Rev Left Radio - Analyzing Dystopian Fiction: Ideology, Orwell, and our Haunted Futures

Episode Date: September 27, 2020

Gabriel Gipe joins Breht to discuss the genre and history of dystopian fiction, its ideological role in American society, the impact of George Orwell and anti-communism on our culture, and what it even means to discuss dystopia while living in one.  Check out Gabriel's book reviews on Instagram @mr_gs_book_club Please Support Rev Left Radio HERE Outro Music: 'Gallows' by CocoRosie LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, I have longtime friend and teacher Gabriel Gipe on to talk about dystopian fiction. We talk about the ideology of dystopian fiction. We talk about how someone like Orwell is used by the left, right, and the center. We talk about what dystopian fiction might look like going forward, or if dystopian fiction even makes sense. sense in a world that is increasingly becoming identical to some sort of dystopia. So this is a fascinating conversation. We touch on a lot of stuff.

I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do too. And as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can join us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. And in exchange, you get bonus monthly content depending on the tier at which you sign up. It really helps keep the show going. It helps me and Dave's family. keep our heads above water during this economic crisis and we just deeply appreciate everyone who lends even a few dollars to our show and to left-wing independent media.

So without further ado, let's go ahead and get into this conversation with my good friend Gabriel Gipe on dystopian fiction. Enjoy. My name is Gabriel Gipe, and I am a high school teacher in Sacramento, California, and I teach 12th grade government and politics. I am also, I would identify politically as a Marxist-Leninist. I organize with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and ultimately I think I'm just really fascinated with dystopian fiction in general and kind of how it plays a significant role in politics and how we identify politics and how we identify and understand ideology and our relationships with it. And that's kind of what got me thinking about all of this, obviously, because a lot of what we're experiencing now is a lot of people are calling it, you know, we're living in a dystopian hellscape. I think that the topic of this episode is very relevant to a lot of what most of us are feeling internally.

Absolutely. Yeah, you're in the West Coast. You know how things are going over there. It's horrifying to look at the images, you know, sitting as I am here in the northern Midwest and looking out over the West Coast and seeing that I have friends in Portland, good friends in Seattle, friends in L.A., in the Bay Area, etc. So I'm really seeing it all up and down the coast and people I love and care about. including you, are being affected by it. So it's hard to see, but it's also sort of good segue into this general conversation.

I think we'll end this conversation after we understand deeply what dystopia is and what its primary features are. We'll end this conversation with the discussion of whether or not we actually live in one right now, which I think will be a nice way to conclude. But anyways, it's been a long time coming to have you on. We've been friends and comrades for many years. I think we met online many years ago on Facebook before I even deleted that. I think we ran a perhaps I can't remember.

Do we run a like a political page together on Facebook? Yeah, yeah. It was the libertarian Marxist musings page. That's right. That's right. All those years ago. Well, it's so happy to finally, finally have you on. And this is a great topic.

So let's go ahead and dive into it. First and foremost, just to lay the cards in the table. What is dystopian fiction and what are some popular examples of it? And then maybe if you have time, what's the point of analyzing it for Marxists? For sure. Yeah. I think what's really interesting about dystopian fiction is that it is very much unlike a lot of other genres of fiction. And that, like, it really plays off of realistic scenarios that really push us as, like, the reader to think about, like, the logical boundaries of decisions that we might be currently making or might make in the future as, like, an individual or as a society.

And I do classify dystopian fiction into like two separate camps. The first camp is kind of like the dystopian fiction that is an antonym to utopia, right? So like it's just universally horrible. Like a really good example of this would be the book The Road in which there is no sense of like joy. Things are traumatic. They're terrifying. your um you know you could put kind of like mad max into this this category as well there is like society essentially has collapsed right and it's the total antithesis to utopia um the second

category i would i would call the veiled utopia um and that is more where uh society has this very thinly um veiled vestige or um you know just kind of a false utopia to it um but right underneath the surface is the, you know, the horror, the totalitarianism, the authoritarianism, the social control, the lack of individuality and human emotion, et cetera. And I think that it's really important for us as Marxists to be able to analyze this because I think that there isn't a more perfect example of the base and superstructure in Marxism, because our lived experience obviously give rise to these cultural experiences and cultural manifestations, and those lived experiences are obviously predicated on our economic conditioning. So I think that

looking at dystopian fiction as a result of our current economic conditions, and then it works to reinforce those conditions in various ways, which we'll talk about throughout this episode, I think it is really important for us to be able to look at it because there is a very clear line of reasoning from the dystopian fiction to how we understand politics and political ideology and how it shapes our opinion of politicians and policy and kind of our interaction every day with those systems. So I think it's, although obviously it's like meant to entertain, It's also meant to be like a very harsh critique often of society as well as like individual expectations of society so that we really need to to analyze it through that lens of, okay, this is a byproduct of our economic system that works either to reinforce it or to destabilize it.

And it can be a really powerful tool. And I think that we'll, you know, see that through our discussion because so many people base their understanding of politics on these very, like monumental pieces of dystopian fiction like 1984 or Animal Farm or Brave New World, which we'll talk about more in depth for sure. Yeah. Yeah, there's a, it's funny you mentioned Animal Farm. There's a genre of tweeting where reactionaries trying to make some point against the left are actually on Twitter mistaking animal farm for Animal House. So they'll make these tweets like, wow, we're living in 1984. It's just like Animal House. Like what Orwell said.

Oh, man, I wish. I wish it was way more like Animal House. I know, right? Way better. And then your distinctions between different type of dystopians. You mentioned the veiled dystopia. And one of the movies I watched in prep for this episode where I think that really applies well is Starship Troopers by what Paul Verhoven. Where, you know, initially that movie came out and it got.

critiqued by all the critics in America as a fascist right-wing, you know, sort of fever dream movie. But what Verhoeven was doing and it's come to be seen this way by critics, you know, over the years is a 1997 movie, I believe, is, and he says this himself, he was like, I was ironically creating a fascist utopia, right? So this idea that on the surface, you sort of get this idea of like, everything looks kind of clean and nice and orderly, but what actually makes that society run is just mindless machismo, this fascistic understanding of human life and this need to constantly be at war with some other capital O, which actually serves to devastate, brutalize the people involved in the entire system. And so what on the surface might look at first glance like

a utopia is actually that veiled dystopia that you were talking about, which just helps drive the point home. And I think throughout this conversation, we might come back and anchor the conversation to a few really solid sort of works of dystopian fiction that everybody's familiar with like Brave New World, like 1984, but we'll also be referencing a bunch of different films or books that you or I have read throughout our life to help bring these examples to life. So if you haven't heard or seen that one movie, fear not. You know, we'll get to other ones that you probably have encountered.

So with all that said, do you have anything to say before we move on? No, I just think that that's a really good point is that the, you know, the genre of dystopian fiction is so expansive and actually like has a lot of crossover into other genres as well into just like you know what we would classify as you know classic uh science fiction and fantasy and there is a lot of crossover and i think that yeah starship troopers is it's so it's so interesting that it became this kind of like um you know so many people very much misread that and and kind of like idealized the overall jingoistic aspects of it and not realize that it was obviously making a critique of it.

Yeah. Misinterpretation of dystopian fiction, I think, is a huge part of this conversation. Absolutely. And there's something very fascist about not being able to see the satire inherent in a film like Starship for just a mindless sort of approach to such a work of art. But this is a great segue because I want to talk about some of those distinctions. right you mentioned that you know there's often overlap between what we call dystopian fiction and sci-fi or apocalyptic fiction and you know some apocalyptic films aren't dystopian some sci-fi films aren't dystopian but a lot of dystopian films will have elements of both of those

things and we'll get next to the five characteristics so we can help us have a clearer vision of it but before we do that what role does a cataclysmic events for example play in the genre of dystopian fiction and and where is that overlap in those distinctions in your mind Yeah, I think the really important aspect of the cataclysmic event, quote unquote, with this genre is that, like, oftentimes within these works of fiction, it's left to be really ambiguous, and that plays a really significant role in why people misinterpret a lot of dystopian fiction. So let's like take some examples of this. So like in 1984, very classic dystopian text, we know that there has been some kind of like post third world war-esque event,

right? But nothing ever really is clearly established of what happened. It's left to be, you know, the memory of one of the characters where it will briefly touch on some aspect of the event that led to the current dystopian world or reality that they live in. And I think that this is really important for the genre because it doesn't, and it's not meant to, show the points of succession politically that led to whatever that cataclysmic event is. And that cataclysmic event can be something, you know, that happens in the natural world, or it can be something that happens through, you know, modern warfare or some political, you know, venture that goes south, right?

But like, the point of it being ambiguous, I think, lays a pretty solid foundation for people not being able to pinpoint warning signs of what the author could potentially be like laying out like, okay, well, if society is going in this direction, this is what could potentially happen. It's always left as kind of like an unsolved puzzle with pieces kind of scattered throughout. And I think that that's really important to distinguish between films like, say, the road, right, again, which doesn't have like a clear articulation of, what necessarily led to that point versus like Blade Runner, right?

Whereas Blade Runner has like a very, um, the, the events that lead up to this relationship between like humanoids and, and, and, you know, artificial intelligence is,

is kind of seen as like a natural succession of technology. And this is also, you know, pretty foundational and in Brave New World. Um, they, he's, Huxley is, you know,

writes out a pretty clear understanding of his fear of like, a technological world that is void of like human attachment and individuality. But I think that the cataclysmic event helps kind of dismiss the long protracted struggle that often leads to dystopian like qualities within society. So, you know, obviously, if we were going to try to relate this to our current situation, I think that a really good example is that, you know, people saw Trump becoming president or the Trump administration gaining power as this kind of anomaly, right?

It's like, how did this happen? Like, how did we get to this point where, like, Americans are just so openly racist? And that's, you know, it definitely plays into this liberal view of history in which only the uncomfortable parts are the anomaly, and they don't necessarily see it

being connected to a larger protracted struggle between, you know, the forces of reaction and those who are trying to push humanity towards a more broader understanding of what humanity is. And I think that dystopian fiction works a lot to reinforce that by like the usage of cataclysmic events without the evidence as to why the cataclysmic event actually led to the, you know, the destruction of society or the regression of society or what have you. Yeah, that's incredibly interesting. I think we'll get more into that when we talk about how dystopian fiction is used by the left, the right, and the center because, you know, sometimes I'll be watching a dystopian film and think of it as sort of in.

inherently reactionary for the reasons that you say, but in other ways, it's obviously sometimes warning against the worst forms of reaction. So, you know, it really opens itself up to be used by all, by people all along the political spectrum, which, again, we'll get into in much greater detail in a few questions, but just planting that seed for now moving forward. So before we move on, what are the five primary characteristics of dystopian fiction? Because I think this will help drill down even further on what exactly. exactly we mean by dystopian fiction and and perhaps where some of those boundaries are, you know, by, by, by extension. Absolutely. Yeah. And I want to make clear that these,

these primary characteristics are definitely not universal. Like, they don't show up in every single dystopian work of fiction. It's not like the hero's journey, which has like a very clear cut understanding of like A plus B equals C and we're going to move to D after this. These, these characteristics often, some of them will be used. Some of them will be, you know, dismissed or just not touched on at all. But I think, that these five essentially kind of at least some amount of them will wind up in every dystopian work of fiction. And I think that the first and probably the most easily recognizable is government control and by extension or a lack of government control. So there's oftentimes

within these works of fiction, the idea of like some form of authoritarian or totalitarian centralized authority centralized state that controls every aspect of the population. and within population control through, you know, for sterilization or they are able to actually make human beings or through like actual genocide, right? Or there is on the other side of that, like there is just a complete lack of government and we've broken down society into total barbarism, you know, each person for themselves. And I think that kind of leads into the second of the five, which is environmental destruction in which you have people that are fighting over just their basic resources.

The access to, like, water is generally seen as scarce access to food. Oftentimes, in these books, you'll have groups of people that are pushed towards cannibalism, which I think speaks to, like, this inherent fear of, you know, our lack of ability to control our environment where we have nothing left to do but, like, to consume one another. you know so even the term like eat the rich comes from the from the term you know from the idea that like eventually the poor will have nothing to nothing left to eat but the rich which is which is firmly placed in like dystopia right and I think that that also leads into the third point which is technological control and that you know has a very distinct separation between those who are being watched and those who are being watched we have like surveillance

you know, genetic engineering, um, pacifying the population through mass media, which is something that definitely fascinates me, um, or even drugs, right? They'll, they'll be able to concoct some sort of, um, toxic, uh, you know, cocktail for people to, to take and, and to subdue them, um, to make them a, a more easily controlled group of people. Um, and then the, I would say that loss of individualism would be the fourth. Um, there's always, um, there's always, some form of like force collectivism, a group think or mob mentality that is very prevalent within dystopian fiction. And I think that that speaks a lot to the political ideology of it that will touch on and how the political left, right, and center use it. And then, of course,

survival. So like the, you know, main protagonist or whoever it is in these works of fiction is always looking, you know, it's not, it's not a question of like how are they going to make their life better. It's not a question of how are they going to reach self-fulfillment or an understanding of enlightenment or anything. It's always survival. It's very precarious. Their existence in itself is very precarious. So those five government control, environment destruction, technological control, loss of individualism and survival, I think, are the five primary characteristics that definitely every piece of dystopian fiction touches on some of them, whether or not they have all of them is obviously, again, not universal, but I think that it sets

a really good understanding of what we're talking about when we're looking through that lens of dystopia, having some aspect of that. So it plays really well into our understanding of it while we talk about it currently. You know, it's like we're experiencing, especially here on the West Coast, like you said, at the beginning of this episode, like we're watching this massive environmental destruction with a government that seems like they have absolutely no idea how to handle this crisis because they essentially don't. You know, we also are dealing with massive surveillance where we're dealing with, you know, population control through the media with the amount of disinformation that's coming out about

COVID. We're dealing with people who are, you know, on a mass level about to be homeless or are already homeless. Like, especially in California, our homeless population over. the last several years has has quadrupled um and it has there's no sign of it slowing or getting better so i think that all of these these key characteristics are make it very easy for the reader to identify with the the protagonist or what it is that the society might be um going through yeah absolutely and you know talking about government control well on one hand our government has you know

no control over the climate catastrophe or over the pandemic. What it does control is violence. And so, you know, even while it can't, you know, prepare us for pandemics and climate change, it can't do anything to alleviate the suffering of people hit by those things. What it can do is, you know, murder black people in the fucking streets or wage seven wars at once. And, you know, all the things that our government should do, which, you know, worry about public health, eradicate poverty, take care of people's mental illness, doesn't do any of it. And so instead, all of that stuff now falls for on the one part of the state that it does control, which is violence.

So now the police are responding to mentally ill people with no training whatsoever on how to do that. Police are responding to situations fundamentally caused by poverty with no ability or comprehension on how to solve that other than to beat its symptoms over the head. And so while in some areas of our life, there is absolutely no government control in other areas of our life. life, there's an oppressive amount of government control, which I think also plays in to the dystopian sort of reality we're living in. But another thing I wanted to mention, and this is probably, you know, a Venn diagram touching on many of these characteristics, is the role that hierarchy plays in these dystopian fictions. Like, I was noticing something that I was going through a bunch of these films is there's

always, unless it's like a post-apocalyptic scenario where the only hierarchy is force. In most situations, you're not in a complete sort of runescape. like the road you have some semblance of you know of structure and it's always take it always takes the forms of intense hierarchies the hierarchies themselves have very sharp distinctions and are completely arbitrary and while often we like to look at those societies and say you know they're very different from our own what is class society especially in a place like america if not utterly arbitrary meaningless and and you know almost meaningless in its cruelty in in the subjugation of people. It's really, you know, we live in a caste system of sorts here that's just

the boundaries are a little bit more diffuse. It's buffeted by ideology, you know, and there's a general history of prosperity over the last 50 years, which is now going away, but which really sort of helps stabilize the ship in times of chaos. So I just think it's funny that in these dystopian films, these arbitrary hierarchies are put up as evidence of the dystopia when in so many ways. They're just pulling from the already existing arbitrary hierarchies of normal class society and just projecting them a little bit forward

or perhaps making the distinctions a little bit more clear cut, you know? Absolutely. You know, no, I totally, totally agree. I think that that is one of the aspects of the genre that make it so fascinating for so many people is that when you're done either, you know, reading one of these works of fiction

or watching the movie that you can walk outside and be like, well, thank God I don't live in a world like that. Right? But But like there are so many aspects of our world that are exactly that, right? Which is, which is why it's a reflection of like the worst aspects of our, of our society. You know, it's like we, yeah, there's, oh, there's so much that you could touch on there. But I think that, you know, especially we're going to talk about it a little bit later, but like Black Mirror, especially, you know, like plays off of so much of what we experience, you know, and like even the term like Orwellian has become such a common used phrase. because of how often we're running into things that were talked about in that book, right?

So it's really fascinating that it really does work to reinforce like some of the worst aspects of our society because it makes people feel like, oh, well, it's not that bad. So I guess that it's, you know, it's something I can't complain about. But I also wanted to point out that most of, especially with dystopian literature, most of the authors are white and are writing these, you know, these dystopian pieces based off of their perspective when a lot of what they're talking about, like the worst case scenario for society to deal with is reality for people of color, right? So it's, it's really fascinating to see, you know, especially with the older, older dystopian

fiction that's like these very like well-to-do Englishmen, you know, writing about like how how horrible society would be if you know x y and z when that was in fact the reality for so many people on the planet um and generally the reality because of the white people who were you know writing these books to begin with exactly well and that speaks to the ideology of it which the next several questions really address so so moving on and this is something that i think you're uniquely positioned to speak on why is dystopian fiction as a genre heavily emphasized in the educational system in America as opposed to other genres like, you know, science fiction, a more existential fiction or even fantasy. Why do you think dystopian fiction has

such a solid place in the curriculum in America? Yeah, I think what's really interesting about like the books that get chosen, you know, to, you know, for students to read in their English language arts classes or whatever it is that they're taking is, it really sets a foundation again, for their understanding of politics, which is fascinating to me because as a teacher of seniors, you know, it's like I get 12th graders on their way out, right? At this point, like, this is their last year. You know, so many of them are just checked out of the educational system in general, but most of them have had some kind of experience with a dystopian work of fiction that is very overtly political nature,

whether it be Animal Farm or 1984 or Brave New World or even like Lord of the Flies, right? Their understanding of politics is shaped by these works of fiction and then they're thrown into a civics class like mine at the end of their high school career. So a lot of their understanding of what we end up talking about in my class is shaped by works of fiction. And I think it's really important to understand how, you know,

these works are weaponized in very specific ways to reinforce cultural narratives and reinforce, like, political structures. Again, playing into that, like, it's not as bad as this, so our system must be good, or look how different and starkly, in stark contrast, our system is to this particular you know, model that is displayed in this work of fiction. And I think that just speaking from my own experience, I had a very long, kind of like arduous love affair with 1984 as a book as a teenager. The first time I read it was in seventh grade. And it really shaped my understanding of like totalitarianism, authoritarianism, like what that would look like. And obviously I didn't

understand its impact in terms of how it was meant to represent like the Soviet Union at that time. But it really had just a really significant impact on how I viewed politics. And I think that like a lot of ideas like, you know, the memory hole, who controls the past, controls the future, rewriting history, the ideas of constant war. Like these ideas, are kind of implemented at an early age in the educational system. And I think that that is done very purposefully to reinforce, like, an American exceptional idea of culture because it's never, none of these books are ever explicitly, you know, again, going to that, that cataclysmic event.

Then none of them are actually talking about the things that lead up to these cataclysmic events, Right. So it's like in Lord of the Flies, for instance, it's like, oh, these boys, they're left on an island, right? But they're left on an island because they were escaping a bombing, right? And the bombing raid was happening during some undisclosed war, right? And that undisclosed war has reasons. But those reasons aren't important. Like for the text, it's important for us to understand like the breakdown of social order and the breakdown of law and order, right? And what could potentially happen in a, a quote-unquote anarchistic type scenario where, you know, might is right, the person who is the strongest, who can, you know, kill the pig the fastest, right? They are going to gain leadership access and how much we need the structures of society to hold our worst nature at bay. And I think that that's really important for educational systems in general to push into

kids because our entire educational model is not built on a foundation of nurture and growth. It's built on hierarchy and submission, you know, so our kids are taught from a very early age. And I know that I'm sure you've experienced this or contemplated it with two children who are in school, where like the teacher is, you know, know, the master, right? And that master has control over your destiny, whether you fail or succeed is completely in their hands. But we need those systems. We need those structures in order for us to survive, right? And that's reinforced, I think, a lot through these works of dystopian fiction. Like, look how it could be, right? So let's take another, like a work of science

fiction that I think is, I read in high school, but didn't, it wasn't assigned to me. It was like stranger in a strange land, which is not part of the curriculum, but is a very, you know, it's you, you have a human who is born on Mars, comes back to the planet and is imbued with all of these essentially superpowers, right? And has reached some form of enlightenment and is able to view humanity as this kind of like desperate grasp of evolution where like evolution has failed right like we actually are a plague you know on our society is a plague on on the planet and it's very critical of of western chauvinism and nation building and um the war machine and etc so i think that like it's it's pretty obvious why one text might be chosen versus another and i and i think that

dystopian fiction especially in the educational realm works to really reinforce a lot of the systems that um are oppressive in our society in order to justify them yeah yeah in a in a way that science fiction or existential fiction or fantasy doesn't often do it's like so reliably ideological when you're talking about dystopian fiction and one of the things that that obviously most of us read and that makes me that this conversation makes me think of is I'm the sort of the horseshoe ideology inherent in 1984 for example

and I just realize this especially when I'm watching the film I watched it this week I haven't read the book in many years but in the film at least and this is probably true as well in the book but there's a sort of mixture of aesthetics of both fascism and communism so you know like you'll see the big brother

the totalitarian figure the Insock flag, as depicted in the film, could really be fascist or communist. It's hard to tell. The hand gestures of sort of like the crossbones with the closed fist is like a mixture of the sea hail salute and the raised fist. And so I think it sort of subtly and it subtly sort of reinforces this horseshoe theory by this seamless mixturing of the aesthetics of both the far left and the far right into one totalitarian. apparatus and that obviously plays an ideological role in maintaining the status quo or representing implicitly America as a way out of these two extremes and that really if you go too far to the left

or too far to the right, you end up in the same place. And I think that's really how it's used ideologically often. Absolutely. Yeah, I was I was going to touch on that in a later question, but I definitely think it's relevant here as it definitely reinforces that like centrist understanding of politics, especially with 1984, because it absolutely muddles between, like, is this supposed to be fascism or is this supposed to be communism? And obviously, like, you know, Orwell himself, which we'll get into in a little bit, you know, is staunchly anti-communist. But, like, even so, the book itself, I think, did clearly, I mean, and I have some quotes that

I'll pull out later, but, like, there's some clear distinction between, like, what he viewed as fascist and also what he viewed as like when communism takes a wrong turn or when socialism takes a wrong turn and it very much is that if you go too far in either direction it's going to be terrible right and that's that's kind of what it reinforces and um you know i have a lot of students who definitely you know um come into to to my class and they're unaware of where they stand politically and they um all they know is that communism's bad right and and it's just as bad as, you know, fascism or, you know, even if they don't understand the term fascism, it's just as bad as Nazism, right? Like Stalin and Hitler are the same person, right? They were,

they were created in the same chasm. It's just like their understanding of politics is definitely shaped by a lot of these texts and these texts often muddle these ideologies together to a point where they're indistinguishable. And that's what makes it so powerful. You have to take it upon yourself to self-educate and think critically and sort of break out of the conditioning that you're force-fed in this society, or you just end up parroting the dominant ideology while feeling as if those thoughts are coming from some conclusions you've reached through independent critical thinking, like, no, this is really what I believe. And then if you say, well, why do you believe that? Where did you first hear these ideas? It sort of goes back into

the blurry, misty depths of their past conditioning. And oftentimes they're not even even aware of it. And something as simple as a book at the right time in middle school or high school, but even something reinforcing like the Pledge of Allegiance every single day, which, you know, my son entering kindergarten this year, even over Zoom, is, they stand up and they do the pledge of allegiance. Oh, Jesus Christ. And it's dystopian to see it. And, you know, we'll, we'll complicate it and we'll, you know, make our, even our kindergarten son sort of think critically about it just to set up that counter narrative, not force feeding him the counter narrative, but making him just sharpening that critical mind so that we'll ask a simple question afterwards like

what does freedom and justice for all really mean what would that look like you know and obviously he's only a kindergartner but i did that with my daughter who's 11 and it paid dividends down the road where you just start shaping the critical capacities of the child not telling them what to think but how to think from a very early age and then watch that process develop sort of of its own accord as they get older and they have that critical mindset which so many kids and adults in this society completely lack. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that we see a huge impact on our society when we encounter adults who didn't do any of that critical thinking. Oh, God. And we'll, like, on and they'll, you know, like, they'll wield one of these texts, like, as a political text that we should consider

to be, you know, a real world understanding of what we're experiencing. I mean, like, I've been in arguments with people where they're like, read 1984. I'm like, as what? Like, and they, they generally, like, presented as a work of, like, political theory. And I'm like, you're basing your entire understanding of like the soviet you know of soviet history based off of 1984 like you've got to be kidding me exactly just dog shit and they're convinced it's some sophisticated critique too which makes it all the right absolutely yeah because it's in a book the only book i've ever read that was forced to as a sophomore it's never left me right yeah so uh for this discussion from from this point on out i think we'll be talking about dystopian fiction

from the past first and then we'll discuss the present and the future to sort of give a chronology of how dystopian fiction has sort of evolved with the times because if we take seriously the Marxist idea of base and superstructure then we understand that the shape and the dimensions

and the focus of all fiction but specifically this sort of fiction we're discussing will change and adapt and move depending on where that underlying sort of political economy is and what the needs of the ruling class are at any given era or epoch. So with all of that said, what are some essential works, and I know we've touched

them a little bit, we can go a little deeper. What are some essential works of dystopian fiction from the past? And what did they represent ideologically? I know we've touched on 1984, but I'm sure there are plenty more. Sure. Yeah. And I actually kind of want to go back to 1984 because I do think that it is what most people kind of imagine as the launching point for most of the dystopian fiction that we, like we have a basis of reference. with 1984. And I think that it's important to talk about kind of at length because of the time frame that it was written and the continuous impact that it has on our understanding of political ideology. I mean, like this book was written in 1949. And, you know, he wrote Orwell or

Eric Blair, you know, George Orwell was his pen name, wrote Animal Farm in 1943, right? So he was writing this kind of analogous Soviet style farm in the midst of World War II. And obviously it's pretty straightforward that it's a critique of the Soviet Union.

You know, the old major being Lenin, Snowball, being Trotsky, Napoleon, being Stalin, etc. And it's also very clear which side of that political divide or well stood on at that time. But I think it's really

important to kind of analyze it through the lens of that time frame as well as Orwell as an author, right? Like his wife during World War II actually worked for the Ministry of Information, which was the British arm of like of propaganda, right? And that played really heavily into his understanding of Winston's occupation, which was essentially rewriting history. And even the government in 1984, like you had mentioned, Inksok, it meant English socialism, right? So even though people kind of see 1984 as like an extended critique of the Soviet Union, I think that it's more important to look at it through the lens of, again, that like if we push too far in either direction, this is the logical conclusion.

Now Orwell fought on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War was openly allied with communists early on, but then the relationship soured and he became very anti-Soviet and saw the Soviet Union as this kind of like perversion of, you know, what he considered to be like pure socialism, which I would consider more along the lines of like social democracy or democratic socialism or what have you. and he you know even goes into quote in in 1984 he says that the society was rejected and vilified every principle for which the socialist movement originally stood and it does so in the name of socialism so it's obvious that he's he's making this critique of the Soviet Union right like as being openly identifying as a socialist state but then he he states that it vilified and reject every principle that the socialist movement had stood. But I think that this quote is pretty important for an insight into the text itself and why it's generally analyzing the manner that it is. And this is during a scene in which Winston, the primary protagonist, is being

tortured by O'Brien, a member of the inner party. And O'Brien is telling Winston the justification for their power, the reason why they're in control, and the reason why society is the way that it is. And he says, the German Nazis and the Russian communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise, where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. And power is not a means it is an end one does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution

one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship the object of persecution is persecution the object of torture is torture the object of power is power and i think that this this quote specifically is really insightful um and how 1984 sets this understanding that like all you know all forms of power are inherently corrupt, right? And this gets reinforced through a lot of, you know, like liberal quotations of like absolute power, you know, corrupts absolutely. And therefore any, any push for even workers' power

from like the Marxist sense is also unjustifiable and will also result in some, you know, horrible dictatorship in which there is no end where people are free and equal despite that possibly being the motivation for establishing power in the first place. And I think that that 1984 kind of like sets this, you know, going forward as how a lot of dystopian fiction is politicized in this, again, horseshoe theory type understanding of politics.

But I also want to touch on a Brave New World because I think what's interesting about Brave New World, and it's often put into the very similar category with 1984, is that it, in essence, is not at all the same. It's very, very different. In Brave New World, the New London, the world in which these characters are existing in, is basically filled with nonstop pleasure and like hedonism, right? The characters are consistently taking, you know, they are actively choosing to take a drug that we would, I guess we could say it's something probably. I'll be like an antidepressant. My wife the other day was like,

so they're basically just taking Molly all the time. I'm like, essentially. Yeah, it's kind of what it is. Like, they're just like completely tripping balls for like their entire life. But it really works to pacify them because it's a, it's kind of like an ultimate caste system within this society. Like humans are created. They're genetically engineered to be of a specific class.

And, you know, like they even go so far as. to physically, electrically shock babies when they're born to dislike things like books and flowers, right? Like if they are meant to be part of the, what we would call like the proletariat, like the working class, right? They're shocked so that they're not, you know, they find no enjoyment in literature or nature. They make them essentially be close to the cities and that's what they are comfortable with because they know that if they leave, then they're going to feel physical pain. They know that if they try to enjoy any kind of intellectual stimulation, they're going to be subjected to pain. But I think that what is interesting about both the

Brave New World and 1984 is that they do have similar underlying themes. And one of those underlying themes is the destruction of the family. And I think that this understanding of like the family unit and how it was, like how it may be destroyed in some, you know, dystopian vision of the world played a lot into like Cold War fears of like the understanding of what like communal living or communal life was like in the Soviet Union, right? Like this idea that somehow, you know, this lack of distinction between personal and private property that like if the communists took over that they,

you know, everyone would belong to everyone. There is no family. There's no monogamy. Like, everyone's sharing the same toothbrush. Everyone's sharing the same partner. Um, and the, the old understanding of the family, um, has been, you know, disintegrated for the, for the good of the collective. Um, and those, both those, you know, both these, these texts have that theme throughout. I think the brave, brave new world definitely, um, pulls on that a lot more heavily. There's, you know, a lot of like orgies. There's, uh, you're not only, strongly discouraged to not have monogamous relationships but like you're punished if you do then of course you know the the protagonist is someone who wants to have a monogamous relationship and um you know

is subjected to to all sorts of humiliation for wanting that and whatnot um but i i also wanted to touch on what's interesting about these two authors uh specifically is that you know Orwell was at one point a student like aldous huxley actually taught French at a college and Orwell was a student of his. And Brave New World was actually written in 1932. So this, you know, predates 1984 by about 17 or 15 years. I'm super bad at math. This is why I don't teach math. Sounds right to me. I don't know. Yeah, 25, 30, whatever. It doesn't matter. But, you know, it predates 1984, but is often, you know, seen as as, it's kind of contemporary. And even though

obviously that time difference is not huge. I think it's really important to understand that this text was written prior to World War II, whereas 1984 was like post-World War II. And there is a very clear line of demarcation between like how ideology was shaped before and after because our relationship with the Soviet Union and obviously like the existence and then non-existence of Nazi Germany, as well as imperialism. Japan, right? Like there's there's all these very clear shifts in our relationships with these other regimes or other power structures around the world. But one thing that I thought that you

would find interesting in particular, because I know that you've done past episodes on like psychedelic experiences is that Huxley, you know, famously left the world tripping balls. Like he was injected with a massive amount of LSD as he was on his deathbed. But that wasn't obviously his his first encounter with psychedelics and his he had actually written numerous texts about his experiences with mescaline and LSD and mushrooms and was a huge believer in like in universalism and mysticism as well as like just the the broad understanding of internationalism and humanity and I think it's it's really interesting to to view his text as kind of like a warning for technology alienating us from the natural world.

And obviously there's a lot in the text that speaks to all sorts of different facets of human nature or what is perceived as human nature. But I think that these two books, although written in a general time frame that's similar to one another, are vastly different in how they kind of like set the genre going forward. Yeah, yeah, that's all, I have a few things to say. That's all so fascinating. One thing to say, speaking of Aldous Huxley's experimentation with psychedelics and hallucinogens, you know, he wrote the book famously, The Doors of Perception,

and the psychedelic sort of banned the doors from the 60s and 70, I think the 60s, they obviously got their name from Huxley's Doors of Perception. And as a young, teenage, late teen, growing up doing a bunch of different sorts of drugs and getting very much into this whole world. Some of my most profound first hallucinogenic experiences were, while listening to the Doors' music, I have very intense memories of that. And so it's just funny that, you know, that comes from Doors of Perception, who, you know, Aldous Huxley also wrote Brave New World, et cetera.

I think that's interesting. And yeah, I think you're right, too, when we talk about how fiction sort of represents where society is at that moment. And Brave New World, in the book, I was reading chapters of the book to Preparters, for this episode and they would replace the word God with Ford and a huge part of it is like, you know, oh my Ford. A huge part of it is in this post Ford era with the assembly line and the hyper division of labor. Huxley is sort of extrapolating from that and saying, you know, where could this possibly go in the future? And then you get, you know, literally genetic modifications, genetic editing to put people in their cast position from birth. And then in 1984, Orwell is in a post-World

World War II moment thinking about where does the state go from here, how much levels of control, what does the next war look like? So they're very much reflecting the anxieties and uncertainties of their age. And the last thing I'll say before we move on, and you mentioned it towards the end is this, the role that nature plays in both of these works of fiction. In a brave new world, you talked about how they would do Pavlovian conditioning on children in certain working class strata to beat out of them a love of flowers, which, you know, is a stand in for a love of nature. And they talk about in the book how in the past they gave them a love for nature because they wanted them to consume transportation that takes them out of the cities into the rural countryside. But they found that, you know, it was a destabilizing element to have these working class people have too much love for nature. and so they had to beat it out of them along with a love for books so they don't read and they don't go out in the nature and find anything lovely about it and that's a way of controlling their mind and then in 1984 at least in the film again i haven't read the book in many years in the film um Winston has this moment where he meets um his his lover out in nature you know they walk out of the city this grim sort of decrepit concrete everywhere city and they go out into nature and from that

point on throughout the film whenever Winston's trying to find his happy place or to make some sense of what's going on psychologically, it's this sort of disassociative trip back to nature where he's trying to stay grounded. And as he is conditioned and beaten and tortured, the ability for him to hold on to those images of nature become shorter and shorter and shorter, as if, you know, siphoning nature and a love for nature out of the human mind makes the human more easy to control. Both of the those themes popped up in both of those works, which I think is incredibly fascinating. There is something, I don't know how to put it, it's not exactly revolutionary, it's not exactly primal, but something very human about nature and being out in nature for long periods of time makes the absurdities of the socially constructed world inside the cities more apparent. You know, you spend time out in nature by yourself for a while, the boundaries of yourself and the role you play in society loosen a little bit and things like money and working nine to five jobs

and clocking in and clocking out and wearing your tie a certain way because it'll piss your boss up if you don't. All of that becomes more and more absurd and obviously and explicitly absurd. And so I can't really fully formulate it, but there's something about being in the natural world in and of itself that works against the worst elements of society.

you know, as displayed in these works. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And I think that that really touches on, like, one of those five key characteristics of, like, environmental destruction being a precipice for, for, like, this dystopian world. Like, once we lack access to those green spaces, our ability to just enjoy the natural environment around us, like it literally feels like dystopia, which is, I think, what so many of us are facing now, you know, like here in California, just going outside is a hazardous act, right?

Like our air quality index over the last weekend was like 486, you know, which is, it's like you walk outside and you're instantly, you get a headache. And like that on top of being isolated because of a pandemic, I think a lot of this plays into this like, wow, you know, like how much do we appreciate our natural world? How much do we take it for granted? And how that plays into these works of fiction. And one thing I did want to touch on because you brought up the Ford situation in Brave New World, which I think is fascinating because, you know, there was such a fetishization of the efficiency of like the Ford model of consumerism. And it's a big part of a Brave New World that people aren't allowed to have old things, things that might be like nostalgic because they are pressured to constantly consume new things to help the economy.

And I think that that reflects incredibly well in a world of 2020 where planned obsolescence is such a primary factor of global capitalism. It's like we specifically create goods that are meant to break down over time that aren't going to, you know, your phone isn't going to work as well as it did two years ago, despite there not being any structural reason why it shouldn't. It's built in a way that it is meant to degrade so that you are pressure. to buy new things. You know, and it, they, you know, they, I can't remember the phrase for this, but

it's like the, it costs more money to be poor because you can't put money into a higher quality item and those higher quality items are, are meant for the wealthy, but if you could afford the higher quality item, you wouldn't need to buy more as you went, right? It's like the analogy of the buying boots or something along the lines of that, slipping my mind. But I think that that's a really big part of, of what Huxley was kind of demonstrating. that fear that anxiety around like a world that everything is as cookie cutter right like on the surface everything looks great you know everyone feels happy but their happiness itself is manufactured

and is the byproduct of a drug and social conditioning through pain yeah yeah one more thing I want to touch on before we move on and yeah one more thing and then I'll move I don't want to get too deep into this I mentioned this in other episodes but just thinking about nature and how any sort of dystopian system seeks to deprive us and disconnect us from nature it's also it's a cause and an effect of what what i would call or what in buddhist tradition they call the illusion of separateness um you know if you feel like the world like the natural world is outside of you it's something out there and that you are inside your skin and moreover you were put here by god or even just that even if you're an atheist that sense of um you know i can go out into nature but i'm

something fundamentally separate from it, that illusion of separateness also bleeds into the social realm, because when you feel like you are fundamentally separate from the natural world, you can plunder it, you can exploit it, you can reduce it to commodities. When you feel you are fundamentally separate from other human beings, you can bomb them, you can fire bomb them, you can nuke entire cities, killing babies and children and families and pets indiscriminately. And so at the core of so much of what's rotten about our world and so much of what's behind the climate catastrophe we're currently living through the beginnings of is the fundamental notion, whether explicit but mostly implicit, that you're separate from these things, that we can go ahead and ravage and strip the natural world for commodities because that's not us. That's something external to us.

And the truth is, at least from my perspective, is that we literally are the earth. right like if you don't think that god popped us into this world but you know what's your other option we came out of it right we bubbled up out of the world we have the same common ancestor as every plant and animal on this planet and so we are all deeply utterly inexorably connected and so much of our modern world and so much of the depravities of it is premised on at least this implicit assumption that we can keep all the ravages of this grotesque consumer society on the outside. We can fill up the landfills, we can destroy the earth, but as long as I'm okay in here, as long as I'm sitting in my golden throne, shitting in a golden toilet bowl

and have food within reach any moment of the day, that I'm okay. And, you know, we're starting to see the world put pressure on that very idea that we're separate because wildfires are just as you know, a clean, a clean, stable world is just as important to you as your lungs, you know? The trees and the oceans are just as fundamental to your existence

as the blood pumping through your veins. And so I hope what's going to come out of this going forward is more and more of a recognizing by more and more people that we are not fundamentally separate from one another or from the natural world. And in order for me to be okay, other people have to be okay.

The world has to be okay. we have to take care of one another as an act of taking care of oneself, you know. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Couldn't agree more. So let's go ahead and keep going. We're going to talk about the present dystopian fiction in a bit, but I move these questions around a little bit because we're talking so much about Orwell and ideology. And I want to talk about maybe you can mention, you don't have to, but maybe mention the Marxist critique of Orwell.

But then let's discuss more broadly how the right, the left, and the center use Orwell specifically ideologically and how perhaps, perhaps dystopian fiction has been weaponized into anti-communist propaganda more broadly. Absolutely. Yeah. So I think that we've touched on a lot of this already, but I kind of just want to reinforce some of it, especially with Orwell being kind of used as a stand-in for like thinking critically about the Soviet experience and like communism as a whole, right? Like it oftentimes people who are very anti-communist will utilize. or weaponize Orwell's literary work works as evidence against the, you know, quote-unquote excesses of the Soviet Union or whatever it is that they might not have fundamentally agreed

with that system. And I think it's very interesting to point out, again, that Orwell never went to the Soviet Union, right? So it would be as if I had written a, you know, a fiction book on China that someone would then, you know, quote as, like, evidence that the Chinese system is this way. And I think that that's really, really important for us to understand that, like, one, Eric Blair was, you know, lived in the heart of imperialism of that time, which was the U.K., you know, was fairly well educated from a well background, served time as a police officer. for the British Empire in what was then, you know, Burma, which at that point was part of India, you know, which was a colony of the British. And so it's really important to understand that his viewpoint of what he saw as the acceptable version of socialism was not at all what the global south of the global peripheries would have been able to

to fundamentally bring about, right? Like he, I think despite his education did what I think so many leftists do, which is ignore the material conditions of which these revolutions kind of erupt in, right? Like the perfect conditions don't exist for revolution, right? Revolutions happen sometimes in the most complex and backwards conditions, and you kind of have to deal with that hand that you've been dealt. So I think that when it comes to how he's weaponized by the left in particular is that you'll have a lot of factions of like ultra-leftism that utilize Orwell's critique of the Soviet Union to lay claim to, you know, over-centralization, the lack of support of the Soviet Union to the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, you know, the totalitarianism of quote-unquote, Stalinism in 1984 specifically there's there's a tremendous amount of emphasis on on like show

trials. And another kind of interesting factoid about Orwell is that most leftists know that he had created a list of suspected like Stalinists that should be, you know, found prosecuted or arrested. And he actually provided this list to Celia Kerwin, who was a very, close friend of Robert Conquest, who very famously wrote a book about all of, you know, Stalin's alleged crimes and all of the issues surrounding the purges. And this, you know, that text by Conquest was also used as a foundational resource in like the Black Book of communism. So even, even though most people kind of view Orwell as as a socialist, like he was very staunchly anti-communist. So it works in several ways.

either for, you know, the more anarchist side of ideology or even like the Democratic Socialist side of ideology that is critical of the Soviet Union. I think Orwell's legacy often gets used as kind of like a bludgeoning tool for those who would possibly defend like the Soviet experience or the legacy of the Soviet Union. But I think it's really interesting to kind of understand his relationships to other very staunchly anti-communist. And in many cases, like with Robert Conquest, you know, very fundamentally right-wing political figures. And then obviously the right, he uses Orwell consistently to bludgeon any movement on the left. You know, they'll, like, I think most obviously you can look at how the understanding of like the right-wing use of the term like social justice warrior, right?

or like calling people snowflakes for being politically correct. The entire idea of like political correctness, which has its fundamental ties to, you know, quote unquote cultural Marxism, which is directly tied to the Nazis. But like even political correctness gets tied to Orwell, right? Because it's a reconstitution of what is acceptable language, right? And so the right will utilize how Orwell kind of, you know, manifested this destruction of language to reorganize it in a way that was acceptable to the party, right? So, you know, the right obviously has no idea what like the left even

truly is because they think Democrats are the left. But like, you know, they'll, they'll use like respectability politics as a form of Orwellianism, right, against the left, you know, so they'll say like, oh, well, this is Orwellian or even if you, you know, stand up for trans people's rights that somehow are wellian because we're, We're forcing you to accept that this person identifies the way that they identify and that, you know, the people on the right should be able to, you know, misgender them all they want because that's their right. And if you take that away from me, that's Orwellian. So it's just kind of like this ridiculous understanding of like this text that again gets used as like a like actual political theory. Like they think that this is political theory and they think that it's justifiable to use it to base policies.

of it. And then, of course, like, the center will utilize Orwell, again, to kind of reinforce that, that horseshoe theory of understanding that, like, both sides. Like, I mean, the fascists are just as bad as the communists, right? Like, BLM is a bunch of crazy Marxists that are trying to reinvent, you know, society in this very, like, particular understanding. But we also don't agree with the alt-right Kekistan people, you know, because they're, you know, they're both crazy fanatics and the appropriate solution lies somewhere in the middle. Um, you know. Antifa are the real fascists. Right. Exactly. You know, and it's not even, it's not even like, obviously we would associate that with like those on the right making such like ridiculous statements. But it's like the liberal center or, you know, most liberals are on the right as well. But the centrist will even claim that like, well, you know, Antifa, like they're just a bunch of anarchists and they just want to destroy things. And they're, they're trying to make everyone, you know, a transgender lesbian Marxist.

atheist who worship Satan, you know? So it's just like this totally ridiculous understanding of the world around them that is based, um, you know, formulaically on, on a, on a fictional text. And I think that it's, it's really important for Marxists to, to not ignore or dismiss the impact of Orwell because of how, you know, how much of an asshole he was as a person. But like, it's also, it's just so fundamental for us to, to kind of, view that our political landscape is significantly shaped by a lot of literary works. And this one in particular, I think, you know, Orwell in particular, is, is so ingrained in Western culture and

Western understandings of like the Soviet system. And the, and obviously the Soviet system is therefore like the foundation for all understanding of socialism in general right like no you know most people's understanding of socialism does not go past the soviet system so um everything is framed through whether they are aware of it or not through like the lens of orwell um and and it gets it gets weaponized by both sides i see it i see it you know just as often being used by by anarchist or or uh democratic socialists against you know, Marxist Leninists, as often as I see it used with Republicans, you know. So it's fascinating in that regard that like both, both polls, so to speak, we'll use it. And it's just kind of like, how did that happen, you know?

And I mean, like, obviously it happened for a reason. And I think that that, you know, ties back into that educational piece of how it's, how it's presented kind of as fact as at a young age for so many people. and most people don't go further to investigate kind of the premises that are set forth by Orwell. Absolutely. Yeah. And in lieu of an educational system and a society which has no vehicles, mainstream vehicles at all, to have a nuanced or complex discussion about World War II or what happened. Everything gets reduced to cliches and black and white. It's very fitting that a work of fiction would replace anything.

sort of mainstream nonfiction dialogue about reality because the stories that America tells about itself specifically in the World War II period and after are so at odds with actual historical reality that they're almost forced to turn to fiction to propagate their their version of events than they are to have an honest account of facts and reality and try to parse out the realities of what actually happened. The role the Soviet Union played in defeating fascism the black book of communism that came out as fascist propaganda pipelined right into liberal centrism and used as a bludgeon against the left. And so it's very fitting that a work of fiction has to do all this heavy lifting because a society like ours is devoted to not really truly

understanding history as it actually is, or at least some evidence-based objective analysis. We don't even have that. And then just the idea of how it's used across the right, left, and center. That Orwellian idealism and white chauvinism of I know what socialism is supposed to be and those people aren't doing it right. That is white chauvinism and it's absolutely alive and well on the anti-communist left to this day. There's a very direct lineage of like Orwellian thought down to some factions of ultra left, you know, socialists and not all anarchists, not all left comms. I'm making those caveats because there's plenty of principled people that see through the nonsense.

But it is really used as a battering ram. And then on the right, as you said, just a dog shit understanding of political philosophy and history, it just becomes just this blunt weapon, you know. It doesn't even matter. Like, you know, right wingers can be on Twitter and tell you to read Animal House, and it doesn't matter. Because the point is not about reading anything. They've not read it.

They don't expect you to read it. It's just the most laziest shit they can pull out of their back pocket at any given moment, you know. Yeah, I think it's so hilarious that more often than not, people will, you know, it's like, I'll get into arguments with people over history, and they'll be like, read a book, and I'm like, which one? You don't even, you don't even have one. Like, you're just saying, read a book. And it's just like, because in their mind, all books reinforce their ideological understanding

of the world. And I think that, you know, what you said, that the use of fictional text being, you know, standing in place of actual history and theory. um is is so indicative of the american understanding of history because the way that history is taught uh in the american educational system is a utopian understanding of a dystopian history so it's it's really like the the backwards you know it's like it's almost as if it's almost a well yeah right exactly yeah i mean yeah Winston's job was rewriting the past um to to fit the ideological needs of the ruling class in the present and it's so funny

that the books it's the books themselves sort of get turned into that it's a hilarious and sort of sad irony right yeah very much let's move from from the past to the present what are some modern or more modern works of dystopian fiction that you think are relevant here and what do they represent not only ideologically because i think we understand how dystopian fiction represents ideology broadly but maybe how it's shifted over time right away from the brave new worlds in the 1984s into more contemporary concerns or reflections. Absolutely. And one that I really want to touch on, because we talked about this a lot, you know, leading up to this episode, because there's so many areas that we can go to. There's so many examples of dystopian fiction that we can

touch on. But one I really wanted to, you know, give some time dedicated to was the hunger games. And specifically because of the overall popularity of it. But I also think that it touches on a lot of the themes from the past, but brings them into a more modern context. So again, I want to give kind of like the context of which it was written. So this, you know, The Hunger Games, three books, was written by Susanna Collins. And she started writing these books at the beginning of the Iraq War, like right when the Iraq War was launching in 2003. She was inspired by, like, her desire to kind of dive into the concept of what a just war was.

And, like, the theory of just war within, like, political science, you know, it states that, like, a just war has to be, like, a last resort. It has to have a, you know, a just cause. There has to be valid authority to wage that war. There has to be the probability of success. There has to be an exit, exit strategy, and it has to be a proportional response to whatever happened to bring about war in the first place. And I think that that's really important to look at because, one, the war in Iraq doesn't meet any of those specifications, and that served as the backdrop of these books being

written. So you have, you know, essentially a group. So people who have been, you know, segregated into different districts where the people who live in the capital have, like, absurd wealth and luxury at the expense of all of the other people in the districts. And then, you know, once every year, people within a specific age range have to literally fight to the death for the entertainment of the people in the capital. And I think that it's really, like, alarming that this book about young people fighting to

the death for the enjoyment of those at the top was written at the onset of the Iraq War in which obviously working class kids get sent overseas to kill other working class black or brown kids for essentially the entertainment of the ruling class, right? I mean, for their enjoyment and their insurement of their luxurious world. And I think that it's a really interesting to look at. at these books through that lens because it was obviously taken to its logical conclusion of putting people in like a Thunderdome type experience and having them just like kill each other so that they could ensure their survival and therefore they could secure wealth and

fame. It seems extreme. But like if you take out that kind of that piece of like the games and put it into context of war, right? Like, it's actually not different at all. But I also think that a really important piece to the Hunger Games is, like, the role of Catnus. And Catniss is obviously the protagonist to the books, and she, you know, volunteers to take her sister's place in the Hunger Games. And once she, you know, so she decides to kill herself with her, her. her opponent, Peta, and because of that sacrifice, they both survive, right?

And then she essentially becomes very, she becomes the tool of like a political rebellion. And I think that this aspect of this specific dystopian work of fiction is what's most fascinating about it is that Katniss herself is like a reluctant political revolutionary. and she's not eager to necessarily take up the banner of the districts and revolt. Like she sees the corruption, she sees the exploitation and the oppression that her people are subject to, but at the same time it doesn't necessarily have a political articulation of her own ideas and thoughts, right? And she very much becomes like a pawn in the game between District 13, which is in like open

rebellion to the capital and the capital itself, so much so that it, she ends up, you know, at the spoiler alert for anyone who's listening to this, you know, at the end of the three books or the movies, you know, she ends up murdering the leader of the rebellion rather than murdering the president of Pan Am, which is the world that they exist in. And I think that, again, this works in modern context to reinforce that horseshoe theory. understanding of our political ideologies because obviously like alma coin who's the the president of district 13 is in no way meant to represent like a communist even though uh president snow who's the president of pan am is obviously a fascist um but in in the same regards it demonstrates this

kind of like both sides are bad um the the answer kind of lives in the in the center um and that the um you know that rebel causes are are manipulated from external factors like that's the outside agitator kind of narrative um that's put into catnus's life like she you know catnus is is clearly like meant to be the figure of the rebellion but at the same time she's having her strings pulled by like an outside um you know nefarious force and i think that that um you know it's interesting to me that these films and books were so incredibly popular, and it doesn't matter where your political leanings are, you'll probably enjoy them. But at the same time, you know, you'll often get people who are critical of movements that are in open rebellion. And they don't necessarily

see how ironic it is that they support these characters and these dystopian works of fiction that are trying to secure justice or peace or equality or whatever it is that their motivational factor is and they'll they'll openly demonize you know BLM for being on the highway or um you know someone for breaking a window or like a building burning down right like none of that's justifiable to them and and it works to reinforce why it's not justifiable by the fact that the the protagonist in hunger games is viewed essentially as apolitical right like she doesn't have necessarily like a political cause she just knows that like oppression's bad right like there isn't necessarily like a solution um that she's rallying behind like a a program or or an

ideology it's just that like my sister was going to die and then her sister does die so like both sides are bad and they're terrible and i need to rise up against both of them um so i think that the hunger games despite it being you know written 60 years after these other previous works the fiction that we were talking about essentially reinforces very similar narratives. And I think that another grouping of dystopian fiction in our modern context is the Black Mirror series on Netflix. And I think that this is really indicative of where we're at as a society with our overall alienation. that we feel towards each other. And like you brought up this, this, you know, a minute ago with, like, if you don't feel

connected to one another, it's much easier to, you know, bomb the shit out of people around the world. Or if you don't feel connected to nature, then it doesn't seem so bad when it's all burning to the ground. And I think that the Black Mirror series really speaks to a lot of people's kind of innate fears of where we're heading in the realm of, like, technology, alienation, isolation, um, destruction of, of the environment, um, you know, the, the overall rising tide of like authoritarian surveillance state, um, centralization, uh, the breakdown of democracy, um, super viruses.

I mean, there's, there's so many episodes, um, in, in the series that like touch on what, you know, it's great because each one is kind of encapsulated within its own theme. Um, but it, it touches on so many different aspects in this really, um, frightening way that is, is, is, like clearly visible to the people who are consuming it as a product of culture. Yeah. Yeah. So much fascinating stuff. I have a million little notes.

I can't get to them all. But one thing I do want to say in sort of connecting it up with some previous episodes we've done is just how capitalist realism is so often replicated in these fiction, these works of fiction and not only just dystopian fiction, but also apocalyptic and science fiction, where it's very hard. even for, you know, sort of brilliant, insightful artists, you know, authors of these texts, to think outside of those confines and to project forward in a way that radically challenges the basic assumptions of our already existing society instead of simply replicating them or elaborating on them to see where they could go wrong. I think we sort of see, and I'm sure there are science fiction and dystopian authors and artists out there who have a radical bent and are working on this.

But I just can't help but see how so much of this stuff reinforces a generalized capitalist realism. And this obviously shouldn't come as a surprise. I think Mark Fisher opens his text on capitalist realism with an analysis of a dystopian film, Children of Men, and uses it as an example and as a doorway into the broader critiques and arguments that he makes throughout the books. And, you know, Children of Men, I think, is a really important work of fiction here to, to, talk about for various reasons, but also because I think it represents a very, I mean, fertility issues aside, a likely future, even just with like climate change and stuff of sort of the breaking down of society, the delegitimizing of the state, the state necessarily having to

become more repressive as the conditions deteriorate and they're losing grip on the monopoly of violence and ideological control over the people, etc. So I just, I just think it's helpful to think about this stuff through the lens of capitalist realism. And as Marxists, as anybody that's a radical or revolutionary thinker, we can enjoy these works, right? Like, I enjoy reading Brave New World. I enjoy The Hunger Games, right? But we can also, and we must, I think, take that meta perspective of like, okay, on this level, this is an enjoyable film. I can watch with my kids and eat popcorn to. But on another level, how can we analyze the themes and assumptions to have a better understanding of the collective psychology of this moment, of this

epoch, of this era. What is this saying about our society and what is it not saying? What can it not even imagine saying? And I think it's at that critical juncture where you start taking that meta perspective and critically engaging with the work where you can simultaneously enjoy it as well as use it to come to a deeper understanding of where we are socially, politically, culturally, etc. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I think that it's so important for us to be able to critically analyze like all aspects of culture. I mean, this is something that I try to instill as a skill set with

my students is just like, like you said, what is this saying about our culture and what is it not saying? It's like there's a reason why call of duty is a multimillion dollar, you know, video game franchise. And it's like, what does this do to reinforce like militarism? What does do to reinforce, like, nationalism or, you know, Western chauvinism or, you know, et cetera. It's just, it's just really fascinating that, you know, these works of fiction and culture in general, it's like, of course, like, we all are stamped with the society that we live in. So, like, we are our products of it. And we need to either, you know, accept that and, like, droll about our lives in horrible

misery or we can work to transcend it. But we also need to, like, critically analyze all of the things that we, especially especially, you know, consume as entertainment because we often apoliticize entertainment in general. Like, it's just that like, oh, well, I'm just watching this movie. I'm just watching this show. It's like people watching the NFL and being like, just keep this Colin Kaepernick race stuff out of football. This is just about sports as an F30 fly, you know, F35 flies over the fucking stadium in a 100-yard American flag is displayed on the field. Yeah, let's keep politics out of sports. But go on. I'm sorry to know. No, no, no. That like is a perfect addition to that because I think that so much of what Americans view as apolitical is so political and they just don't, they can't conceptualize how it's politicized. And they only view things that disrupt the status quo as being political. Anything that maintains it is immediately seen as just like, well, I mean, it's part of the status quo. So it is apoliticized. But obviously it holds a great deal of,

um political weight to it and um yeah you know i wanted to touch on on one other thing because um we talked about how these works of fiction often get utilized in in anti-communist propaganda and i think that this one particular episode of um black mirror really um kind of like drove it home on how uh political these these forms of entertainment can become and how often they're weaponized against like in lieu of the state, right? Like they become like a tool for the state to further their narrative. The episode Nosedive, which I believe is the last episode of the first season, is when they essentially have like a social credit system

where they're consistently ranking their interactions with other people on like a one through five star scale via some kind of like social media app, you know. And eventually, you know, the, the woman, the protagonist in the episode, like, has like a total breakdown. And, like, you know, as her score continues to plummet and her access to, you know, societal goods or ability to do things is just completely, like, taken from her. Right around this time, a bunch of news media outlets were reporting on China having a social credit system. and the social credit system will track things like, you know, like how long it takes you to perform certain, you know, according to these media outlets, like to perform certain activities or how nice you were to people or how rude you are or whether you gave up your seat in a bus, et cetera, and it will give you a ranking and that could give you access to certain things within society. And like, I mean, it was like clockwork, you know, all these BuzzFeed, you know, New York Times, like, we're, we're, we're, we're putting out like, oh, you know, China is basically a black mirror episode. Like, they're living in a dystopian nightmare, right? And it really, like, worked to create, like,

a further, like, misunderstanding of, like, Chinese society and, like, xenophobia in general for a lot of people, while, you know, ironically enough, like, they just happen to be in the crosshairs of, like, U.S. foreign policy, right? So it's just like, oh, I wonder, it's interesting that all these news media outlets just kind of found, like, a perfect representation. of what they want us to think China is like while completely ignoring the fact that like the United States is one of the only countries to utilize credit scores to decide whether or not you have access to like housing right or or or transportation or even a job or opening a bank or even like trying to get a job at a bank like they check your credit it's like your employment

your housing all the basic shit your your interest on loans It's all dependent, you know, on your credit score, which is much more materially impactful in a lot of ways than even the worst hyperbole of the Chinese social credit system. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's fascinating that like people, you know, have again apoliticize that entire system of ours, like our credit score system of just being like, oh, well, you know, you have to have debt because debt is good. Like it shows that people are willing to lend you money and that you are a reliable person to pay it back. So, like, keep accumulating debt, just pay a little bit off at a time, but forever stay indebted. We always want this debt peonage to be this continuous basis. And it's like, this is a, like, that's a dystopian fucking nightmare. Exactly.

I mean, so often, just to build credit, like when you're young and you're trying to go out and get something that you need credit for, they say, you don't have a credit history. Therefore, you must go and take out debt in order to prove to us that you have a credit history in the first place. I literally, in my mid or early 20s, I had to get a credit card just so I could put a little amount on it every month and then pay it off immediately to boost my credit score. It's just, it's an absolutely sort of topsy-turvy approach to everything. And it is premised on the need to pump people full of debt for the various financial institutions and to keep American consumerism, you know, its head above water and to keep the system stumbling down the fucking road.

Yeah. And again, that, you know, that episode of, you know, for. people who didn't see it as a complete analogy of the Chinese social credit system, even the episode, if you just take it for face value, it kind of speaks to this like need for social validation. But again, dismisses that like we have those systems in place already that will deny us access to our means of survival through the credit system. And it's like, it becomes this kind of like, oh, ha, ha, ha, like wouldn't it be terrible? Like if we couldn't get a job because people didn't like enough of our posts online. And it's like, well, what if it was terrible that we couldn't get a job because

we at one point, you know, had to bail on a lease because we couldn't afford housing. You know, like, how terrible would that be? Because that's our reality. Yeah. I would rather be judged on whether or not I opened the door for people than that fucking car I got, you know, taken from me because I couldn't keep up with payments in my early 20s that fucked my credit up for seven years. and I can't buy a house because my credit is too low because when I was in college,

I couldn't afford this payment and it went into collections. It's like, no, I can be a nice person. It's the poverty and the inability to make money that really fucks me, you know. Right, for sure. Seriously. Well, let's go ahead and move on. We're over, I think, an hour and a half here. I'm going to ask one more question, maybe two.

And, you know, we've discussed about the ideology, the anti-communism inherent in a lot of dystopian fiction, how to meta-analyze it from a moment. Marxist perspective as a form of ideology, the past and the present. And so knowing what we know about how dystopian fiction operates, what maybe educated guesses might we make about the form dystopian fiction will take in the near future given what we're living through right now? Very hard question, I admit, but I know, I know. I've been thinking about this question for a while, kind of in preparation for this

moment. And it's so difficult to kind of make a hypothesis. of where I think that it's going, but I do think that you were going to see a significant shift from potentially, now again, potentially that from like government control to more apocalyptic post environmental destruction wasteland, right? Like, and we have a lot of examples of that in the past. Um, you know, some that we've talked on like the road. Um, we didn't really talk about Mad Max, but like that, that entire series is based on this, like, um, fighting over resources. Um, but I think that, um, if we look at dystopian fiction as a reflection of

the current moment, the current, like, political moment, um, we have to have to see that like our, our environment might, um, you know, there could be some adaptation of, of like, more, uh, involvement of artificial intelligence. kind of bringing about a new dominant, you know, quote-unquote species that challenges like our hegemony over the natural world is kind of where I view it going because it's like, you know, we had talked about this before. It's just like how much worse can it get? Like how can, like, one of the things that makes dystopian fiction so desirable to consume is that like it almost makes us feel better about the world that we're living in.

But it's like if what we're currently facing is ultimately like devastating 24-7 and people are pushed to the brink with their mental health and their ability to like handle our reality, then what can dystopian fiction offer that would like, you know, garner the same response that it has in the past? because it's like we are dealing with an increased authoritarian government. We are dealing with a massive surveillance state. We are dealing with a massive environmental degradation and collapse. You know, hurricanes, fires.

You know, so it seems to me like the realm that we haven't quite, you know, actualized is the world of artificial intelligence becoming like a dominant threat to our existence. but I'm I'm fascinated of where it can go and I think that like you know black mirror definitely touched a lot on the ideas of like artificial intelligence and further exploration of like technology becoming more of a threat in and of itself to our existence and I think that we're going to see a lot more of that play out in in the coming years absolutely yeah the matrix also I rewatched the matrix last night and it also touches on the entire AI process problem. I can also see dystopian fiction if it will continue at least for a while. I can see

it one genre being, I'm sure there's been films or works of fiction where this is the primary thing of focus, but geological engineering gone wrong, right? Like since we've passed the point where we can do anything meaningful to prevent climate change, our only options are shrinking table of options at this point is how can we do some geological engineering to reduce what's already happened. And one of the things that comes out is like, well, we could spray certain particles into the sky that would bounce back the sun's heat and light and, you know, bring down our carbon emissions or at least reduce the amount of greenhouse gases coming in to our atmosphere. And that obviously sets up a very easy to see dystopian future where that goes wrong.

we block out the sun completely or we you know has downstream effects we can never think of that that happens and so i can see that as as a one maturing piece of it right but i can also see as things continue to get bad more and more people become revolutionary right more and more people become radical including more and more artists and authors and so in a more optimistic um sort of things or the way things could develop you could see a new generation of radical authors come up who push on capitalist realism who begin to use not just dystopian fiction but all of the related forms of fiction to actually challenge the status quo instead of reentrenching it and i think that when i say everybody or we say everybody has a role to play in making revolution or influencing

the people in your sphere of influence or whatever your talents are using that towards the cause of struggling for a better world there's a million artists out there who can who can do that and You have and who are, but I can see that continuing. So on one hand, we can see like dystopian fiction going as it is. On another hand, we can see capitalism giving rise to its own grave diggers in the form of radical artists who help us break out of capitalist realism. And then the third option is just that this sort of fiction ceases to exist. The luxury of sitting back and being able to create art becomes harder and harder in a less, less stable world. the world as it is resembles or is a dystopia so much so that fictionalizing it or satirizing

it becomes useless, meaningless, redundant, right? I can see it going in any one of those directions. Any thoughts on that? No, I totally agree. And I think that's what made it so difficult to kind of like figure out because it was like it almost seems redundant to continue making fiction that highlights the worst aspects of our society when it's like what we're currently living in is a culmination of the worst aspects of our society. But I did want to bring up because I think that, you know, that

idea of like spurning, you know, the grave diggers of capitalism and artists who are rejecting the status quo and push to completely like redefine our, our understanding of consumer-based entertainment. The book looking backward by Edward Bellamy, which was written in 1888, is not a work of dystopian fiction. It's actually a work of utopian fiction. And it is one of my favorite fictional texts. And it's beautiful. And essentially, it's a conversation between a man who falls asleep under a deep sedative in 1887. And because of unforeseen circumstances, wakes up in the year 2000. And he's having an ongoing conversation with a medical doctor who helped him

kind of recover from his long, you know, slumber. So the man from 1887 is just thoroughly confused by the world that exists in 2000. And the world that exists in 2000, according to Bellamy, has eliminated all of the strife that the world at that time had experienced. And he goes into a really thorough breakdown of how they were able to solve all of societal's problems. And it's fascinating because, I mean, essentially, he's just outlining a really beautifully articulated manifestation of socialism, right?

But he never calls it that. And what's interesting about the book, you know, obviously being written in the late 1800s, having the revolutionary history of all of, you know, the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848 and, um, You know, as its backdrop, what's fascinating about it is that people were so inspired by this work of fiction that they started Bellamy clubs and they tried to enact Edward Bellamy's like world, you know? So I think that, you know, what you were saying about, like, maybe instead of us being so fascinated with the terror of what could come, maybe artists will start capitalizing off of this. ultimate, like, feeling of despair and, um, turn it around into something like, okay, well, what would it look like if we fix this? Like what, you're like, let's, let's, you know,

in a fictional way, rather than us just being like, well, you know, like as, as Marxists, we're not going to try to predict what socialism would look like in our given context. It, it could be like a work of, of intellectual, you know, stimulation to imagine that and then write it out in a fictional context. And I think that in it up itself could be beautiful. something that that could inspire people, or at least ignite their imagination, you know, and inspire people to possibly, like, try to bring it about by destabilizing the status quo. Absolutely. Yeah, I love that response, and I think I'm convinced that that perhaps is the way to go.

Sort of a post-dispopian utopia as a way to break out of capitalist realism. Yeah. And, you know, thinking of socialism as an ongoing open-ended science of experimentation, you know, all experimentations need models and it helps us think through, you know, the problems of our time and how we might implement socialism in any given, you know, period and epoch and time and place to have those models in the form of works of fiction that can try as hard as it might to break out of a capitalist realism and to think about what the world could look like if we solved this problem or what some possible paths are as sort of juicing the overall collective imagination as we

struggle to find a path forward that doesn't lead us to dystopia. So yeah, I absolutely love that idea. So anyways, thank you so much for coming on. I know this is long overdue. We've been friends for even before Rev Leff started. And so it's awesome to finally get you on and to have this wonderful discussion situated as we are in very dystopian time. So thank you so much for coming on and having this conversation. Before I let you go, is there anything else that you didn't get to say that you want to touch on any recommendations you might have for people if they want to you know check out a film they haven't seen in the genre and then if you want where people can find you online um yeah i i mean i don't think there's any um i mean like i was going to touch on

a lot of these other um pieces of of dystopian fiction but like after that that last question i really encourage people to read um that book looking backward by edward bellamy i think that um a lot of Rev-Leff listeners would really enjoy it. It's rather short, but it is just a really, like, beautiful vision of the future, right? And I think that we living in our times need to focus as much as we can on trying to find those sparks of, like, hope and enjoyment wherever we can find them. And if we're, you know, constantly reinforcing our very dismal existence sometimes with nonstop works of dystopian fiction that might work to to leave us all feeling rather hopeless.

So read a book that will hopefully inspire you. So looking backward by Edward Bellamy is where I would go. I also, in terms of where you can find me online, most of my profiles are private, but I do run or have an Instagram that is public that I do book reviews on, which is Mr. underscore G.S. underscore book underscore club, so Mr. G's book club. And I do weekly reviews of generally nonfiction texts, but I'm going to start working in fictional texts as well

because I'm sure that you've experienced that a lot of people will ask for reading recommendations. And I'm always just like, okay, where to start. So I decided to start this Instagram where I will post books with a little short review to kind of help people so that when they ask, I can just direct them there and say, like, well, depending on what you are interested in, maybe you'll find something that I've done a review on.

And if not, then maybe I can help you find it. Awesome. Yeah, I follow that page. It's awesome. I highly recommend it. And I'll link to it in the show notes of this episode so people can go and find that as easy as possible. Thank you again, Gabriel, for coming on and having this discussion. Let's absolutely do it again.

I know listeners will get a lot out of this. And this is long overdue, but hopefully we can continue to work together because I just enjoy talking to you. Absolutely. Yeah, it was a blast. Thank you so much. for having you on. have turned to puppies A shimmer in the midnight

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