Is your glass half empty?

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February 25, 2013 by nextsimulacrum

Apart from arguing about dystopia’s political and social relevance – what’s more about it? Do all dystopias necessarily have hidden (or open) messages behind them? Are they still significant now, when the majority of the society seems to have embraced modern technology and learnt how to live with it?

Remember the question: “Is the glass half empty or half full?” We all know what possible different answers to it are supposed to mean. We can easily adapt this to another concept. Utopia is for optimists. They think it’s gonna be ok. No, actually it’s gonna be better. Sooner or later, it’s bound to be. Many will say they are naive. Well, they might be a little bit too enthusiastic, but they have good intentions. To think about it, aren’t they more happy and more successful in their lives?

And then, forever gloomy pessimists. They think they are cool. Never expect much, never get disappointed. For them, the future is a dystopia. One way or another, isn’t it a personal dystopia for everyone? “Don’t worry, we are all gonna die anyway”.

Finally, there are also these in the middle, the ones that probably don’t like the glass question at all. They call themselves realists. They think they are rational and look down on these who have a distorted image of the world, whether it is too light or too dark.

It’s all stereotypical. And to carry on with stereotypes, you wouldn’t really expect optimists to like dystopia. They would probably better go for a mighty epic fantasy film with a pompous ending. Realists, they shouldn’t like any of this rubbish at all. I’m too serious for that, I read Dostojevskij. Well, I don’t mind Paulo Coelho when nobody is around, but don’t tell anyone. Anyway, that stuff is for teenagers only, it’s below me as an educated adult. Or – it’s all for geeks and no-lifers. Get a life, don’t dream about things that could never exist. Pessimists, however, should all be big fans. Future is scary. It’s fatal. You know something terrible is eventually going to happen. Isn’t it, like, a little bit fascinating to see how pleasantly bad everything could be?

Who knows, a similar tendency might actually even exist. However, many people have this “dark side” buried down in their minds. They might (thanks God) not all be Neroes, wishing to burn Rome to ashes. However, many feel a weird excitement when they watch the news and get to know that something very bad happened somewhere far away. Maybe it brings an odd comfort to know that many people are in a so much worse situation than you. That you’re very lucky compared to them. Probably makes you feel better. After all, there are people who keep checking the criminal news every day.

Dystopias fascinate people. They play Half-Life, watch The Matrix and, if they are hardcore enough, they want to visit Chernobyl zone. They thoroughly enjoy it, so it definitely can’t be written off as irrelevant. But why?

For some miserable people dystopia could be a metaphor of the reality. Some of them might be actually unfortunate in their lives, some might have the INFP curse. And for others, and this is how dystopia first came into existance, it is about fear of the future. Both of these types are deeply concerned about the world. They see some threatening tendencies that they don’t like and they would like to stop them. They are not likely to start an open fight which would probably be futile anyway, but they can make other people aware of it. They are probably a little bit naive and they still believe that you can change it just like that, intellectually.

Authors of dystopian literature might have serious social concepts in their minds, but neither creators of Call of Duty nor gamers who play it really think about ideas lying behind it. It’s all about the process and the general atmosphere it has. It’s all about the feeling.

Our lives are very comfortable. No, not everyone’s, but I bet these who don’t have their basic needs fulfilled don’t spend their time indulging themselves with dystopia. But ones who do – they normally live relatively comfortable and peaceful lives. They should be happy and they probably are, but they feel a lack of excitement. Or a lack of a vague something in their lives that they can’t even properly describe. So here comes dystopia as a way to transfer yourself into a terrible situation, get all the excitement out of it and come back with a big sigh, making sure that it was only a fiction and that thankfully your life isn’t like that. You get to experience all the excitement you want and at the same time you suddenly get to see your inevitably sometimes slightly boring life as a blessing, since you have just been reminded what it would mean to lose it.

And still, there’s always that little “what if”. What if something like that actually happened? It might be unlikely, but is it really impossible? That anxiety about the future isn’t only a result of technological advance, even though it was deeply influenced by it. This anxiety and the clash of values of different generations always existed. Was it always reasonless? Elders in Ancient Rome were also concerned about the future of their country. And it didn’t seem bright, the future it was being lead to. And was it? It finally lead to a total destruction! Has anyone actually ever believed that the future would be bright? Oh yes, communists did. And where did it lead, if not to one more destruction which was meant to initiate the creation of the new world which it never did?

Technological advance isn’t a status quo, it is a process. Every process has a final goal it is moving towards. The scary thing is that we’re not sure how it is supposed to look like and if we are going to like this Brave New World our children will have to live in. Even if it has such people in’t!

Future needs to be scary. Future is scary. Because future is what people hope for and nobody wants their hopes to be destroyed. Still, we know that most of them eventually will be or that we simply won’t have enough of time to fulfill all of them. One day, future will not come. That’s why people’s minds are dystopian. How could they not be?

I’m joking. Everything’s gonna be ok.