A Dystopia of Our Own Design

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever. –George Orwell, 1984

More and more often, I look around and find that the themes of my favorite dystopian novels have come to life: separatism/division, erasure, controlling the past to control the future, the rich stamping on the poor while the poor take it out on each other, using technology to control and monitor our lives, etc. It is everything that we have been warned against, especially in literature—time and time again.

If we have been warned so often, how exactly did we end up here?

I believe that those who aimed to warn us may partly be to blame for the future we have found ourselves in. They did their best to warn us, to show us where we could go with technology and sociopolitical policies if we did not clean up our acts, and that is exactly the problem. They showed us exactly which way to go, and some people took up the torch not to avoid that future but to head straight for it.

Think about it: we assume that everyone takes away the same lessons from books, but we also know that books are often considered up for interpretation. What might be seen as a warning to one person, might be considered a blueprint for another—a means to their own ends, as it were. Whether their ends are for the betterment of humanity or not is up for debate, as is whether they justify the means they use to get there.

Perhaps this has to do with when we are being introduced to dystopian novels. The earliest I remember being introduced to a dystopian novel was when I was in the eighth grade, at just thirteen years old, when we read Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Now, I was considered rather mature for my age, so the themes were not lost on me. The ideas behind the book horrified me, in fact. I am not so sure if it affected the rest of my classmates as strongly, though. That could partly be due to the fact that we were listening to an audio book that was not particularly well-read. I remember during a part when the main character was crying—after an especially traumatic scene regarding a baby being killed—and the voice was acted out so horribly that almost my entire class laughed (I might have been the only one who did not).

Tell me, how can we expect people still young enough to laugh at something like that to grasp the complexities of a dystopian novel and comprehend that it is meant to warn you against what could come? No, this is not enough to expect that any of them would become the next dictator using 1984 as their blueprint. Still, starting students on dystopian novels when they are too young to understand what they are reading could cause issues with how they remember and treat those lessons later in life.

There is nothing wrong with trying to tell people to wake up and pay attention to what is going on in the world. If we do not, then we will continue down the path that we are already on and destroy society as we know it. However, we must be careful with how we handle our warnings once we produce them. We must get them into the hands of the right people and make sure that they understand what is being said, rather than twisting it to satisfy their own needs.

It all boils down to these three lessons:

Be careful what you write.

Be careful how you read.

Be careful how you teach.

Otherwise, the world will pay for it.