Philosophical Point - What Is A Dystopia?

Some good points have been raised, the last few days. What makes a Dystopia a Dystopia? What is the difference between a Dystopia and, say, a post-Apocalyptic setting or a successful alien invasion setting such as Capella's Golden Eyes or The Tripods?

The key difference in a Dystopia is that we have not fallen knowingly under an alien influence, or succumbed to a disaster of some sort which has reduced society to some state of barbarism.

A Dystopia, at least the ones gracing science fiction books and media, is something which society creates all by itself.

"In order to ensure our security and continuing stability, the Republic will be reorganized into the first Galactic Empire, for a safe and secure society which I assure you will last for ten thousand years."

[Senate fills with enormous applause]

"So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause."
-- Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith

"—of course, this country is essentially totalitarian. But it employs a subtle, well, this just might have been a fortunate result, but it skillfully managed to leave little bits of freedom intact. By providing this kind of candy, they can proclaim, 'Of course, every citizen has the right to freedom. However, freedom must be controlled for the sake of the public good.' The claim actually sounds legit, huh?"
Shuya and Noriko silently waited for Shogo to continue.
"That was how the country became this way. Seventy-five years ago."
-- Battle Royale

When a society becomes dystopian, on the surface things go about mostly as you expect to see them in the regular, normal world. People go about daily business - shopping, going to work, the daily commute. Children go to school, where they learn various lessons. Unless the society is completely "lock-them-up-in-cages-when-they're-done=working" bonkers, they have places to go to for leisure and recreation.

However, dig down not too far and you will see something horrific; something unavoidable, something burned into the psyche of every man, woman and child in this society; something deeply engrained in the collective mindset of its people, such that their attitude towards this clear obscenity which they at first tolerate, and later grow to love, marks them as alien to the reader as the sea in Solaris:-

Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.
-- The Handmaid's Tale

"There is more than one kind of freedom...Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it."
-- The Handmaid's Tale

"It was a pleasure to burn."

"With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word `intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar."

"We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against."

"People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these."

"If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war."

"Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy."

"We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. We have our fingers in the dike. Hold steady. Don't let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world. We depend on you. I don't think you realize how important you are, to our happy world as it stands now."
-- All of the above from Fahrenheit 451

"It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak -- 'child hero' was the phrase generally used -- had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police."

"The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp."

"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."
-- Nineteen Eighty Four

So why would society willingly throw away such things as rationality, jurisprudence, the processes of democracy and justice, and go down a road where people are led by some bizarre, populist, dumb as rocks corrupt oligarchical dictatorship?

In some cases, apparently, it's survival. The Mega-Cities in Judge Dredd are the only human enclaves left after Bob Booth's Great Atomic War; the Colonists on the colony of Plateau in Larry Niven's "A Gift From Earth" have to accept the Covenant of Planetfall and being ruled by the Crew, because they had nowhere else to go but the monolithic mesa known as Mount Lookitthat - the rest of Plateau's land surface lay beneath a dense atmosphere like Venus'.

Indeed, Larry Niven's early Known Space ARM stories are unbelievably grim. The penalty for any kind of crime, no matter how trivial - spitting on the sidewalk, letting your dog foul the grass in the park - was execution and mandatory organ harvesting. Organlegging was a thing practiced by organised crime syndicates.

In other cases, the changes are assumed to have come into force some time in the past, giving society a little time to let the changes soak into their battered collective psyche.

Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed to have been set in a period where society had been under the thumb of Big Brother for a good few decades - though it could easily have been six months, because the Party would never let the truth about its history be known. The society of Battle Royale had been in existence for some 75 years by the time of the novel, in 1997, meaning that the fascistic government of The Great Dictator had taken over in 1922.

On TV, the Terran Empire of Jerome Bixby's Mirror Universe continuum in Star Trek seemed to have predated even the time of Zephram Cochrane and First Contact on April 5, 2063, since the opening montage during the credits of the Mirror Universe two-part episode "Through A Mirror, Darkly" of the spinoff series Enterprise showed that the roots of the Empire had been formed during the Age of Sail - a time of barbarism, enslavement and corruption and an Empire in the UK, perhaps, which never, in their case, ended.

Also on TV, the society of Bregna in the short-lived MTV animation series Aeon Flux seemed to have been benevolent until its takeover by one Trevor Goodchild, the protagonist of the story. Bregna, the Breen and Trevor Goodchild remained constants throughout the series - even though every episode had zero continuity with any of the others.

And sometimes, for instance in the case of the Terran Empire, of Larry Niven's ARM story setting, and the worlds of Kurt Vonnegut Jr's Harrison Bergeron, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and Margaret Attwood's The Handmaid's Tale, things become dystopian because it is of benefit to some members of society. A dystopia for many might be a Utopia for some; and those for who it is a Utopia hold all the cards. The sound of liberty dying is indeed that of rapturous applause.

What makes the protagonist, then, any different from the rest? Because, in most cases, the protagonist comes to the realisation that, in some key way, the society in which he lives is wrong.

Winston discovers how the Party in Nineteen Eighty Four would make unpersons of the most loyal Party members as much as the least, because the sharpest minds might ultimately twig that what they are doing is actually wrong, and all that intelligence would then be turned against them. Montag, in Fahrenheit 451, discovers just what it is he has been burning, and is horrified by his own actions.

Sometimes, the protagonist is an external influence - Aeon Flux herself comes from Monica, the rebellious anarch nation next door, where she is a constant thorn in Trevor Goodchild's plans. Captain Kirk, in "The Return of The Archons," stumbled upon Landru's planet in time to witness their Red Hour, Star Trek's answer to Orwell's "Two Minutes Hate."

But sometimes, the protagonist not only does not oppose the party line; he supports it. Judge Dredd himself supports the Draconian Mega-City One Justice System, for instance.

Next time: Why do we write about Dystopias? With some examples from the world of television.