptions has to do with our experiences and associations. For me, “bad shit happens” isn’t entirely academic.
I knew several people originally from Vietnam and Cambodia when I was a kid. My mother taught Sunday school at a Cambodian Christian church. I met people who were literally boat people, who didn’t get out until after some of the really bad shit had already started happening. The change happened quickly. One woman was a nurse, her husband was a teacher. They had plans for the future, a future that abruptly got erased.
We had an exchange student from Croatia at my school. At the time, all we knew about Yugoslavia was that it was kinda-sorta Communist, though not really part of the Soviet Union. She described a life that wasn’t substantially different from ours, though she described the US as being wasteful and not respectful of the relatively high quality and low prices of the goods available. Less than 5 years later, this girl might have been gang raped and had her family shot in front of her. I don’t actually know whether she got out before the civil wars or not.
When I was in college, one of my best friends was a Guatemalan whose family had been granted asylum in the US. He doesn’t remember Guatemala since he was only about 4 or 5 when they left. The popularity of Che Guevara shirts and posters on campus disgusted him, though.
I know from talking to people I have actually met that life can go from pretty normal to absolute chaos in the span of a few years. There might be some warning signs, but often the people in that place don’t see them as indications of impending horror, but only as signs of unrest and needed change.
Dystopian societies don’t have to last forever. In both real-life conflicts and in fiction, they aren’t necessarily long-lasting or monolithic.
In 1984, a major theme is rewriting history. How do we know that the war has been going on for a long, long time? We don’t. It might be less than a decade. The line, “We have always been at war with Eastasia,” is a party line. It’s truthiness, not reality. Big Brother and the system has willfully erased most indications of time passing and any sense of any real past. There are hints that Winston remembers a time before Big Brother, which means that he was at minimum a child with some memories of a normal society. That could mean that Oceania has only existed for about 20 years. In addition, Winston is an unreliable narrator, so we can’t fully trust what he tells us anyway.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, it’s maybe 10 years post-revolution. Otherwise, Offred who had a husband and a child before, wouldn’t be considered young enough to have children any more. She is, if I remember right, in her early 30s, which would have made her implausibly young for marriage and children if more than a decade had passed. Gilead collapsed shortly after that, according to the future academic interlude. Offred’s account includes references to a resistance group, which was probably the beginning of the end.
Brave New World is set so far in the future that there’s no point in speculating whether the world it postulates is possible now. In 500 years, damn near any society could form.
In real life, all you need is one generation to change an entire society. Pol Pot in Cambodia deliberately erased all history before his “Year Zero”. North Korea has persisted for 3–4 generations. There are grandparents who grew up there knowing nothing but a totalitarian regime. North Korea shows that you don’t even need to change the entire country, just the section that you control.
In asserting that democracies are de facto stable, you quickly run into the “no true Scotsman” problem. The UK isn’t technically a democracy — it’s a constitutional monarchy — but I’d consider it to have a very stable and fairly egalitarian political system. Japan is a constitutional monarchy too, but given the relative newness of the adoption of that system and some internal conflicts I’m aware of from having lived in Japan for over a decade, I’d rate it as having a substantially less stable and trustworthy government than the UK’s.
Uruguay has been a full democracy since at least the beginning of the 20th century, but temporarily devolved into a military regime from the late 60s until the mid-80s. Another college friend of mine was from Uruguay. He didn’t have any real horror stories, but said that there were some very good reasons he wasn’t living there.
China and North Korea are technically democratic republics, but a single party system ends up being totalitarianism in all but name.
Sweden is notoriously egalitarian and socially progressive, so much so that they get made fun of for things like the occasional mainstream use of gender neutral pronouns and parenting ideals strongly pushing unisex toys, among other things. They still ended up having riots recently.
Like I said before, democratic systems are too young to really know how they’ll do in the long run. Things that have happened in my lifetime like: the LA riots; a presidential election that was so contested that the Supreme Court — for the first time in American history — had to step in to settle it; multiple banking crises; several disaster mismanagements; greatly increasing wealth disparities; and more or less constant involvement in warfare for most of my adult life have shown that things are not trending positively.
I’ve been living outside the US since just before 9/11 — aside from visits to family and friends every few years — and from my perspective Americans totally lost their fucking shit for a while. Even now that things have gotten a bit more settled, things have changed quite a bit from the way they were before I started living in Japan.
The political divides have gotten bigger and the acrimony has gotten nastier than any time in my memory. Religious fervor has increased greatly from when I was young. My family used to be considered weird because my mom raised us as Jesus freaks. Now, there seem to be fundamentalist wackos all over the damn place. People are also far more accepting of authority than they used to be. Looking back at things I wrote in high school and college, my views haven’t changed much, but this shift has gradually made me look like a flaming anarchist in comparison to where I would have fallen on the political spectrum before.
You are free to disagree with me, but I tell you that the US has most definitely changed for the worse in the last decade. While a total dystopian break still isn’t at all likely, it’s been made far more plausible because of those changes.
Great post all the way around, Sleel. Very interesting.
Plenty of riots have occurred previously in American history and there was at least one similarly disputed Presidential election in 1876 which while not requiring the services of the Supreme Court did require an electoral commission of 15 men.
Absolutely true, primarily due to the fact that one of our Republic’s two major parties seems determined to reenact the decline and fall of the Federalist party two centuries ago.
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When were you born precisely? Most of the rise of the modern Evangelical movement (which is all things considered more moderate than the fundamentalism of the 1920s), took place in the 1970s and '80s with the perception that moral standards were declining and the rise of the New Right. Nowadays, people without religious affiliation are the fastest-growing religious demographic in the United States and the percentage of Protestants in particular among youth are barely half of that of elderly Americans: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/28/1219803/-More-Republican-demographic-death-spiral-No-religion-a-plurality-among-Americans-18-30
Suspicion of authority is everywhere. Just ask the Tea Partiers for starters.
I don’t dispute that the policies of President Bush the Lesser were by and large harmful to the country and that this has been exacerbated tremendously by the Great Recession. However worse disaster have befallen this country before without the suspension of constitutional government which English-speaking countries have maintained continuously since 1688. I don’t see such a strong foundation ending anytime soon.
Sleel, you sure do post awful purty.
There’s a dichotomy to outsider perspectives; on the one hand, I don’t live in the US, so it is completely fair to say that I’m not there, and I don’t know firsthand what things are like. On the other hand, I think it would be a very bad idea to disregard all outsider perspectives; I have no dog in this fight when I say that from where I sit, things look pretty bad to me. I’m not getting the firsthand, on-the-ground perspective, and I only get what I know from tv and the internet, but on the other hand, I’m not immersed in the system, being fed the party line.
Well, I don’t live in Canada, but from what I see on TV it is a barren wasteland populated exclusively by hunter gatherers who live in igloos. As an outsider, I feel I have perspective on Canada that someone who lives there–since they’re typically a nomadic seal hunter–might not have.
Sleel, I understand your case. It’s clear that the fundamental difference between us is the definition of dystopia. For me dystopia is far more severe than “bad things happen”. Bad things always happen. They seldom lead to dystopia.
If you get to mention bad things that happened in your lifetime - things that did not come within a million miles of setting us on the path to dystopia - then I get to mention that I lived through the 60s. The things you list wouldn’t have made a scary Tuesday afternoon in 1968. And the 60s are a pleasant stroll through the park compared to what my parents lived through.
There is also a distinction between “asserting that democracies are de facto stable” and noting the historic fact that no dystopia has ever occurred in a stable democracy. That does not imply that one cannot happen in the future, but it does demand that an extraordinary event must be made plausible. That it has happened under non-similar conditions does not make it so.
Everybody everywhere in every time looks around and sees threats. Some imaginary, but mostly all-too-real. Ironically, your paranoia on the subject is healthy. The more you see it coming, the harder you’ll work to ensure it doesn’t. Yet you always leave off the second half of that sentence. People do pay attention to the past. They do say never again. They do fight the forces. Even so bad things continue to happen as they always will. Dystopia is a possible outcome. Yet nothing you have said makes it a plausible outcome in the U.S. I think you should be more explicit here in step two.
Part of the reason explanations are so vague is that the characters don’t know how their society became dystopian. Totalitarian governments censor and propogandize their history and current events. History classes at school concentrate on teaching how terrible things were before the dystopia went into effect and how much better things are now that the dystopian government takes care of them. Similarly, news about what’s going on in the world gets slanted the government’s purposes: highlighting the violence and injustices that goes on in democratic societies and how the virtues of their own societies outweigh those of the democratic states.
Add to that that people who speak against the government’s views are branded as troublemakers, tortured, and killed, and very often their families are punished too.
Hence, the average person in a dystopian society has no idea how the dystopia originated, and moreover, is discouraged from asking about it. Many people in those dystopias simply accept that this is how things are, and self-preservation prevents them from trying to change it.
Which is yet another example of why a US-based dystopia is impossible. Nothing ever goes away. The “Memory Hole” was created by a man who couldn’t even conceive of the Internet and how easy it makes sharing.
What tv shows are you watching?!?
I don’t think your analogy is valid; for one thing, US Americans aren’t expected to know much about Canada, because we don’t ping your radar very much. Canadians know much more about the US because we’re steeped in your culture - your television, your movies, your novels, your news, your magazines, your advertising, your food, your internet, etc. If you were a student of Canada and made it your business to learn a lot about Canada, then it would be very interesting to see what your outsider’s opinion would be.
