While I understand and somewhat agree with the premise here, I think the missing piece - touched on near the end - pertains to the importance of heroes in our stories and their mimesis.
Dystopias are "hells without heroes." This is as true in art as it is in life. An artist is free to observe and convey any nightmarish vision of hell. But if he fails to cast any heroes into that hell, to do battle with its demons and their thralls, then he has sketched a nihilistic map to it as you claim.
In fact, I think that *does* describe the theosophy-adjacent Huxley's work (if not quite Orwell's, though an argument can be made). You might say that Brave New World wasn't a dystopia but a utopian playbook, even in his own conscious thoughts. And I suspect that's a danger inherent to "utopian" visions as well, because heroism demands the solving of problems in linear spacetime. There are no heroes in heaven either, and no need for them. We immanentize the eschaton at our peril, as usual.
Moreover, a human life will contain much tragedy, so it's true we should set our minds on how to improve conditions for ourselves and others. But if we, as artists, draw those plans too rigidly or hubristically, the painting we end up with could be like the rabbit-duck illusion. We'll swear up and down we made a portrait of a rabbit. But others might only see the duck, and pursue their dire duck strategies just as they would in the hero-less hells.
But when the heroes are cast into these "perfect" hells (or duck-heavens), we are drawn back to the truths of our condition and purpose in the world. We understand that the situation can get very dark - midnight black at times - and that these times are when we'll be tested in the crucible. A hero may or may not relish such tests. But he knows he must face and overcome them, and he does. The harder the test, the greater the hero.
And so, Winston Smith escapes O'Brien's machinations, gathers the forces of the Brotherhood, rises up like Paul Atreides on the hellscape of Dune... none of that happens, of course. But if it did, then the dystopia that Orwell crafted becomes all the more a translation of the Divine for the horror of its monsters and structures.
I'm so glad to see someone else make this point. The moment when 1984 turns into a Dystopia is the moment that Winston Smith gives up because O'Brien is part of the Party. Had he fought back at that moment and been killed, he would died a hero and the book would have been tragic but not dystopian.
That's why I mentioned that there's "an argument" for Orwell's placement in the dark pantheon of nihilistic mapmakers that Megha describes... and then I went ahead and made the argument myself. I think the difference in Orwell's case is that he properly set the stage for the heroic tale to follow. That he choked at the last minute... maybe socialism explains it. Or rather, maybe the ultimate envy, wrath and cowardice which powers that ideology explains it.
Have not read Huxley. Orwell is a lifelong favorite, and I have read everything by him except for one early novel. I don't agree that he was conjuring up the world of Oceania and Big Brother, or if so only inadvertently. The book is a reimagining of the world he actually lived in, Soviet Russia and its torture chambers, the Western Communists who would change their beliefs and their public statements in the blink of an eye, and who would justify any malicious action to advance their fanatical ideas, the wartime BBC where he worked, where facts were ignored or fabricated for the war effort, the ignorance of the proles who just got on with things no matter what the regime was, or what it did, the disintegration of liberties under war conditions, the fading away of religious belief and its replacement by political cults. All of this was lightly glossed realism; it was a dramatized version of his own lived and observed experience. He wrote 1984 while he was dying, and it was written in despair and as a warning. And in fact we mostly did not get the world of 1984, a world of overt government violence and cruelty, possibly, in part, because Orwell scared us away from it. The world of Huxley, however, seems more like what we have now. People are apparently less afraid of being rendered comatose by drugs and sexual stimulation than they are of having their faces eaten off by hungry rats, which is not surprising.
Your final point is well taken. Stories about better alternatives are sorely needed. I'm not sure that utopias are the answer, though if someone writes a good one I may read it. I would suggest instead plausible stories of overcoming the current chaos and malice, which provide a hopeful foundation for action. I am currently writing something which I believe is in that category, but it is slow going.
Very much agreed. I have been writing online since 2005, and I periodically grow very tired of the recycling of doom. If all you can imagine is doom, doom is probably guaranteed. What solutions are we imagining? I see it too in my own Substack, when I talk about solutions, making oneself stronger, mentally, physically, spiritually, there is roughly a 20% decrees in readership, compared when I write about what is wrong.
Also though, I would add, changing consciousness is the stuff of magic.
I have to admit I have a strong predilection to all things dark and dystopian: movies, books, art, culture, both fictional and irl. Given a choice between sunny, happy and hopeful or dark, psychotic and hopeless, I will generally choose the later...for entertainment. I only like to experience this stuff vicariously and not IRL.
As for why this is I've always thought it might be because my life is rather sunny, happy and comfortable, and my interest in the opposite is a sort of attempt to balance yin and yang. By exposure to the worst that people can conceive both in imagination and actuality, perhaps the juxtaposition allows me to appreciate just how good my life is. Oh, no worries. Nirvana and utopia are far from what composes my existence. The dark side, for me personally, is at a remove, and for that I am extremely grateful.
It's not the dystopias alone that are the Problem, it's having only dystopias to imagine. Negative thinking, as embodied by dystopias normally works as a form of prevention.
However it can only do so in relation to complementary positive thought. Lacking true and deep positive and visionary thought dystopias naturally fills this hole in our souls. We cannot escape it (despite desperately wanting to), because it's all we know, or rather all we can except as knowable.
Perhaps there is something to the admonition to think on things that are true, pure, beautiful....
Orwell was an atheist and could only show what was bad, he had no basis for declaring what was good. Without God, all things are permissible and the only real question is who will be Chief Rat, or Ubermensch.
Huxley rewrote his dystopia in Brave New World Revisited and provides hope.
Dystopia is easy to create for the same reason that Utopia is impossible to create, at least for the masses. Utopia, the vision of a perfect world, is a very personal thing. My vision of a perfect world is almost certainly not anyone else's vision of a perfect world in all its details. And so it goes, when one person or group of people try to create their vision of Utopia, they necessarily rub up against many more people who do not share their vision. However, believing that you are creating a "perfect world" is quite a euphoric endeavor in itself. Who wouldn't want a perfect world? This results in our Utopia builders resorting to force, to "lead" the people to the bright sunny uplands of the builders' perfect world. The net result is a Dystopian system from the perspective of the masses, which from the perspective of the leaders remains Utopia under construction. There is a lot of that going around these days.
Being one who is neither a follower of current trends nor easily manipulated by modern media, it is often hard to simply get through a day surrounded by people who think that gay couple with a baby is a-ok. But then, I always fall back on the quote attributed to Marcus Aurelius. “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
Words are spirits. We exist as wells of life or of death. It is true that words come forth from the spiritual realm. There is no word ever written or spoken that had not first originated in the spiritual realm. This is a truth that stands across all time. So then it is not hard to see how hell or heaven manifests on earth.
“One who walks righteously and speaks with integrity, One who rejects unjust gain
And shakes his hands so that they hold no bribe; One who stops his ears from hearing about bloodshed And shuts his eyes from looking at evil; He will dwell on the heights,
His refuge will be the impregnable rock;
His bread will be given him, His water will be sure.” Isaiah 33:15&16
Something interesting about the plot of Anthem taken from Wiki “Equality 7-2521, a 21-year-old man writing by candlelight in a tunnel under the earth, tells the story of his life up to that point. He exclusively uses plural pronouns ("we", "our", "they") to refer to himself and others.”... this was published back in 1938 and I see people putting ridiculous pronouns in their emails now as I’m sure we all have unfortunately experienced... Maybe you’re onto something...
Maybe the year 2050 will look more like the plot of The Road by Cormac McCarthy... let’s hope he didn’t conjure that....
The Manosphere is counting the hours down to "artificial wombs". They say it will free men from dependency on women for offspring. And yet none of them are fostering or adopting children in the current.
The nature of samsara, the material world, is there is always negative and positive going on simultaneously. Is the current world dystopian? No more so than 200 years ago, or 2,000 years ago.
Great post! I also think that much popular culture over the past decades has been not just reflecting but actively creating our dystopian reality - music (think metal, rap, drill, etc), the arts and literature all wallowing in and simultaneously bringing into existence the atomised, nihilistic, drug-crazed orgy that is the modern world.
It's unfalsifiable. Another point of view is that Huxley and Orwell were articulating historical forces that had already been in motion for decades or centuries. Some do it better than others (Fukuyama comes to mind).
While I understand and somewhat agree with the premise here, I think the missing piece - touched on near the end - pertains to the importance of heroes in our stories and their mimesis.
Dystopias are "hells without heroes." This is as true in art as it is in life. An artist is free to observe and convey any nightmarish vision of hell. But if he fails to cast any heroes into that hell, to do battle with its demons and their thralls, then he has sketched a nihilistic map to it as you claim.
In fact, I think that *does* describe the theosophy-adjacent Huxley's work (if not quite Orwell's, though an argument can be made). You might say that Brave New World wasn't a dystopia but a utopian playbook, even in his own conscious thoughts. And I suspect that's a danger inherent to "utopian" visions as well, because heroism demands the solving of problems in linear spacetime. There are no heroes in heaven either, and no need for them. We immanentize the eschaton at our peril, as usual.
Moreover, a human life will contain much tragedy, so it's true we should set our minds on how to improve conditions for ourselves and others. But if we, as artists, draw those plans too rigidly or hubristically, the painting we end up with could be like the rabbit-duck illusion. We'll swear up and down we made a portrait of a rabbit. But others might only see the duck, and pursue their dire duck strategies just as they would in the hero-less hells.
But when the heroes are cast into these "perfect" hells (or duck-heavens), we are drawn back to the truths of our condition and purpose in the world. We understand that the situation can get very dark - midnight black at times - and that these times are when we'll be tested in the crucible. A hero may or may not relish such tests. But he knows he must face and overcome them, and he does. The harder the test, the greater the hero.
And so, Winston Smith escapes O'Brien's machinations, gathers the forces of the Brotherhood, rises up like Paul Atreides on the hellscape of Dune... none of that happens, of course. But if it did, then the dystopia that Orwell crafted becomes all the more a translation of the Divine for the horror of its monsters and structures.
I'm so glad to see someone else make this point. The moment when 1984 turns into a Dystopia is the moment that Winston Smith gives up because O'Brien is part of the Party. Had he fought back at that moment and been killed, he would died a hero and the book would have been tragic but not dystopian.
That's why I mentioned that there's "an argument" for Orwell's placement in the dark pantheon of nihilistic mapmakers that Megha describes... and then I went ahead and made the argument myself. I think the difference in Orwell's case is that he properly set the stage for the heroic tale to follow. That he choked at the last minute... maybe socialism explains it. Or rather, maybe the ultimate envy, wrath and cowardice which powers that ideology explains it.
Have not read Huxley. Orwell is a lifelong favorite, and I have read everything by him except for one early novel. I don't agree that he was conjuring up the world of Oceania and Big Brother, or if so only inadvertently. The book is a reimagining of the world he actually lived in, Soviet Russia and its torture chambers, the Western Communists who would change their beliefs and their public statements in the blink of an eye, and who would justify any malicious action to advance their fanatical ideas, the wartime BBC where he worked, where facts were ignored or fabricated for the war effort, the ignorance of the proles who just got on with things no matter what the regime was, or what it did, the disintegration of liberties under war conditions, the fading away of religious belief and its replacement by political cults. All of this was lightly glossed realism; it was a dramatized version of his own lived and observed experience. He wrote 1984 while he was dying, and it was written in despair and as a warning. And in fact we mostly did not get the world of 1984, a world of overt government violence and cruelty, possibly, in part, because Orwell scared us away from it. The world of Huxley, however, seems more like what we have now. People are apparently less afraid of being rendered comatose by drugs and sexual stimulation than they are of having their faces eaten off by hungry rats, which is not surprising.
Your final point is well taken. Stories about better alternatives are sorely needed. I'm not sure that utopias are the answer, though if someone writes a good one I may read it. I would suggest instead plausible stories of overcoming the current chaos and malice, which provide a hopeful foundation for action. I am currently writing something which I believe is in that category, but it is slow going.
Very much agreed. I have been writing online since 2005, and I periodically grow very tired of the recycling of doom. If all you can imagine is doom, doom is probably guaranteed. What solutions are we imagining? I see it too in my own Substack, when I talk about solutions, making oneself stronger, mentally, physically, spiritually, there is roughly a 20% decrees in readership, compared when I write about what is wrong.
Also though, I would add, changing consciousness is the stuff of magic.
I have to admit I have a strong predilection to all things dark and dystopian: movies, books, art, culture, both fictional and irl. Given a choice between sunny, happy and hopeful or dark, psychotic and hopeless, I will generally choose the later...for entertainment. I only like to experience this stuff vicariously and not IRL.
As for why this is I've always thought it might be because my life is rather sunny, happy and comfortable, and my interest in the opposite is a sort of attempt to balance yin and yang. By exposure to the worst that people can conceive both in imagination and actuality, perhaps the juxtaposition allows me to appreciate just how good my life is. Oh, no worries. Nirvana and utopia are far from what composes my existence. The dark side, for me personally, is at a remove, and for that I am extremely grateful.
Wow, this is giving me a lot to think about. I am not sure yet that I completely agree with it but feel like I needed to hear it.
It's not the dystopias alone that are the Problem, it's having only dystopias to imagine. Negative thinking, as embodied by dystopias normally works as a form of prevention.
However it can only do so in relation to complementary positive thought. Lacking true and deep positive and visionary thought dystopias naturally fills this hole in our souls. We cannot escape it (despite desperately wanting to), because it's all we know, or rather all we can except as knowable.
Why this is the case, is quite another story...
Perhaps there is something to the admonition to think on things that are true, pure, beautiful....
Orwell was an atheist and could only show what was bad, he had no basis for declaring what was good. Without God, all things are permissible and the only real question is who will be Chief Rat, or Ubermensch.
Huxley rewrote his dystopia in Brave New World Revisited and provides hope.
Dystopia is easy to create for the same reason that Utopia is impossible to create, at least for the masses. Utopia, the vision of a perfect world, is a very personal thing. My vision of a perfect world is almost certainly not anyone else's vision of a perfect world in all its details. And so it goes, when one person or group of people try to create their vision of Utopia, they necessarily rub up against many more people who do not share their vision. However, believing that you are creating a "perfect world" is quite a euphoric endeavor in itself. Who wouldn't want a perfect world? This results in our Utopia builders resorting to force, to "lead" the people to the bright sunny uplands of the builders' perfect world. The net result is a Dystopian system from the perspective of the masses, which from the perspective of the leaders remains Utopia under construction. There is a lot of that going around these days.
Being one who is neither a follower of current trends nor easily manipulated by modern media, it is often hard to simply get through a day surrounded by people who think that gay couple with a baby is a-ok. But then, I always fall back on the quote attributed to Marcus Aurelius. “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
Words are spirits. We exist as wells of life or of death. It is true that words come forth from the spiritual realm. There is no word ever written or spoken that had not first originated in the spiritual realm. This is a truth that stands across all time. So then it is not hard to see how hell or heaven manifests on earth.
“One who walks righteously and speaks with integrity, One who rejects unjust gain
And shakes his hands so that they hold no bribe; One who stops his ears from hearing about bloodshed And shuts his eyes from looking at evil; He will dwell on the heights,
His refuge will be the impregnable rock;
His bread will be given him, His water will be sure.” Isaiah 33:15&16
Did you read The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious? Or did some other of Jung’s work influence this article?
How could someone start 1984 and not finish it? Not only is it a thoughtful book, it is a rip roaring page turner.
HG Wells
You left out:
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Anthem by Ayn Rand
Something interesting about the plot of Anthem taken from Wiki “Equality 7-2521, a 21-year-old man writing by candlelight in a tunnel under the earth, tells the story of his life up to that point. He exclusively uses plural pronouns ("we", "our", "they") to refer to himself and others.”... this was published back in 1938 and I see people putting ridiculous pronouns in their emails now as I’m sure we all have unfortunately experienced... Maybe you’re onto something...
Maybe the year 2050 will look more like the plot of The Road by Cormac McCarthy... let’s hope he didn’t conjure that....
The Manosphere is counting the hours down to "artificial wombs". They say it will free men from dependency on women for offspring. And yet none of them are fostering or adopting children in the current.
The nature of samsara, the material world, is there is always negative and positive going on simultaneously. Is the current world dystopian? No more so than 200 years ago, or 2,000 years ago.
Great post! I also think that much popular culture over the past decades has been not just reflecting but actively creating our dystopian reality - music (think metal, rap, drill, etc), the arts and literature all wallowing in and simultaneously bringing into existence the atomised, nihilistic, drug-crazed orgy that is the modern world.
dystopiam repudiate utopiam amplexate!
I'll give my answer here re Orwell: https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/george-orwell-a-life
Michael Mohr
"Sincere American Writing"
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
It's unfalsifiable. Another point of view is that Huxley and Orwell were articulating historical forces that had already been in motion for decades or centuries. Some do it better than others (Fukuyama comes to mind).