Dystopian Novels: Fiction or Future?

          In 1931, Aldous Huxley based the dystopian novel Brave New World, six hundred years in the future. In 1958, Huxley revisited the ideas of his novel in Brave New World Revisited: and concluded that his predictions could come to be in less than two hundred years. Orwell wrote his dystopian novel 1984 (1948), less than forty years after it was penned. More recently published dystopian novels such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), and French novelist, Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (2015), drew on contemporary societal changes as inspiration for their dysfunctional societies set in a far-too-near future: Houellebecq’s vision occurs only seven years after publication. Once considered as futuristic fantasies, are these authors providing a literary Doomsday countdown? There are overlapping concepts in all these novels, that are based on the fundamental flaws of humanity; guilt, greed, and fear – all of which leave humanity vulnerable to controlling forces. These societies live in totalitarian isolation from other nations in their fictional worlds, but what are their parallels in reality? Current affairs over the last few decades would seem to suggest that Oscar Wilde may have been on to something when he proffered that, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”1

          Freewill would suggest that mankind has a choice, but humanity is easily malleable and when revisiting his Brave New World, Huxley put forward an uncomfortable blueprint for future potential oppressors.  So, what makes us so vulnerable? We’ve seen tyrannical behavior from despots around the world for centuries, and yet, even in ‘modern civilization,’ we see nations divided, and atrocities acted in the name of ‘the people.’ We shout, “Never Again!” to genocides, wars, displacement and yet, the pattern repeats, and we allow it to happen. And why? Because what we are really vulnerable to is the ‘Allure of Persecution’ (AoP) and our would-be tyrannical governments know how to apply it. Seek out a fear or weakness, play to the audience that shares that fear, embolden the reasoning behind that fear with repeated rhetoric, justify the feelings, throw in some hate, and you are left with an individual or group, who feel justified in any behavior to save themselves from that fear. 

          The beauty of the Allure of Persecution is the flexibility of it as a marketing tool to sell any idea. Once your audience has had their fears justified, they are malleable to accept solutions, that in a fearless environment, may conflict with their inner logical or moralistic compass. Every day, our AoP is played on by the media, governments, or power-players, seeking to manipulates us.  Commercials for hair-growth products play on men’s fears of going bald; they’ll look older, won’t be sexy, and won’t find an attractive partner. Why do they believe the rhetoric? Because the media has been selling it for centuries. Then what follows when you’re at your most vulnerable, an acknowledgement of your persecution, followed by a solution: You’re being persecuted for being bald… buy this product...and we can save you! In 1984, Winston Smith’s greatest fear is rats, once he has been ground down by torture, the Party take Smith to Room 101, and rats in a cage are tied to his face; terrified he not only gives up his love, Julia, but begs for her to be eaten by the rats. Once his spirit is destroyed, he will agree to anything, even seeing five fingers instead of the four that are held up. The rise of social media has made the world even more vulnerable to the Allure of Persecution, but if we continually allow ourselves to become irresponsible victims, we may wake up to find ourselves living in someone else’s Brave New World.

 

“Community. Identity. Stability”2

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

 

          In the futuristic society of Brave New World there was no alcohol, tobacco, or illicit drugs available to the people, instead society are issued a chemical compound called soma, which relieves depression and maintains a sense of community, identity and stability by subduing anyone’s anxiety or dissatisfaction with the world they live in. When ‘revisiting’ his novel in the late 1950s, Huxley discussed the use of “Chemical Persuasion”3 to subdue the masses; on the eve of the psychedelic 1960s, he suspected that LSD may be the drug of choice. In reality, the negative association with the mind-bending drug as a creator of the illusions that users had superhuman strength and, in some cases, an ability to fly, led to accidental suicides and long-term mental health issues: society viewed this drug as anti-social. However, in more recent years, medical research programs are investigating LSD as a potential treatment or cure for depression, schizophrenia and other mental health ailments. “Psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin from “magic mushrooms” have been proposed to ease depression. But the hallucination side effect makes these powerful drugs less ideal as therapeutics. Now, scientists in China have designed LSD analogs that appear to have solved the hallucination problem.”4 The nature of hallucinogenic drugs are generally more isolating, as the individual’s reaction can be unpredictable, and therefore, even though research and development is ongoing for their mental health benefits, hallucinogenics remain a less suitable for achieving a sense of passive community.

          However, a drug like cannabis has a more predictable effect on the user, creating a mellow, amenable state of relaxation. Cannabis was originally introduced to Western Society during the early colonization of India and Pakistan, where the plant grew indigenously. William Brooke O’Shaughnessy, a young Scottish chemist, moved to the Indian colonies, where he researched the historical use of cannabis, publishing his results in The Bengal Dispensatory. (1842). Since then, it has been used globally throughout society with confusing levels of acceptance and legalization. In Adelaide, Australia, it has been legal for fifty years to grow up to six plants for personal use, but anything more is considered drug trafficking and comes with stiff prison sentences. In the UK, for decades it was an on-the-spot fine and criminal-record but in 2004, the drug was downgraded to a lower-class and decriminalized, which meant the first offences were dismissed with a warning if holding enough to be gleamed as personal use, and criminal charges only considered if multiple offences occurred.  However, with the expansion of the stronger, hydroponic strains of cannabis, the law was changed again in 2009, and the drug reclassified as a Class B drug, alongside amphetamines and barbiturates.

          The debate in the United States for legalizing marijuana, has been in some part based on the racial stereotyping and persecution of young black men on minor drug charges. This Allure of Persecution portrayed is that marijuana is widely used among white elitist communities with no consequences, but that the Black and minority users have been unfairly targeted and given disproportionate prison sentences for decades. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), state that, “Marijuana use is roughly equal among Blacks and whites, yet Blacks are 3.73 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.”5 And the U.S. President Joe Biden announced a mandate in October 2022, to overturn thousands of cases of personal-use marijuana convictions, that unfairly imprisoned people of color.

          Cannabis-use can exacerbate certain mental health conditions, but the overall properties of cannabinoids are similar to the chemicals produced naturally in our bodies related to appetite, memory, movement, and pain. Research suggests that the benefits may overcome the negatives and are now included in a variety of health treatments to reduce anxiety, inflammation and relieve pain. Because of the connection to appetite and creating the reaction known as the ‘munchies’, cannabis has also been used by cancer patients going through chemotherapy to heighten an appetite destroyed by the chemical treatment. With this growing acceptance of cannabis for medicinal use throughout the country, it is generally considered a chill drug now popularly used for medicinal and recreation relaxation; however, let’s not be immune to its potential to subdue a society and create a stable community. Over 21 states have legalized recreational use of marijuana and a further 10 states have decriminalized the drug’s use. Have the puritanical powers recognized an over-caution towards recreational use? Or have they recognized a way of feeding the AoP, to manipulate society into voluntarily sedated itself with today’s ‘soma’?

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“Who controls the past controls the future:

Who controls the present controls the past.” 6

George Orwell, 1984

 

          George Orwell’s 1984 envisioned a world where fake news was not just accepted, but that the protagonist, Winston Smith and others, were employed to ‘correct’ the news archives. During his interrogation, his indoctrination included accepting, “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war.”7 By wiping out the past, the ‘Party’ that controlled Oceania, were able to brainwash and control the Outer Party members and Proletariat through a process of marketing fear and persecution. Smith lived in a world where he was constantly observed by Big Brother, and in the real world, technological advancements have created reality from Orwell’s imagination. Closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) have been part of the landscape for decades, our home-entertainment screens now mirror the peering screens of Big Brother. Tech giants have Googlebots, Alexas, and Siris that listen in and take our requests, measure our rooms, monitor our online movements, and have cameras just waiting to view and record us.

          The Orwellian hate-filled rallies ceased to become limited to fiction, as Huxley recognized when he explored how people could be manipulated in Brave New World Revisited. Huxley described how Adolf Hitler “brainwashed” the masses by holding huge rallies, “In the evening…they succumb more easily to the dominating force of a stronger will.” 8 By repeating the same false information over and over, when the audience is fatigued and their brains more susceptible to the influence of propaganda. Huxley had suggested this in his 1931 novel, but watched it come to fruition with Hitler’s Nurnberg rallies, when mastering of AoP enabled him to brainwash an entire nation into accepting the genocide of the Jewish people. In recent history, we have seen the same techniques employed by the former president, Donald Trump, who is a master of misinformation, fake facts and manipulating an audience. Trump played on the allure of persecution in his run for president; appealing to the white manufacturing workers of the Midwest states, such as Indiana, who were losing their livelihoods due to trade agreements that offshored their jobs to cheaper tax and employment hubs in Mexico. Trump repeatedly told his followers at rallies and by his abuse of the social media platform Twitter, that “Mexicans are rapists” and to “Build a Wall,” and the factory workers accepted the allure of persecution, that their jobs were being stolen by Mexicans, and voted for Trump. In her attempt to understand the working class man’s support of Trump, Farah Stockman witnessed how Trump took advantage of their AoP when the factories were closing to win their votes, “Rexnord of Indianapolis is moving to Mexico and rather viciously firing all of its 3000 workers. This is happening all over our country. No More!”8

          The Russian war to take over Ukraine, offers up an example of how the AoP can be used both negatively and positively by both sides respectively; to justify the beginning of a war, and to gain resources to end an unjust war. Putin has made no secret of his belief that the biggest tragedy in modern history was the collapse of the Soviet Union, where he was a high-ranking member of the KGB – the original Big Brother. His second attempt at annexing Ukraine had to be sold to the Russian people and Putin’s initial AoP target was buried deep in the psyche of history.      By playing on the fears of the older generations who remembered the horrors of WWII against Hitler’s Germany, Putin manufactured news that their Ukrainian brothers were being taken over by the Nazis and Russia must again send out their heroic soldiers to overcome the Nazis and save their brothers.

          In an October 2022 interview, David Letterman asked the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, about Putin’s rhetoric to justify the war. Zelensky articulates how the art of AoP was used negatively by the Government of the Russian people, “They purposely developed this narrative…to brainwash them. They had to convince them and keep them in that information bubble…that Ukrainians do not exist.” The President believes that the authoritarian government first installs their ‘truth,’ then restricts access to alternative truths through media, until either the people are convinced, or they are too afraid of the government to question the truth. Zelensky goes on to explain that war provides, “The conditions in which you have to choose to either remain human or turn into an animal; a terrorist, a marauder, a rapist…and we saw this in the Russian Occupation. It is a difficult choice to make because of the hatred towards enemies who took away the life one had before.”9 During the interview, Zelensky also described that he had to raise awareness for the persecution of his people with interviews with worldwide audiences, to plead for more air defense weapons to defend his country, and he did this by appealing to the World’s Allure for the Persecuted.  When international support began to slow down in the summer of 2022, Zelensky’s wife Olena addressed the United States Congress in-person, from the perspective of a wife and mother, describing the atrocities and sacrifices that were being suffered to appeal for more US-aid to help end this war and save the lives of children, wives, and husbands. 

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“Better never means better for everyone…

It always means worse, for some.”10

                                                        Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

 

          In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid’s Tale, the rise in mortality rates of babies was blamed on chemical toxins and birth control, including abortions, the Pill, the Morning-After Pill, and homosexuality. Atwood had many inspirations for her dysfunctional society where women were controlled, including the fall of the Shah of Iran, and the formation of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979. Women who had had a certain freedom and education under the influence of the pro-West Shah, were suddenly forced to wear strict Islamic codes of dress, and the Morality Police were formed to ensure that no woman show a hair of her head or an inch of her skin. And like Orwell’s Thought Police, there were official channels to punish those who broke the laws.

          The Conspiracy Theorists of the Extreme Right today, use the Allure of Persecution by touting the false claims of ‘Replacement Theory.’ The falsehoods claim that Planned Parenthood and other pro-choice movements, were backed by Democrats who use abortion and contraception to reduce the white population and replace it with a Black population who will vote Democrat.  The call to arms against this perceived persecution is to demand that white people need to outlaw abortion and discredit Critical Race Theory to survive or the white race will be eliminated! Their argument is that abortion encourages white women to focus on their careers and not have children or single-child families, whereas minority groups tend to have large families who would vote more for Democrats, until ultimately the Democrats would be voted in permanently. 

          The link between the two may seem tenuous, but as Atwood’s protagonist Offred confesses it took them a while to wake up to what was happening: they hadn’t questioned when members of Congress were hanged by ‘terrorists,’ or when there was a nationwide lockdown ‘for their own safety’ until it was too late, and when they came out of their homes, the new order had been established without so much as a battle. “In a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”11 For any governing regime to take complete control, it doesn’t need to have the support of the people – the ambivalence or apathy will do fine. Small steps are often all that is needed to set up the processes. In The Handmaid’s Tale, cash currency is disposed of, and everyone’s money becomes electronic. On the same day as all women are sent home from their jobs and told they are no longer allowed to work, they discover that all their access to money has been removed – as Moira says, “They just click a button and all the accounts marked with a F [for female] are frozen.”12 With some footwork, this money would be transferred to their husband or nearest male relative, if they had one. Today, this sounds unreasonable and unthinkable, but it was only one hundred years ago when women weren’t allowed to own property: in England, on the death of a husband or father, the estate was entailed to the nearest living male relative who had the choice to continue to support the women of the family or turn them out on the street. The UK is currently considering moving from paper money to only online currency. That is only one-step away from controlling all life’s resources, as Atwood suggested writing back in 1985.

 

“If you control the children,

you control the future”13

Michel Houellebecq, Submission

 

          The publication of Submission in 2015 was promoted on the cover of satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo on the same day that the magazine’s offices were bombed by Islamic terrorists. Houellebecq himself received death threats for the controversial and Islamophobic ideas in his dystopian novel set only seven years in the future.  With the Right-wing Le Pen on the verge of taking power, the Liberals and the Muslim Brotherhood join forces to create a coalition; the Muslim party concedes many of the usual political issues, such as the economy to the Liberals to run, “What they care about is birthrate and education…whichever segment of the population has the highest birthrate, and does the best job of transmitting its values, wins.”14 Houellebecq raises an interesting concept of how could a gender-equal society with a secular government like France, whose mantra has always been “viva la difference” be persuaded to persecute women, homosexuality and be converted into an Islamic state?  We only have to look back to Nazi Germany and the Hitler youth to see that the idea of changing a society starts with the children. The values that we raise our children with are the values that will dictate their lives. It is well documented that racism and prejudice are not inherent emotions but instead are socially constructed attitudes imbued in children as they grow, as is the same with political ideologies.

The Republican party in the US will argue that the schools and universities have become overrun by liberals, and the arguments about Critical Race Theory are central to many political agendas in the current climate. Therefore, if you are planning on changing the beliefs of a society for the long-term, it makes sense to start with the children.  In The Handmaid’s Tale, the aunts talk regularly about how much easier it will be for the future handmaids who will be born into the roles, as they will have no memories of life being different; they will be raised to believe that they are doing God’s work as ‘concubines/surrogates’ for the good of society.

          When we enter Huxley’s Brave New World society is already conditioned and maintained with the use of soma, and a learned disgust for past societal structures. Orwell’s 1984 has allusions to a post-apocalyptic world and is perpetuated by fear, torture, and isolation. Atwood’s Eliade is the result of a second civil war in America, which we learn in occasional flashbacks. But in a way Houellebecq’s future Paris is more terrifying; through the thought-processes of his protagonist, the bored, middle-aged lecturer François, we see how the Allure or Persecution plays out as he is slowly indoctrinated into welcoming new ideologies. The shift is slow, subtle, persuasive, carrot-on-a-stick based movements as we see this once, decadent academic eventually embrace his polygamous and career benefits, as he converts to the new system, and turns a blind eye to his past female colleagues who are discretely eliminated from the campus. Real and permanent change comes slowly when it’s easier for us not to notice.   

 

“It can’t happen here: anything can happen anywhere, given the circumstances”15

Margaret Atwood

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          If Climate Change accelerates at a rate that scientists are warning, then we have visions of Snowpiercer, the 2013 post-apocalyptic science fiction action film based on the French climate fiction graphic novel Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob. Humanity is forced to survive on a train that must constantly circle the frozen waste that is left of the world. Streaming services seem to offer us no end of “entertainment” featuring terrors of an apocalyptic future, but are we really moving towards such a future, and can we stop in? Could the fiction that entertains us happen in real life? A dystopian world is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as “an imagined state or society where there is great suffering or injustice.” In many parts of the world throughout history, people have been subjected to dystopian worlds that haven’t had to be imagined – so is that the key word? Imagined? And how closely does that tie in with the Allure of Persecution, which is often an imagined state, which is either used to persuade or control us, or that we use ourselves to justify our actions and agendas. Whether the sudden loss of civil liberties that women experienced when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan and instigated fundamental laws, the loss of women’s rights in the 1979 Revolution in Iran, the storming of the US Capital on Jan 6th, overturning laws such as Roe Vs Wade, Hitler Youth, transatlantic slavery…the truth is that we have seen horrors in real life that far-outreach the imagined states of dystopia.

          If these authors have more insight than the general population, why aren’t we listening and acting upon their warnings? Are these simply ‘stories’ to entertain us – even in the face of evidence that life is imitating this artform? Or is the allure of persecution too strong for individual groups to act against the potential offenders?      Amazon was an online bookshop, now we buy our food from them, and they map our rooms for interior design. It caters to everything from our online products, our developing reliance on Artificial Intelligence, and soon our cellular contracts. The profits of our trust put founder Jeff Bezos on the moon – but what does his advanced technology do with the humongous amounts of data that his services collect? Does the convenience of having ‘stuff’ shipped to our door, further house-binding us to watch our streaming services, trump the risks of an Amazon takeover. Do we utilize our own AoP when we claim that, “we can’t use other services because there are so many security risks using unknown smaller sites and we could have our credit card details stolen!” …beware soon we could have Amazon not just delivering goods to our doors but dictating our lives through our screens. Are we like Ofred, “not paying attention?”16 Are we capable of identifying or questioning the agendas of governmental and/or private institutions before it’s too late? Are these novels offering imperative warnings that society should wake up to? Or are they providing a textbook to potential dictators on how to get the populace to succumb to a new normal? Brave New World Revisited reads like Trump’s marketing campaign, in which case should we burn those books and prohibit these controversial ideas from circulating? They burnt the books that could spread rebellious movements in Fahrenheit 451, and so by burning the books then we fulfill the prophesy. When society is stoned on our cannabis soma, having our wants anticipated and delivered to our doors, while we watch our preference-predicted streaming services, then maybe we won’t care. Or maybe we’ll wake up and it will be too late.

          Each author reviewed in this paper has provided a warning in their novels of societies’ complacency throughout history, which has enabled them to be overtaken by authoritarian governments. Through brainwashing and fear, people will accept what the perceive to be the better option when seduced by the Allure of Persecution. Perhaps humanity has reached its limits of acceptance, and the only solution to stopping the Doomsday clock to Dystopia, requires the human race to reassert its united humanity and courage. Let’s look positively to the East and the uprisings in Iran and China. Never in their history have they seen the strength of women burning their hijabs. Perhaps the utopia that we seek is not in the Allure of Persecution, but the casting-off of persecution. Perhaps the ultimate utopia can only be achieved if women are in charge.  Zelensky gave us the answer in his Defenders of Ukraine address, when he talked about the great spirit of the Ukrainian people, explaining that the military alone could not win the war, and that it was the people recognizing their own fear of losing their democracy and freedom, ordinary people risking their lives to fight the tyrannical oppression threatened by Russia; farmers moving landmines with their bare hands, old ladies throwing Molotov cocktails at Russian soldiers, all united to stand up and say, “I’m not afraid, I can do it!” 17

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End Notes

 

1. Oscar Wilde, “The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Selection,” accessed December 18, 2022, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv310vj6p.

2. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York, NY: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006).

3. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 1958).

4. Angus Liu, “Relieving Depression with LSD-like Drugs without Causing Hallucinations,” Fierce Biotech, January 31, 2022, https://www.fiercebiotech.com/research/relieving-depression-lsd-like-drugs-without-hallucinations#:~:text=Psychedelics%20such%20as%20LSD%20and,have%20solved%20the%20hallucination%20problem.

5. ACLU Staff, “The War on Marijuana in Black and White,” American Civil Liberties Union (American Civil Liberties Union, October 22, 2018), https://www.aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/sentencing-reform/war-marijuana-black-and-white.

6. George Orwell, 1984 (New York, NY: Signet Classics, 1977).

7. Orwell, 1984, 257.

8. Huxley, Brave New World,

9. Farah Stockman, American Made What Happens to People When Work Disappears (New York, NY: Random House, 2021).50

10. “My next Guest with David Letterman and Volodymyr Zelenskyy | Official Clip | Netflix,” YouTube (YouTube, December 7, 2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJrWFn5lwU8. (00.08:00-00.10.50)

11. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (New York, NY: Anchor Books Edition, 2017).

12. Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

13. Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

14. Michel Houellebecq, Submission (Vancouver, Canada: Langara College, 2018), 64.

15. Houellebecq, Submission, 64.

16. Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale, xiii.

17. Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale, 56.

18. “My next Guest with David Letterman and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, (00.31.50)

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