How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes
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cambridge.org
"In the totalitarian-dystopian genre, the prototypical narrative content elements — e.g., setting, character, plot, and story morals — are relatively clear and consistent; thus, they are “filled in” according to widely shared genre conventions."
Writers can thus write in such worlds without extensive world-building. It's like grinding out police procedurals or zombie novels. Not every writer can build worlds like Charles Stross. It's also easier for readers. Reading Ian Banks is hard work.
More generally, we have a decided lack of novels describing a better future. We have no shared conceptual model of what a better future should look like. We did once, up to 1970 or so. To a considerable extent, futurism is still stuck in the 1960s. What passes for futurism today is a minor tweak on the present.
("Futures: 1) Utopia 2) Dystopia 3) the future in which your cell phone takes slightly better pictures.")
That said, postmodernism does support a "whatever works" approach, and we desperately need some sort of positive futurism, lest we end up implementing the coal-powered AI hellscape by default.
Languages don't get destroyed by rearing children in isolation so they're left unable to speak. Languages die when their population shifts over to a language with more to offer. (Generally, the ability to participate in a larger market.)
You can go pretty much anywhere rare languages are spoken and hear parents tell you they hope their children will grow up to speak something more useful. Where do you get the idea that this doesn't empower people?
> (Generally, the ability to participate in a larger market.)
It all hinges on your use of market: I would have written society. It's extremely telling that nowadays ‘market’ and ‘society’ have become almost synonymous, not because markets have subsumed the role of societies at large, but because monetary exchanges have become the de facto be-all and end-all of social interaction. Implicit in your choice of words is the notion that the only thing that merits making the effort to interact with others is the exchange for the sake of profit.
I'm an economist but this kind of stuff saddens me profoundly. If this isn’t a path straight to dystopia then I don't know what is.
Now that's a dystopian theme- I presume you mean that a lot of social interactions these days are on technological platforms that are themselves seeking to make a profit (or a at least a return on investment if not an actual operating profit)?
And if you really think about it, "monetary exchanges" have been "the de facto be-all and end-all of social interaction" for a very, very long time now. A part of growing up is the ongoing realization that all the things you believed are done because they're needed are actually incidental, and done primarily to make money. It's a sad state, but not new.
The contrast is live in the US in deaf communities. Deaf community leaders have a strong and unconflicted opinion on surgery to restore the hearing of deaf children: it's bad, it's a denial of the inherent worth of deaf people, and you should be ashamed for even thinking that a deaf child's hearing needs to be "fixed".
They think that way because they have a direct personal interest in the size of the deaf community: the larger the community is, the more power community leaders wield. But they have zero interest in the well-being of any specific child, and less in the well-being of a child who isn't even part of their community.
In contrast, the deaf parents of deaf children are often very conflicted. They know a child is better off being able to hear. But the child is unlikely to participate much in the deaf community (important to the parents) if its hearing is restored.
But still, I think it's hard to argue that it would be an example of disempowerment to exterminate sign language by restoring everyone's hearing so they can learn a spoken language and communicate with the people around them.
My anecdote:
I have enough people around me (literally several millions in my city) that speak my language. All books, movies and TV shows I ever wanted to see are available translated in very high quality. There is so much original content that a lot of people simply don't even crave foreign content, that includes any science you would think of (and our countrymen are the pioneers of many), programming guides etc. The sole purpose of learning English in my country as viewed by the government (that sets up schools) is to take advantage of foreign profit and then return back home with the money and participate in our society, and that view reflects the wishes of the majority of our society - we prefer to interact with our people because the people and especially the language "make sense" (Czech language is regarded for its internal consistency and hard rules combined with freeform sentences - that makes the language a form of wild art where you can completely change logical meaning of the whole 10-sentence block with a single tone pronounced differently, if you wish to do that).
This purpose ("to be worthy on the job market") is said to you numerous times (I heard it at least once a week the whole 12 years I had English class) your whole childhood by your parents (who truly believe that our culture is big enough and English is not for that purpose), youe teachers, your school principal and of course the government.
My concern was primarily directed at the fact that it's strange to indicate that one is learning a language to participate in a market which is a subset of all social interactions.
Is it really? I'm sure it's strange to you - as a native English speaker, there is no language that would offer you significant new opportunities.
However I've never met a Czech person who doesn't learn English because of the market (academic/job/business opportunities) - as I said, this purpose is frequently highlighted from the youngest age (I was 4 when I was first told I need to learn English because of my future job). Also consider that until 1989 our borders were closed - meaning WE couldn't travel. It has became perfectly normal during the past 90 years to participate socially only within our own culture (and language).
It's not strange, especially wrt. in particular English. People really don't learn English (or make their kids learn English) to immerse themselves in the British or American culture (the latter is pushed worldwide anyway). They do it because jobs require it, and will for the predictable future. In fact many people nowadays, including my wife & I, are talking about getting kids to learn Chinese along with English, to hedge our bets for who will be the dominant economic power 20 years from now.
(Also note that when people learn English, they don't expect talking just with the English or Americans. They want to be able to talk with everyone else in the world, since all the other people are know or are learning English too.)
This was part of the joy of Burning Man: it felt like an experimental laboratory where we could try out non-exchange-based modes of society. After a week in an environment which was, thrillingly, both utopia and dystopia at once, we could then go home and see about recreating the good parts of those experiences in our everyday lives.
(I don't know if it still feels that way - it got too big and too institutional for me to feel like I belonged there anymore, but it's possible that it still works for people who are less sensitive about the presence of complex power structures.)
The way I see it, we've made a huge step back in order to be able to move forwards. Hunter-gatherers may have had more leisure time, but they could never have developed airplanes, vaccines, modern medicine, plumbing, Internet or space travel. To achieve those things, we had to specialize and build large-scale economies. Hunting/gathering was a dead end, whereas our culture still has open possibilities for tremendous improvement.
One thing I spend a lot of time thinking about is the amount of things that I'm wrong about. Some of them minor, but also likely something that a future man would find abhorrent, equivalent to slavery or cockfighting or something. Extrapolate from how often people are wrong on the Internet (!!11), and I'm probably wrong a lot. Extrapolate from HN, less so. Civilization as a whole must also have these systemic errors which are unnoticed by almost everyone; modernism definitely had such errors.
The single most modernist institution remaining today is the Olympics, which attempts to use athletic competition to maintain international peace. We all know that the IOC and related bodies have serious problems, but the mission itself is still valuable. Even if it does implicitly promote nationalism.
Languages die when people judge that those languages are worthless, because those people, who might have spoken the languages, would like to be economically productive instead. I'm saying that when a person or group of people choose to abandon their language, in order to achieve their own personal goals, and the language dies as a result, that is an example of people being empowered. It's not an example of people not being empowered.
You seem to have confused "empowered" with "good".
Maybe that's because it's hard to be optimistic about the future starting from now? The worst case is that the environment goes to hell and we die, or the economy crashes and life becomes hell, or killer robots kill us all (at the behest of some state actor or just because they loooove paperclips). The best case is we get humans to not behave like humans (so some people are less miserable), and then we either upgrade ourselves into unrecognizable transhumans or we become pets to transhumans or incomprehensible AIs.
> To a considerable extent, futurism is still stuck in the 1960s. What passes for futurism today is a minor tweak on the present.
Maybe that's just because we've picked most of the low hanging fruit that we could see in the '60s, and what remains still feels pretty far off? The best possible future that we can hope for can be summed up as "now, but don't fuck it up."
If everything seems destined to hell, with no one capable of doing anything about it, people just give up and live their lives focused on short-term needs. This ends up directly contributing to those world problems we're all worried about. Maybe an influx of positive fiction could help change the overall mood towards the idea that the brighter future is both possible and worth fighting for?
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Honestly, everyone here owes themselves to watch Disney's "Tomorrowland". Yes, it's a bit clichéd. But it's also heartwarming, and for me it was the first thing since many years that left me smiling and full of energy. The movie asks some very pointed questions about the state of the world, and covers this very topic: that our obsession with dystopias is forming a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that this is a kind of dumb thing to do to ourselves.
Humans have good reason to fear the future. The future is very scary. However, the future has always been very scary, and it isn't any scarier now than it has been since the invention of record keeping, where basically the same threats were present. The past is also very scary to anyone who sits down and realises that the people in the past are basically the same as the people in the present.
The future isn't going to be any bleaker than the past, it will be just as full of hope, success and vibrancy.
"'We saved a seat for you?' That's a commercial."
I was just looking at stills from Tomorrowland, for inspiration for things to build in Second Life. Second Life is a good test for futuristic architecture, because, after you build it, you get to live, work, and play in it. You find out if anyone else wants to. Not much passes that test.
Tomorrowland is a theme park. Swooping roads with no offramps. Big round unflyable craft that land in cradles. Giant tubes full of plants. It's not a working future.
"Minority Report" is considered one of the better examples of futuristic urban design in film. It suffers from the usual problems. Giant arcology structures mean nobody in the interior volume has a window. The road network's connectivity is far too low. Overall, though, it looks halfway workable.
"I, Robot" is a bit more workable. Worlds with a lot of "nature", like "Avatar" and "Jurassic Park" do OK. The giant tree thing tends to be overdone.
There's a whole world building department at USC's film school.[1] Their videos are not impressive. There's a startup in this space.[2] Mostly they do title sequences and ads.
> Tomorrowland is a theme park. Swooping roads with no offramps. Big round unflyable craft that land in cradles. Giant tubes full of plants. It's not a working future.
Yeah, the architecture definitely isn't. It just looks nice. But that wasn't the thing I meant in my comment. I meant the underlying theme. Better future through competence, dreams and - yes - technology. And (spoilers) how all was almost lost when they unleashed the positive feedback loop of expecting dystopia and giving up. I like that movie because it's the first thing in a long time that rekindles this, perhaps childlike, positive thinking, that we can make things better.
"- Huxley's "Brave New World", Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451", Orwell's "1984": once considered fiction, these futuristic novels are actually happening right now and they seem to be getting worse. Yes, Miss Newton?
- Can we fix it?
- Sorry?
- I get things are bad, but what are we doing to fix it?"
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Thanks for the thoughts on urban design in other sci-fi movies. I admit I never thought much about it when I watched them; I'll likely pay more attention from now on. Also anything in Second Life you recommend checking out?
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EDIT: Also for "commercial", it was great. I almost jumped out of my seat when I saw rockets landing old sci-fi/SpaceX style, and a launch loop just casually shooting a rocket the next moment. Sci-fi porn that scene was for sure.
Your entire brain is the result of chemicals. Emotions, as such, are a result of your interoceptive cortical systems.
Spoiler: Chekov’s Gun, and the assumption that new technologies are so seemless as to be unnoticeable or rarely commented on.
"Campbell had often said that a science-fiction mystery story was a contradiction in terms; that advances in technology could be used to get detectives out of their difficulties unfairly, and that the readers would therefore be cheated.
I sat down to write a story that would be a classic mystery and that would not cheat the reader—and yet would be a true science-fiction story. The result was The Caves of Steel. It appeared in Galaxy as a three-part serial in the October, November, and December 1953 issues, and in 1954, it was published by Doubleday as my eleventh book.
There was no question but that The Caves of Steel was my most successful book to date. It sold better than any of my earlier books; it elicited nicer letters from readers; and (best proof of all) Doubleday smiled at me with greater warmth than ever before. Until that point, they wanted outlines and chapters from me before handing me contracts, but after that I got my contracts on my mere statement that I was going to write another book."
It's arguably worse for the trappings of the military (rigid hierarchy, loyalty as the core value, etc) to be used in the context of functions that are civilian by nature, such as science and diplomacy. The essence of life as it's portrayed is that of a benevolent military dictatorship.
I know Star Trek has some storylines grappling with some of these issues. But any allusions to civilian life I remember seem rather tacked-on. Politicians were usually frightened & helpless, in need of rescue. They did get to wear nicer clothes, though.
(this is almost exclusively based on TNG–I did not watch enough of the other incarnations to comment on those)
In DS9 civilian life is almost the primary focus of the first few seasons, as the titular DS9 has only skeleton Starfleet representation onboard, and most of the protagonists aren't part of it. The series also had portrayed an attempt by some Starfleet personnel to turn Federation into actual military dictatorship ("for the greater good", of course).
Go back through TV history and note how stuff like Star Trek and Doctor Who flips between being dark and upbeat every decade or so. Or how comic books went through a cheery silver age before a depressing dark age and a more upbeat modern one.
And yes obviously there's a cultural aspect too. Compare something like Doctor Who's reboot to Black Mirror; you can tell which one started in 2005 and which one started in 2011 by the tone of the whole affair.
Still, it'll come to pass eventually. Optimistic sci-fi fiction will come back in vogue soon enough, especially when people start getting sick of the 'everything and everyone is doomed' tone that much of today's fiction seems to have.
In other words, much dystopian fiction is actually long-form propaganda.
Human history has been on the slow crawl from worse to better for a long time. We're living in the greatest era in history, but we still act like it's a horrible time to be alive.
And now that I think of it, Banks also doesn't like it. Humans and AI Minds have equal rights. And they exist in a state of benevolent anarchy. There are organizations, but decision making is not at all democratic. Maybe closer to consensus-based.
Also, humans and other organic beings come off as limited and irresponsible. Needing guidance. So the Minds are really running things.
Indeed, the Culture is rather a civilization of Minds, which keeps humans around for moral and sentimental reasons. It creates stuff for them without effective limit. For example, any Culture citizen can have their own planet, orbital, ship or whatever. Abundance has destroyed the concept of money. And the Minds keep them safe, from themselves and from others.
If I want to read about stressful, bad, evil things, I'll pick up a newspaper.
What's not to like?
The golden age of science fiction, the era when science fiction was most popular with the public, occurred when most of that fiction had a positive outlook on the future. I don't think that's coincidence.
To any aspiring authors out there: If you want to stand out and be successful, write stories that show a path to successfully overcoming the obstacles society faces today. If you can successfully do that in a way that doesn't come across as trite and condescending, then you are onto something.
Worse, showing how obstacles are overcome and not seeing it applied in real world is soul crushing.
This is often because politics turned from initially being a way of solving problems to a popularity ascend machismo contest - and it infects everything.
Fiction can only nudge the public opinion.
The difference is applying science and rational thinking vs. soundbites and reasoning from ideology.
That's the problem, the definition of "better" is the whole point.
Say for USA, setting the marginal tax rate of 1M dollars to 100%, including for company revenues, and redistributing that money to the poor greatly increases the Gini coefficient. That's just increasing a number that is widely agreed to be a "sensible definition of better", can't get more "rational" than that. You can write a bulletproof proposal that can't be rationally argued against.
Ideology is not just a series of individual policies, it's a lens through which you can evaluate every possible policy proposal.
"Finding the middle ground" is the Third Way popularized by Blair and Macron now, that has also failed, because it maintains the status quo.
I think that this is an important consideration. If I am not mistaken, this is part of the reason why the super-geniuses in the larger comic universes (e.g. Marvel) do not cure cancer.
Yes, I am getting sick of it all not just for the quantity and repetition, but the fact that it seems people enjoy this shit without the sort of curiosity such stories should invoke. Most of it is gratuitous.
Not everyone is writing about dystopias, but the inflection point isn't quite here yet.
Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. the science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. "If this goes on, this is what will happen." A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life. (...)
I remember an article, whose title essentially summed up my view on this space - "Star Trek: The Next Generation Was the Last Sci-Fi Show Hopeful About the Future"[0]. I grew up on ST:TNG, and I sorely miss the ideas communicated there. That people can organize for common good. That such organizations, even large and bureaucratic, can be very competent and effective. That individuals can strive to better themselves, both morally and in terms of competence. That the default assumption about your colleagues/teammates is that they're competent in what they do. That we can all cooperate, instead of defect.
Speaking of competence, I wish another cliché would die too. That the world is filled with idiots. It's also very popular, and I also destructive to the fabric of society. But I'll leave elaborating on it to David Brin[1].
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[0] - https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a31206/star-trek-th...
Have you tried Walkaway?
(or is a goofy comedy that doesn't take itself seriously at all).
Maybe its time for some of that.
Maybe the problem is that the current visions for a utopian future aren't inspiring.
In other sci-fi you strap on a badass lightsaber/phaser/gun jump in your spaceship/mecha/Mad Max Muscle Car, and live by your own rules.
In modern utopianism, private ownership of weapons is banned, everyone uses public transportation, everyone's vegan, etc. (I realize this is a bit of a stereotype, but I'm just trying to generalize/exaggerate to illustrate what I mean.)
I'm not trying to say that futurists do something like militarize their vision of the future in order to be cool, but I do think they need to figure out a way to present a future that is compelling.
This is how they decide what to test:
"In formulating hypotheses, we draw from several theoretical traditions. The majority of our hypotheses flow from the nature of the content shared across dystopian narratives. We take each theoretical tradition in turn."
This appears to describe the difference between fact and fantasy:
"Scholars in the narrative persuasion tradition distinguish narrative from rhetorical persuasion, where the latter is characterized by advocacy of a position through arguments, reasoning, and evidence (e.g., newspaper editorials and political speeches). By contrast, narrative persuasion involves attitude change driven by cognitive and emotional engagement with a story."
This is experiment three:
"Finally, we test two key folk hypotheses, loosely connected to cultivation theory."
Science is hard:
"Yet an experimental manipulation involving an entire story narrative can be difficult to unpack and interpret."
Overall, I found this paper hard to read (to be fair, I'm not used to seeing this style of thing but I have put some effort in - I read it!) and rather vapid.
Also, FYI, political science has a pretty contentious divide between people who favor a scientific approach and those who prefer a normative/philosophical approach. The two sides basically hate each other. So to claim that "In political science - they assert this is science" pretty much misses half of the story.
But Perspectives on Politics is a good journal.
When people point to Atlas Shrugged or 1984 and cite some real world event that seems to back it up, it reaffirms the belief that we're heading towards that fictional dystopia. When in fact this is merely selection bias.
Dystopian fiction is entertaining, but we cannot draw any real world conclusions from the fictional narrative. The world is much, much more complex than the fictional straw man world the author creates.
“Any” is too strong. At the very least, fiction offers a lens into a society’s worldview.
i also feel there story-lines are a bit trite. gee, another 'evil cooperation taking over everything' dystopia
Reality and fiction slightly intersect as a fuzzy Venn diagram, to a degree, but their more often echoes of imagination than of experience.
Ironically, this happens in the utopian case with Star Trek, which gets invoked as an example of a valid and functioning "post scarcity" society based on fabrication and automation, despite the technology in that series being essentially magic.
But I think first and foremost, Star Trek is being brought as an example of post-scarcity so often because it's pretty much the only story that presented such society and reached general audience. It's pretty much a lone beacon of hope in the sea of dystopia.
Still, I agree with your point. Star Trek is a nice dream, but not a good source of information for reasoning about reality.
I would say I'm more optimistic than you about post-scarcity. Bertrand Russell makes a case for the insanity of modern society by noting that during WWI half of British populace was sufficient to produce enough for all of Britain. Even if we allow for some margin of error in his statement, since that time productivity in the US has increased 4.5x since then.
To me the show is increasingly relevant. For example, it presents a clear answer to a popular criticism to UBI: what is to prevent everyone from staying home to play video games and leeching off society?
The optimistic answer is that once society can produce enough goods for everyone, the traditional value system of society (material wealth => proxy for contributions to society => virtue) loses meaning and will be overtaken by new ones (contributing to society => virtue).
I agree with most of your summary except the end. What if the problems in the US and around the developed world are more due to how society is organized rather than technological? I think the Star Trek value system is appealing and IMO something we ought to strive for.
I am (currently) in favour of UBI, though there are two things that I'm not sure about. One, what's to prevent prices immediately rising to eat the entire UBI, returning everything to status quo but with no welfare budget? Two, how to deal with migration from countries with no UBI to countries with UBI?
As for Star Trek itself (the TNG/DS9/VOY timeline, at least), I do consider it a good vision of what the world could be like. The question that's always in my mind is "how do we get there". I dream humanity can get to a post-scarcity era; the trick is surviving the transition.
In a competitive market (I can go to any grocery store I like) the prices are not set to what people have to pay but on what the other stores are selling for.
The offerings may depend on that - more caviar if folks have more spendable income. But that's called Standard of Living, and if it goes up well that's the whole purpose of UBI
It was more of "people have more money" -> "are able to pay more" -> "prices will raise to what market full of slightly richer people can bear". But I'm not arguing that, just asking about it. I don't have enough economic understanding to make predictions here.
Competition determines prices. Folks can spend money on lots of things. People can share an apartment if they are too expensive, which would drive the price down, and spend their money on other things. More money in circulation means more lending thus more development, which increases housing supply. And on and on.
Another problem is getting people to think "contributing to society is virtuous". It's possible that this idea may be at odds with human nature (similar to Soviet and Chinese implementation of communism).
Also a well-timed first contact with arrogant aliens, that made humans want to show their best side.
> Another problem is getting people to think "contributing to society is virtuous". It's possible that this idea may be at odds with human nature (similar to Soviet and Chinese implementation of communism).
I haven't studied this in any length, but with what little I read, my impression is that the core problem was that communism tried to do away with the concept of private property, and this concept turned out to be pretty much human nature. People want to have things to call their own, and want to see rewards proportional to their efforts. I don't feel like the concept of "contributing to society is virtuous" is at odds with human nature, it actually seems pretty aligned (after all, that's how societies form and grow). I'd love to read more about this. Any recommendations?
In the same way the colonies wanted to show their best side when the British showed up to civilize them?
Sorry.. this is a utopia, I forgot. Per ardua ad astra and whatnot. Must not be cynical. Must not be...
the only reason there was a utopia at all was a global holocaust reducing the population, widespread genetic manipulation and subliminal cultural reprogramming by a race of alien telepaths. The entire franchise is Federation propaganda. The universal translators are literal propaganda machines.
NO GET OUT CYNICISM YOU DONT EVEN FIT.
I'd say stop feeding the wrong wolf, but you seem to have a whole pack there, searching the forest of your mind for any positive thought to hunt down. You might want to call Wildlife Services on this one.
But there is a novella, State of the Art, which features contact between the Culture and 1980s Earth. And that is very dystopian. As are his treatments of various other civilizations that the Culture manipulates.
Edit: grammar
Also, many of those novels feature messaging threads among ship Minds. And some of them are mind-boggling.
One detail from the story that I love is the ship Mind's hobby of collecting individual snowflakes from the worlds it visits with a desire to find two identical snowflakes....
There's a Mind in another novel who collects recordings of human minds, and experiments with them. Other Minds strongly disapprove. But then, the Culture overall experiments with other civilizations that it encounters.
Also, it wasn't until I read State of the Art that I realized that the Culture is not part of Earth human future. I gather than he assumes humanoid panspermia and/or convergent evolution.
As for written science fiction, I really can't think of anything recent other than the already mentioned Banks novels. There's plenty from the fifties and sixties, but not all of it holds up well today.
The original series wasn't much at all, it was basically the US Navy in space. It does have a lot of moralizing and positivity, but the future depicted is also very much a product of its time. I wouldn't describe it as Utopian because the Federation as depicted is still clearly not intended to be seen as ideal.
TNG was a constant struggle between Gene Roddenberry to showcase his Utopian ideals and the writers to actually have some human drama (which he forbade, because humans were supposed to have evolved beyond that,) so it's the most optimistic of the series, most of the time, sometimes (IMHO) to its own detriment. One of the most hated characters in Star Trek, Wesley Crusher, was Gene Roddenberry's vision of the Ubermensch, but he came across as an insufferably perfect Gary Stu.
Further series deviate from the Utopian vision with... mixed results. I personally think DS9 is the best of them because, being an arc-driven series, it gets to flesh out its characters and cultures to a degree other series couldn't. However it's also a series about how a self-described Utopian society can abandon its ideals and morals when faced with a brutal adversary.
I think it's best to approach Star Trek as sci-fi (light on science more often than not) drama first and morality play second.
The show presents a clear answer to a popular criticism to UBI: what is to prevent everyone from staying home to play video games and leeching off society?
The optimistic answer is that once society can produce enough goods for everyone, the traditional value system of society (material wealth => proxy for contributions to society => virtue) loses meaning and will be overtaken by new ones (contributing to society => virtue). Of course in the Star Trek universe, they only got there after nuclear apocalypse (WW3) and rebuilding society, but the value system is appealing and IMO something we ought to strive for.
America was founded on a revolution, and often changing the system from within for anything other than the most trivial issues is seen to the cynics seems impossible.
The fact is that in the present mode of existence the only revolutions that do happen can only happen in fiction. Like for instance see the movie They Live! The protagonist finds himself completely alienated by his newly perceived reality and decides to chew gum and kick ass to get to the bottom of it, only to find that he's in a much deeper hole than something he can do anything about, the aliens run a galactic economic empire of which earth is just a small part -- which could be a pretty apt metaphor for individual existence or maybe the human condition -- even the most powerful can do little about the system. Who controls us? Maybe it's money or technology or a conspiracy, or God, or bacteria and viruses?
So the message is one of revolution because those who are unhappy with reality as it is, can only rebel against it on the screen or in books... and do so idealistically without any sort of heavy handed intellectual exercise which might cause revolution in a hundred years -- like for instance Communism.
The truth is that these days revolution can only be televised. And that is itself cathartic for both the author and for the audience.
What fiction fails to teach you is that being good at violence is a lot of work! To be good at it you need to take krav or bjj or mma classes at least 3 times a week and go to the gun range at least once a week.
I personally think society would gain vast benefits from making dueling legal again. Sadly the lawyers would never allow it because they would lose half their business!
Regardless the political imagination of individuals as to what is right or wrong has very little impact on their ability to actually do much and hurt many people as individuals or even as political fringe groups, as the control mechanisms and technology to disrupt such individuals and groups is highly effective. However, when those groups become large movements perhaps they could possibly lead to some sort of uncontrollable and undesirable violence. Does that mean we should be weary of fiction writers promoting such themes, yes we should, if we're a country like China.
It seems there is a movement to control all forms of speech these days as it's all starting to be considered dangerous... so you don't even have fiction as a refuge to express your revolution.
There is a lot of news about the US police doing exactly that, and not just violence per se, also things like NSA...
The definition of a state, democratic or otherwise, is the monopoly of violence. Doesn't matter if it's absolutist monarchy, Scandinavian-style Social Democracy, or Al-Shabab-style Somali tribal rule -- if you have the ability to compel action then you can create a state.
ISIS was issuing passports, IDs, and currency, for example. You don't have to play by their rules... but then again they don't have to keep .45 rounds from going into the back of your head.
Monopoly of Force is entirely separate from issues of authority or legitimacy; everyone can hate your illegitimate rule but if they can't do shit about it then you still win. You hate the Tsar for having too much authority, but he's got secret police and an army so you stfu and keep your head down.
Meanwhile, US citizens hate Trump but concede he won a legitimate election and, in spite of having like 40% of the world's guns, don't revolt in the street.
> What fiction fails to teach you is that being good at violence is a lot of work! To be good at it you need to take krav or bjj or mma classes at least 3 times a week and go to the gun range at least once a week.
I disagree with all of those minimums. Even in the Marines I didn't go to the range once a week, and I was a 'POG' supporting an infantry unit. We only PT'd 3 times a week, though some of us did more.
> I personally think society would gain vast benefits from making dueling legal again. Sadly the lawyers would never allow it because they would lose half their business!
History would disagree, and dueling was plainly outlawed for a reason.
The appeal-ad-lawyeram is also not an argument; there were plenty of rich lawyers when dueling was a thing (several US Founding Fathers come to mind), and the legal business is currently incredibly competitive in terms of jobs right now -- without dueling.
One thing I notice, apart from all the stuff that outright glorifies militarism and sadism, or makes serious concerns seem ridiculous: even when it's "good guys in a bad situation", even if they end up "winning", so often what's displayed thoroughly and realistically, with great attention to detail is the violence, the abuse, the pain, the mechanisms of control, all the negative stuff... but the hero usually wins via some silly thing that is not realistic, or even just luck.
On average, you often see realistic horrible things, and that's either unsolved altogether, with an unhappy ending -- or it gets solved by means that are not realistic. Like drawing bad things with permanent marker and nice things with water color, then washing the surface with water.. the realistic stuff sticks, the rest fades. At the end of the day, a person got used to seeing more people getting hurt, more arguments resolved with witty one-liners, more people getting murdered -- but they didn't get anything useful for themselves, just some numbing and conditioning, maybe even a bit of fear to take home with them.
I have to think of The Last Days of Sophie Scholl, that movie certainly isn't "happy". I was sad and upset after seeing it. But it still gave me more than it took, if you know what I mean.
Most writers and actors should simply be ashamed, consider manual labor and never speak again. But that's just my actually unpopular, but earnest opinion.
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180525-every-story-in-the...