So, I had a question asked today about which of these three dystopian choices I'd rather live under, and one of them really stood out to me as being "what's so bad about that?"
Brave New World/Wall-E- Life is physically pleasant but meaningless
Cyberpunk- Technology is extremely advanced but inequality is rampant and corporations run everything
Under His Eye- Life is superficially more "normal" than the others, but extreme religious fundamentalists run everything.
And I really had to ask, like...what's so bad about #1? I admit, I never read Brave New World, and I'm too old to have watched Wall-E, but honestly, a life that is physically pleasant but meaningless is utopia. Keep in mind, my own ethics are geared toward maximizing well being, including pleasure, and doing it without meaning. Meaning is a holdover from the protestant work ethic and religious thinking. As someone who embraces humanism, I embrace the meaninglessness of it all and think we might as well have fun while it lasts.
So what's so bad about this? To be fair, i did do some research into Brave New World and Wall-E, and have found that yeah they're a little dystopian, but honestly? Still preferable to our current society. As I see it, we basically live in the cyberpunk world. Cyberpunk 2077 is just a version of our existing world except corporations run more stuff, and all of the problems of capitalism run wild out of control. I'll be coming back to this, but yes, Cyberpunk is just basically our future if we don't fix our crap now.
But let's talk about those other two. Apparerntly with Brave New World, they pump everyone's brains with chemicals to make them feel happy all of the time and make them docile. And I guess that is kinda creepy and dystopian, but to be fair, we do tend to do something similar in our society. our society creates mental illness and forces people to take little pills to be more productive and cope with the pain of living in such a horrible society. We pathologize stuff in such a way where simply failing to mesh with our pro-productivity capitalist culture is a disease that needs to be cured. ADHD is pathologized when I'm like, gee maybe the problem is society forces us to be constantly focused all the time. Autism is really just...being "different" and its core issues are again, not being able to cope in our existing capitalist society.
And I'm not saying that brave new world is good. I mean, I am for the pursuit of happiness, and all fo the liberty that comes with that, but I'm not about to say utopia is messing with peoples' brain chemistry to make them happy all the time. That is creepy. I do think people should be real and in their own minds.
As for Wall-E, uh, isnt that the kids movie with the robots sifting through trash all the time that characterizes humans as dullards because they have lives so pleasant they never have to work? Yeah, real protestant work ethic happy message there. I don't actually see that as dystopia, although I do think that the characterization of humans is particularly bad and biased there, and that state is primarily interpreted through our own cultural lens.
But yeah. I've said it back in the earliest days of this blog, but our society really is the matrix. if you want a real science fiction dystopia, look no further than our society in the 21st century. The matrix is a literal allegory for our society. It's an allegory of plato's cave. I mean we have this society that brainwashes from birth into this crazy religiously inspired work ethic, makes us feel like pieces of crap for daring to question the concept of work, we really do make people take happy pills to cope with how crappy our society is, and yeah, we basically are at the cyberpunk universe now. The only difference between cyberpunk and reality is that cyberpunk's problems are exaggerated to make them more mask off and in your face. But yeah. We really do have a society in which we are surrounded by advanced technology. Just think of it, you're probably reading this on a little pocket computer or LCD screen. You are probably surrounded with advanced technology all the time. We could automate away wide swaths of labor. But for some reason, we keep talking about the need to "create jobs" and we pride ourselves on being such "good workers" and the worst thing ever is just...giving people money where they sit around and do nothing. No, humans need to be made to do things, they need to be made to be productive all of the time. We have to keep working non stop all our lives just so number on chart goes up. We keep people in a perpetual state of precarity and poverty to keep people working. We have this feeling that we cant ever get ahead. That's normal. You're supposed to feel like that. Because if you were too comfortable, you might stop working. You need to be constantly uncomfortable and stressed financially so you keep working. You need to be in constant fear of losing your job and losing everything so that you keep working. our society literally runs on incapacitating stress and poverty to sustain itself. And in doing so, it makes the idea of a world where we...don't have to do that any more sound like the worst thing ever. But maybe what's really the bad dystopian society is actually our society now.
I keep saying it. Our society, in any other context, would literally be seen as dystopia. Work, in our society, would be seen as slavery, and often was seen as slavery by our ancestors. We just now, in this time, see it as a good thing. It's very culturally ingrained into us from birth, and most of us are given little chance to really question it. And often times those who do question it are considered crazy, or just plain lazy. Either way, we're written off. Many people just have this cold hard nosed idea of "that's the way it is" and seem to have not only resigned themselves to it, but seem to constantly crap on those who actually do see it as a problem and try to make it better, as if this is the best that things will ever get and anyone who tries to make them better will actually make them worse. I used to be that cynical, but now I'm not. Because I understand that our world really is socially constructed and that all of this can change if only we collectively decide it to be so and organize this way. It really is a bunch of rich people at the top who don't want the world to change because they profit off of all of this. And they control society and how it is through throwing tons of money through our political system to keep it the same. Which is why progressives are fought so hard in government. If we actually succeeded in making society better, they'd lose all of their power and their privilege would be sure to follow. So we keep society as it is, and keep people working as long as possible, to produce as much wealth as possible. Again, we're all slaves, and as George Carlin would say "no one seems to notice, no one seems to care."
But yeah. Make no mistake, we ARE the dystopia. We ARE the cyberpunk society. Cyberpunk is just a little more mask off about what it is while we tend to hide it better. The best way to maintain control is to have everyone share a mass delusion about how this is just how the world works and that we can't change it and don't bother even trying.
As such, to go back to the dilemma above, yeah, I'll take my risk with Brave New World/Wall-E. A pleasant life with no purpose sounds like utopia to me. I admit, those actual worlds do seem like dystopians, but in reality, I don't think my human centered capitalist approach is much better than the above description. A world that is pleasant and comfortable to live in and aims to make people happy? A world in which we embrace purposelessness and live for ourselves? Sign me the frick up. Sounds better than what we're currently doing.
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