Carl Jung once said, “The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.” If you could create a society according to your ideals, what would it look like? There are an abundance of ideas regarding what is right and wrong in modern society and plenty of ideas of what the perfect world would encompass. Each of us has ideas of what we would change and how we would change them. Though most people start out with ideas of changing the world for the better, the end result often bears little similarity to the original plans.
It is easy to look at any given situation from the outside and see the flaws. Dystopian Literature does exactly this. It allows a reader to step out of the comfort of the world in which they live, and look at that culture through a different lens. By definition, Dystopia is the opposite of utopia. It is a fictional society often taking place in the future, where the standards of living are terrible due to oppression, deprivation and terror often due to oppressive social control. Dystopia could not be so powerful if it was not for the fact that Dystopian societies mimic our own societies.
In most Dystopian societies a totalitarian government creates or sustains a poor quality of life. Often the government conditions the society to believe that it is perfect and above all others. Most Dystopian literature is written as a warning, using example from our present state in order to show the possibilities of what could be. Another recurring theme in Dystopian literature is that of caste systems in society.
George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a satire written about the Stalin Era. The events and characters in Animal Farm parallel the early history of the Soviet Union. While all of the animals seem to have parallel characters in the real world, Orwell directly connects the character Napoleon to Joseph Stalin in a letter to the publisher in 1945. Orwell created Napoleon to represent Stalin, a dictator who was supposed to reshape the Soviet Union but instead created many problems during his regime. He used a secret police force that is also noted in animal farm by the puppies that Napoleon raises to be his secret guard dogs. Orwell shows a strong disapproval of the Stalinist corruption of socialist’s ideals. This book has become well-known for showing what happens when power is overthrown only to have the over thrower become power-hungry and oppressive. This is represented by the swift transformation of the animals on the farm. The seven principles of animalism, known as the seven commandments, are reduced to a single principle that reads, “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The animals become more and more like the humans that they had once thought were awful. They walk upright, wear clothes and carry whips. The animals have become the very thing that they had been working against. If nothing else, we are left with the feeling that a totalitarian government is never a good idea.
While it is classified as Dystopian literature, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World starts out looking much like a utopia. The key idea is happiness and free love. Sexual gratification is encouraged and even demanded. If one does not feel happy, he should take soma, a powerful drug with no ill side effects. Society is broken into castes where each group loves what they do, in fact, they have been conditioned to love their role from the moment that they were “hatched”. Unlike savages, they use the Bokanovsky process in order to grow eggs in bottles where they are conditioned. Lower castes get doses of alcohol and oxygen deprivation while the Alpha’s are bred to be superior. People are not attached. They are conditioned to belong to everyone else and see death as normal. Books of the past have been burned so as not to disrupt society. Knowing and happiness do not fit hand in hand. Brave New World is another case of totalitarian government gone wrong. Huxley himself classified this book as an anti-utopian story that serves as a warning of what happens when government has control over the new and powerful up and coming technologies. Some of the ideas Huxley shows to us are the removal of ovaries, the Bokanovsky process, growing and conditioning babies in bottles, hypnopaedic conditioning and soma. Some is perhaps the most critical of all of the pieces. A drugged person asks few questions. The idea that happiness and truth do not mix seems to be a common motif. Mustapha Mond claims that the World State prioritizes happiness at the expense of truth– people are happier when they do not have to face the truth. Happiness is fulfilled by the immediate gratification of sex, drugs and consumer items. Mond makes it clear that people who are determined to find truth will be eliminated as they are a hazard to themselves and the world. John is threatened with being sent away many times. As with other Dystopian societies, this one is not just a look at what could be, but also a look at the world Huxley was living in while writing the novel. Brave New World serves as a warning against a totalitarian government and aims to show the consequences of an all-powerful state.
George Orwell follows with other anti-totalitarianism Dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-four. Having witnessed totalitarian government first hand in Spain and Russia, Orwell publishes Nineteen Eighty-four in order to sound an alarm in the Western nations who were still unsure about how they would approach the rise of communism. Like Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four had warnings about the use of new technology in already oppressive societies. Nineteen Eighty-four shows a society who uses modern technology in order to monitor and control society. The society is so controlled that even having disloyal thoughts is against the law. The Oceania of 1984 has parallels in both Stalinist Russia and Hitlerian Germany. There are informants everywhere and Big Brother is watching at all times. Along with Animal Farm and Brave New World, Nineteen eighty-four has a rigid social caste system. Most people are Proles, then the Outer Party, followed by less than 2% of the population in the Inner Party and of course, Big Brother. The citizens have no right to personal lives or to personal thought. It is never made clear whether the Big Brother displayed on posters with the slogan “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” is an actual person. The phrase, “who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past” rings true today. When books are banned, history censored and those in charge make all of the rules, the regime is impossible to change. Perhaps one of the most daunting realizations to come out of Nineteen Eighty-four is the fact that the regime will stay in control perhaps for thousands of years. When a society has gotten into the position that Oceania has, it is not easily changed.
The three books discussed all offer a glimpse into worlds that most people would stay far away from. They offer a look into what our future is and what our future could be. All three books present a society that is in the grips of a totalitarian government; a society that began as an attempt toward a perfect world but ended with anything but Utopia.
Huxley, A. (1932). Brave New World. London: Chatto & Windus.
Orwell, G. (1945). Animal Farm. London: Secker & Warburg.
Orwell, G. ( 1949). Nineteen eighty-four. London: Secker & Warburg.
