Just like always.
Regards,
Shodan
IIRC, there wasn’t any particular catastrophe in Blade Runner. We were just given a vision of a future Los Angeles that was overpopulated and economically depressed. Presumably due to brain drain of much of the best and brightest immigrating “off world”.
People always assume that the future will take on some homogenous form of “dystopia”. But as you pointed out, the country beyond the crowded city seemed fine. Decker lived in a run-down apartment, but one might expect that of a down on his luck detective. Although one might wonder why a very senior engineer like Sebatian lived in the dilapidated Bradbury Building all by himself.
You can argue that the US is the only long term stable Democracy. If you want to talk about Democracies in general, as I wrote pages back, Democracies (long term and stable or otherwise) historically haven’t fallen; they rot and change into something else.
You need to list all the long-term stable democracies and what they have rotted and changed into for me to believe this.
I agree, that’s seriously stupid. Atwood is well known for her stuffy attitude about not “really” being an SF writer. Not that her books are all that good anyway.
Does that make her a coward, though? Because that was my question, whether she had a reputation for cowardice, not whether anyone had anything they’d like to criticize her for.
I asked because astorian specifically called her a wuss – not a snob, an idiot, a hack, etc. – and I am curious as to whether this was based on her personal reputation or whether he meant she was a wuss for writing a novel.
We all grew up in a time of relative peace and political stability. Times like these don’t last forever. I don’t expect to see revolution and upheaval in my lifetime, but I know enough history to realize that things can change drastically in as little as a decade or two.
The three dystopias mentioned in the OP are mostly political commentary. None of them are meant to be predictive or taken literally. The very fact that they exist helps, to some extent, to warn us and thus avert some of the possibility of something similar coming to pass.
But in general people are shitty students of history. The 2008 economic crisis was preceded by the savings and loan crisis in the '80s in the US. Hell, if we took lessons from other places, we would have realized that nearly the exact same real estate shenanigans precipitated the collapse of the Japanese Bubble Economy. Same bullshit, different decade.
Among modern democracies, the US is the longest standing one. You can’t realistically make a flat statement about democracies being stable because 226 years of history since the ratification of the US Constitution is extremely short. By any historical standard the US is a very young country, and constitutional representational democracy is a very new form of government.
A little something you glossed over when you mentioned French democracy earlier was the French Revolution; a decade of bloody revolution, counter revolution, and summary execution that probably made Jefferson think, “Holy fucking shit, we lucked out in our Revolution. Them Frogs be crazy, yo!” You’d have to take a very broad view to see the Napoleonic wars and the events surrounding the Second and Third Republic eras as “stable.” There was a brief period in belle époque and now in the post-WWII era that I would call pretty stable, but a few decades in the last 200-some years is a pretty damn small window of stability.
You also gloss over the American Civil War, which had profound social and economic effects that are still in some ways affecting the Southern states even today. Compare Red vs Blue with Civil War states. Awful lot of overlap there.
But sure, a nearly 50/50 split in elections over the last 20 years is totally not worrying at all, especially when one side overwhelmingly pushes religious and political conservatism; is steadfast against any kind of gun control, often expressing the ideology of preserving the ability to revolt against the established government (this worries me even as a strong Second Amendment supporter); and has shown an ability to coordinate extremist political movements that are influential even though their absolute numbers are low relative to those with only partially compatible political views. Yep, not worried at all.
Remember how I said that we have short historical memories? McCarthyism lasted six fucking years. That wasn’t a brief little flirtation with extra-legal powers, it was dangerously close to a demagogue being able to control the entire country. Probably the only thing that kept the US from going down the same path as Germany in the 1930s was the fact that that shit had already happened within that generation’s memory. But it was still frighteningly out of control. McCarthyism didn’t end because of legal opposition, but largely because it fell out of fashion. Some of the legal cases went through almost a decade after everyone decided Red-bashing was très passé.
I had just started living in Japan for a few months before the 2000 elections and I, for one, did not find this Onion article very funny, because it was a little too close to reality. And then came the events of 9/11, the domestic political aftermath of which we are still dealing with. (I’m going to mostly ignore the overseas wars and expansion of the military, neither of which are positive changes.)
The passage of the PATRIOT Act, and extension of many of its provisions are a huge step toward enabling totalitarian surveillance. The collective “meh” that the majority of American expressed toward the passage of those laws and the shroud of secrecy over the proceedings is a big fat fucking warning sign that, while we aren’t there yet, we’re heading toward problems. It’s most worrisome that both political parties are culpable in expanding the control of the central government.
Stability is temporary. In human history the only constant is that every single regime and form of government — indeed every human society — changes.
And as Keynes said, in the long run we are all dead. As I keep saying, something unexpected can and will always happen. In real life terms, long-term is a few generations, long enough for kids and their kids to have grown up in it. It doesn’t require pyramid time.
So I repeat: you can’t extrapolate dystopia from anything we have now. And you especially can’t use the farking French Revolution as an example of something that happened to a stable long-term democracy. :smack:
So… name me a few people that Joe McCarthy executed.
Nobody? Oh well, I’ll settle for a few people he imprisoned.
No? Well, just name me a few people he had arrested.
Well, just tell me about some of the horrible things he had done to opponents like Edward R. Murrow.
What??? You mean Murrow didn’t suffer at ALL for opposing McCarthy?
What kind of tyrant was he, anyway? None of his enemies paid ANY price!!!
The French Revolution didn’t happen to a stable long term democracy. It happed in to an Absolute Monarchy. So yeah. Shitty governments create shitty countries which undergo shitty civil unrest which leads to shitty government.
As for the notion that we were on the verge of civil war with Bush v Gore, dude, you’re fucking high. And by the way, close elections are not a sign that we’re on the verge of authoritarian government, it’s when one party wins election after election.
You’re right that the Civil War was the biggest threat to the United States, and nearly split the country.
Yes, future events are sure to influence us in the future, because after all that is where were are going to spend the rest of our lives. Take a random guy from 1913 and he’s going to have a hard time understanding the changes our country has gone through in the last 100 years. But if you think people were better off in 1913, or 1813, or 1713 than they are in 2013 you’re delusional. Even the super-rich in 1913 didn’t have the standard of living that a middle class person of 2013 has.
Of course there’s a certain satisfaction of being able to point at a random person and have them taken out and beaten to death that no amount of creature comforts or material goods can match. But even absolute monarchs of the past had to deal with rotten teeth, gout, infected wounds, damp, chill, horseshit, getting stabbed in the face, and on and on.
Heck, the changes in China over the past 20 years have created more improvement for more people than any other change in history. And that’s just from taking a look around at how normal countries did things, and doing more of those things and less insane things. The nice thing about hitting yourself in the face with a hammer is how good it feels when you stop.
As you point out, everyone at every time and every place in history has had challenges and difficulties. And we surely aren’t headed for any sort of utopia, we’re going to have to muddle along and make horrible mistakes and deal with horrible disasters and the best half-assed way we can. Some people look at the challenges and stupidity and easily avoided mistakes that we seem to blunder into regularly and feel pessimistic. I don’t, because look at how well we’re doing even though we’re being complete idiots. All we have to do is improve from complete idiot to major idiot. We stop hitting ourselves in the face so often, and think what we could accomplish.
This is what dystopias don’t acknowledge. Bad things happen, and happen more, and happen more, and nothing can be done. If a bad thing happens we linearly extrapolate until we create the worst thing ever. Except in real life when bad things happen there are reactions to the bad things. There aren’t any demonstrations in the United States protesting cuts to social services because in real life we haven’t had cuts to social services, despite all the Republican talk, because in real life people who get social security tend to vote Republican while they complain about big government and cash those government checks. People who get social services tend to believe that other people who get social services are bums and parasites, while they earned and deserve the services they get.
Try to take away their social services–for real, not just talking about it–and you’ll see people get upset. Talk about taking away social services and people love it, because they never figure you’re talking about them, just the lazy bums across the street. Point is, you don’t get bread riots until bread is actually scarce and people are actually hungry. Walk down any street in America, especially the poorest streets, and look around and tell me people are going hungry. When poor people are thin then we can expect bread riots. Not before.
Note that Murrow spoke out when McCarthyism was already on the wane. I don’t find that very reassuring.
Yes, but Exapno completely glossed over that, and next 100 years as if they were nothing. The reality is that right now, we simply have not accumulated enough history to know how modern democracies will fare over the long run. We don’t know because this type of government is literally unprecedented in history. Saying that they’re categorically stable is Pollyannaish.
It’s hard to see how things will go when you’re right in the middle of them. Everybody always thinks things aren’t that bad in their country. There were Jews in Germany who thought everything was going to work itself out. Saying “it can’t happen here” is complete bullshit. It can happen anywhere. That was the true horror of Nazi Germany, that there are no monsters; great evil is capable of being perpetrated by normal citizens doing what they think is their duty.
That doesn’t mean that I think the US is going to fall tomorrow. But I’m not stupid enough to say that I can predict anything about what will happen in a decade or two. Seriously, just take a look at the 20th century alone. Countries went from functioning pretty well, with some racial or religious tensions, then some economic or political factor changes and in 5–10 years people are cutting each other’s heads off with machetes or systematically raping their neighbors. It happens. You can’t always predict it.
Sure you can…
Me, from 20 years ago: There’s no way people will be cutting each other’s heads off with machetes or systematically raping their neighbors in 20 years.
Me, today: Wow! I know it was touch and go there for a while, but there aren’t roving bands of machete decapitators or systematic rape squads in the US. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that won’t happen 20 years from now, either.
This thread should be turned into a sticky, because it may be an all-time champion of moving the goalposts.
Is it possible for the U.S. to turn into a fictional-style utopia?
No, it’s impossible.
Sleel: Yes, it is possible. Because something bad might happen.
Dictatorships? Death camps?
Sleel: Worse! Elections might be 50/50!
Talk about The Onion. This is beyond satire.
Except there are many exceptional circumstances now that have never happened before - most of the world is literate; most of the world is in communication with the rest of the world; we have a tremendous amount of information written down that is available to almost anyone rather than an oral tradition; people can go anywhere on the planet in hours, not months; there are seven billion people on the planet; we’re (arguably) poisoning the very planet we live on. These are all a Very Big Deal, and we don’t know how the future will play out with all these exceptional circumstances happening.
Do you know when people also thought this way?
Every single year of the 20th century.*
Go back and read what people said about the future then. It is identical, except for the fine details, to what people are saying today.
*Actually earlier. Benjamin Franklin, letter to Joseph Priestley, Feb. 8, 1780
Have any of you read Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, and its sequel, Parable of the Talents? Those books scared me worse than any of the other dystopias. They were more chaotic, violent, and grim than anything else I’ve ever read. But they also are built on a strong core of hope for the future, after the bad times pass.
I don’t think any of the classic dystopias are all that likely, but I do see a crisis looming due to capitalism. Our factories are becoming increasingly automated, eventually robots will be able to perform any kind of manual labor, period. Meanwhile, computer software (expert systems, not AI) continues to improve and to replace professionals in a variety of fields. Eventually, the wealthy who own factories and corporations will be able to build anything, launch any enterprise, with very few people assisting them. It will be all about capital. Perpetual unemployment would be the common fate of most of us.
And in many countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas (including the United States) that will mean a mass die-off of human beings, because the rich don’t care about the poor. (Remember Romney and the 47%?) It’ll be a considerable sight worse than the stuff of novels.
All manual labor? When robots are capable of the kind of dexterity required by the average plumber, wouldn’t they just decide to take over the world?
Maybe something as singular and random as a sun storm electromagnetic pulse knocking out our computer system could throw us into total chaos within about two weeks?
It wouldn’t take the rise of evil-minded people to initiate a dystopia. But assuredly, once people were living in a life and death situation, it would be the survival of the fittest. And the strongest, possibly most ruthless, would take charge.
apocalyptic ≠ dystopian