The irony is that many classic dystopian stories are actually written about today, the time and place where they were written, and not about some hypothetical future. 1984 was based on Orwell's experiences as a propaganda writer for Britain in WW2. Animal Farm was about the Soviet Union.
Fahrenheit 451 was inspired by McCarthyism. Saruman's orcs and trollocs in Lord of the Rings were supposed to represent industry, the factories and smelters that were destroying the English countryside in the 30s. The Hunger Games was about the Iraq war and how we numb ourselves on reality TV.
If you believe Jared Diamond (and I think he at least has a point), the point where we entered dystopia was when we invented agriculture 10,000 years ago. That was when humans began to accumulate surpluses that they could use to lord over other humans, and men began to serve men (and women to serve men too). Humans have a remarkable ability to adapt, though. Most of us don't think of agriculture as an evil soul-crushing machine, even though it was the beginning of large-scale repression, because it's so ingrained in our experience of how we live.
Not just Jared Diamond. There's a whole school of thought (albeit very small and disrespected) built around the concept. From wiki:
>Anarcho-primitivism is an anarchist critique of the origins and progress of civilization. According to anarcho-primitivism, the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence gave rise to social stratification, coercion, alienation, and population growth.
If anything had been slightly different whole other sets of sperm would have fertilized the egg, so that's not such an impressive argument. Especially since all of us will be dead at some point, regardless. And funny how that "compassion" doesn't extend to the people crushed every day, the people shrieking in anguish as we speak.
The question isn't just how many people are "alive", but what life are they living. What would make someone seek power over others? Why has this defect been normalized?
Let's say even more abuse allows even more people to get squeezed on the planet. Big whoop? To me that's like overloading a truck to the point where it doesn't move one inch anymore, and not even seeing how counterproductive that is.
I'll just say it: one healthy person is worth more than an infinite number of clones of an alienated person. We can discuss "health" and how subjective that may be, but sheer number of people is worth nothing in my books, that's for sure.
> It's too late, Diana. There's nothing left in you that I can live with. You're one of Howard's humanoids. If I stay with you, I'll be destroyed. Like Howard Beale was destroyed. Like Laureen Hobbs was destroyed. Like everything you and the institution of television touch is destroyed. You're television incarnate, Diana: Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays. You're madness, Diana. Virulent madness. And everything you touch dies with you. But not me. Not as long as I can feel pleasure, and pain... and love.
I'm in rather strong agreement with your post. There seems to be some brand of, I don't know, utilitarianism? That decided that any life, no matter how wretched, is equal to any other life in the evaluation of how bad things are, when this just can't be correct.
> What would make someone seek power over others? Why has this defect been normalized?
This one, though, I would say comes from biology. Power imbalance is the name of the game of everything in nature. You can find it in monkeys, you can find it in simpler life forms.
At some point, we need to accept where all this garbage originally came from (which is also why it's so resilient and strong) and oppose it, assuming it won't eat us first.
> This one, though, I would say comes from biology.
Yes, and no. I see big dogs never barking, because they don't need to. I see little dogs always fretting.
I think the misunderstanding might be in the phrase "seeking power". I don't mean wanting to survive, or wanting to mate. Nobody wants to be "powerless", of course. We want to not be coerced, and then to have some additional "power" to do something. We also want to be acknowledged, and so on. But that's still mostly a give and take, a live and let live -- not "either I have power over you or you over me", I think that sort of binary situation has to be produced with a lot of pain and destruction, it's not the default. Maybe that's idealistic, but at least in the human realm I think that's more or less true.
I mean the kind of hole that goes waaaay beyond "power as in opposite of powerlessness", and that never gets filled. People like Hitler are of course the most extreme examples, but still useful I think: in one sense he was a powerful man, because others obeyed his commands (or distilled wishes from his rants). But actually he was incredibly weak, he couldn't stand up to any person no matter how small as himself, he needed his role as Führer, his self-pity, the admiration, all that. And all of that didn't compensate his original issues, it compounded them. He made no difference to his own weakness, he just murdered a lot of people and then killed himself. He started out unhappy and ended up unhappier, and wreaked only murder and destruction. Actually powerful, or so weak that he had to become "powerful"?
Let's say someone is very strong: if someone tries to rob them they might break off their arm, and yay for that, but hopefully they're not going around robbing old ladies and beating up little kids. Those who do we consider sick, and when I examine their lives we always find something. Something they lack and seek outside of themselves, never getting it.
I'm sure that drive also sometimes produces works of art and inventions but on the whole, I don't think we need this. We already have curiosity, we already have ribbing on each other or topping what others do. We have better means to make art and inventions. And we have empathy, which means we can make each other gifts because it makes us happy to make others happy and get all the progress, all the fancy schmancy tech even, without any of the atrocities. There is competition with sportsmanship, which there should and always will be, and there is this cutthroat madness and lack of empathy for others because people haven't even hold of themselves. The latter has engulfed the planet, while the former is belittled as something naive, which to me is projecting the stunted development greedy people have on those who are more grounded.
Yes, we can also see this in wilderness, but not just it. Take this:
> In a study appearing today in the journal PloS Biology (online at www.plosbiology.org), researchers describe the drastic temperamental and tonal shift that occurred in a troop of 62 baboons when its most belligerent members vanished from the scene. The victims were all dominant adult males that had been strong and snarly enough to fight with a neighboring baboon troop over the spoils at a tourist lodge garbage dump, and were exposed there to meat tainted with bovine tuberculosis, which soon killed them. Left behind in the troop, designated the Forest Troop, were the 50 percent of males that had been too subordinate to try dump brawling, as well as all the females and their young. With that change in demographics came a cultural swing toward pacifism, a relaxing of the usually parlous baboon hierarchy, and a willingness to use affection and mutual grooming rather than threats, swipes and bites to foster a patriotic spirit.
> Remarkably, the Forest Troop has maintained its genial style over two decades, even though the male survivors of the epidemic have since died or disappeared and been replaced by males from the outside. (As is the case for most primates, baboon females spend their lives in their natal home, while the males leave at puberty to seek their fortunes elsewhere.) The persistence of communal comity suggests that the resident baboons must somehow be instructing the immigrants in the unusual customs of the tribe.
[..]
> Dr. Sapolsky, who is renowned for his study of the physiology of stress, said that the Forest Troop baboons probably felt as good as they acted. Hormone samples from the monkeys showed far less evidence of stress in even the lowest-ranking individuals, when contrasted with baboons living in more rancorous societies.
(That guy also has a LOT of super interesting lectures)
I mean, we also know proteins can fold in a way and get others to fold the same that causes Alzheimer's (if I'm not mistaken). Is that useful for something? I don't know, I think sometimes shit just happens. Another thing you can find in nature is this https://www.thedodo.com/inspiring-animal-families-958705512....
Just a random kitschy link, and you might say that that's just because the instincts which are supposed to strictly serve "their own species" are just misfiring, or that they're just practicing their survival skills which doesn't hurt them in these situations. But I like to think that when the basic needs are met, when nobody is feeling threatened, even animals naturally develop all sorts of friendships. This matches what I see in daily life much more than the claim that life is war, and everybody has to be fighting or dying all the time. After all, the energy comes from the sun, and we can neither take it nor reject it, it's just there so we, life in general, used it. That is a much more fundamental basis of life on Earth IMHO.
Well, you have convinced me. We should immediately switch back to a pre-agricultural, nomadic, very low technological, hunter gatherer society. I nominate you as the first headman.
The change will, of course, result in the near immediate death of, say, half of the people currently alive, including me. You get to explain to them what is going on (extra points for ending your speech with a dismissive "But, well, there you are."), but you also get to choose who is a "healthy person" and who is a "clone of an alienated person".
Funny, staying in the dead-end town you were born in with your grandparents' knitting circle supervising your dating life is an even greater dystopia to me.
This, to me, is a "Truman Show" level dystopia.