The Problem with Dystopias

Understanding Evil in order to Combat it

Ok, so this isn’t a fiction post. It isn’t a story. It definitely isn’t about The Oracle. But it is about fiction and fiction stories….

I guess I’m a sucker for reading dystopias, but that doesn’t prevent me from being rather annoyed by the lack of thought that many riders put into them. 

One of the biggest issues in the writing of dystopias is that people forget that dystopias have to work. I understand that the reason that you write a dystopia is because you want to point out what’s wrong with the specific dystopia that you are presenting, and you want to have your character fight the dystopia and win. But you have to think about what happens before the book gets started. And I believe in order to write a good dystopia you have to make sure that it’s a dystopia that was capable of arriving at the first point of your story.

This means that you have to ask yourself what is necessary for a society to become dystopic. I would like to point out that this is very different from the question of anarchy. It is perfectly possible for a society to devolve into anarchy and for that anarchy not to work. Indeed, that is almost the definition of anarchy: a society that doesn’t work. 

But that is different than what most of us mean when we talk about a dystopia. What we mean when we talk about a dystopia is that you have a society that is functioning or at the very least used to function ten minutes ago. It is a society where people are managing to eat enough to live, and where the powers that be able to keep them in check and keep them functioning in the direction that they want them to. And in that context there is something wrong, something evil pervading the society, something your character has to fight.

So let’s take one bad example. Let’s say that you have proposed for your dystopia that this society has an evil king. And let’s suppose that under this evil king, or a bunch of soldiers that carry out the dictates of this evil king. And this evil king is giving a lot of orders that are causing a lot of catastrophe in the society. OK so there you have not a very good dystopia, but at least the beginnings of one. Now I would ask you a question why is anyone obeying the dictates of this evil king?

The answer going back into history is that people obey kings because societies tended to work well when people obeyed the king. In other words what they saw as the possibilities were: 1) to obey the king and have a functional society, or 2) To disobey the king and have anarchy. [see the comments below for the distinctions between how I am defining ‘king’ and ‘dictator’ here.]

What grew up in that society was a societal belief in the king. In other words, in every society that has a monarch, you have a large percentage of the population who are ‘monarchists”. People who believe philosophically in obedience to the monarchy. And the reason that the king can succeed in giving people orders is that he plays into that belief. 

That means that what the king is doing has got to be playing into their beliefs. He has to be giving at least lip service, but in most cases, much more than lip service, to this idea that he is a king and he is doing the right thing, and he is helping the people or at the very least helping the nobles, or perhaps helping the monarchists, or something. He has to be constantly proving himself to them in his actions.

Now let’s contrast this with a dictatorship. A dictatorship (regardless of the name) is not drawing upon history, but is drawing upon crisis. A dictator tends to arise when the ordinary supports of a society have broken down, and the society isn’t working, so the dictator comes in. He  along with his cabal, implements policies that make the society work. The trains run on time, the money stops being devalued, the enemy at the gates gets pushed back, food is delivered to the table… the dictator must be doing something That is causing his Cabal, and even a large minority of the people, to believe that he is acting in their favour.

Now let’s look at a theocracy. This is perhaps the area in which modern writers of dystopian fiction do the absolute worst job. In a theocracy, the leaders are not appealing in general to a crisis. Nor are they appealing in general to history. Indeed, it might almost be said that they are appealing to the opposite of history. They are appealing to the future. In a theocracy, the leaders are appealing to god or gods, and the general idea of a power that is going to make the future better. It may be an earthly future that is better, or it may be a heavenly future that is better, but they are appealing to the future.

But in all of these cases, the power structure has to work. It cannot just ‘be bad’. The king has to provide someone that the people can look to and bow down to, and feel good about the fact that they have such a good king. The dictator has got to make the trains run on time or beat back the enemies at the gate. The theocratic leader has to provide continual assurance to the people that their souls are in the right place that their society is moving to a more and more moral structure.

And that is where so many of these dystopias breakdown. So many of these dystopias provide us with a situation, where nothing works and nobody likes this system. Indeed, the authors don’t even tend to point back to a time when everybody liked the system. They don’t point back to a time when the system worked. They don’t point back to a time when the dictator managed to get them out of the problems they were in, or when the king really was a good king, but had a bad don, or that the ayatollah came in during a time of moral anarchy, and managed to make everybody move onto the same page as far as how they should be living. 

Now it’s perfectly possible that you wish to situate your dystopia at a time after all of those things. A time when all of these things have stopped happening. But you can’t really have an after if no one can picture the time before. If all that your reader sees is an evil theocrat, where none of his priests, believe the religion, where everybody’s being raped and pillaged and the economy doesn’t work and the military doesn’t work and the starships don’t fly… then you aren’t really proposing a system that used to work

So I propose that if you’re going to write a dystopia, you should look at at least three things, and make sure that at least in the past your dystopia was able to do these things. The society may be failing now, but the foundations should still be visible.

Moral unity 

The first thing that any social system has to provide is moral unity. Any successful system has to be built around a common understanding of who they are as a people, and the direction that they wish to go. There has to be a comprehensible, well-taught, understood, and agreed-upon moral philosophy that affects the culture as a whole.

Depending upon what kind of dystopia you are writing that moral philosophy may be greater or less in certain areas, but it has to work for everyone (or at least a large enough mass of significant people). If you look back at communism, if you look at Hitler, even if you look at the Mongols, you will see that there was an overarching sense of belief in who they were as a culture and where they were going. A theocracy will very much tend to focus on the moral nature of the culture and a dictatorship will turn very much to focus on the practical nature of the culture, but they all must include moral unity.

Successful hierarchy 

Every society must have a successful hierarchy. Obviously, this does not need to mean permanently successful, but it does have to mean that is successful in the beginning. There needs to be groups of people in the society that understand their place in the society and are prepared to work at that place. so Hitler had a place for young people. He had a place for the army. He had a place for his Secret Service, and he also had a place for ordinary Germans. They very much had a role in their society. School teachers when they were teaching their children definitely felt like they were playing their role in their society, as were the children.

One may disagree profoundly with the ayatollahs, but there is no question that the religious system that has been put in place in those areas gives everyone a rule, and everyone has something that they’re supposed to be doing. Everyone has their part to play. 

Practicality 

In order for a dystopian society to arise in the beginning, at least they have to do something that works. They have to provide bread and circuses. People have to be able to have confidence that they can raise their children in relative security.

Why does it Matter?

It matters because usually there is a reason that we write dystopias. There is something about the dystopia that we wish our hero, and thus our readers, to be against, to fight against. If we write a dystopia that doesn’t work, then we aren’t actually arming our readers to fight against them. If don’t know why fascism, or Marxism, or Maoism, or any other ism, actually works, why it appeals to its audience, then we can’t effectively fight against it.

I love comments, especially intelligent comments that disagree.