dystopia
1. An imaginary place or state in which the condition of life is extremely bad, as from deprivation, oppression, or terror.
2. A work describing such a place or state: “dystopias such as Brave New World” (Times Literary Supplement).
dystopia
1. An imaginary place or state in which the condition of life is extremely bad, as from deprivation, oppression, or terror.
2. A work describing such a place or state: “dystopias such as Brave New World” (Times Literary Supplement).
dystopia. (2016). In Editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries (Ed.), The American Heritage (R) dictionary of the English language (6th ed.). Houghton Mifflin. Credo Reference: https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/hmdictenglang/dystopia/0?institutionId=5171
The opposite of a Utopia – a dystopia is a model or vision of a world in which lives go badly. In political thought writers have conjured up dystopias in order to warn their readers of the dangers of certain particular social or political developments, or placed dystopia into their overarching model as a kind of hypothetical realisation of some aspect of human nature. Three different dystopic visions are Hobbes’s state of nature, Orwell’s totalitarian picture in 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Hobbes’s state of nature was a hypothetical construct – a stark picture of a war of all against all, in which life was poor, nasty, brutish and short. Without a common power to keep us in check, the basest elements of our nature would resurface, and neither property nor life would be secure. Hobbes’s dystopia is designed to give us a reason to defer to established authority.
Orwell’s is designed to do the opposite. Characterising the incipient tendencies towards total control of individual’s lives, Orwell imagines a society in which we are constantly watched by Big Brother, who directs our lives by way of a huge state bureaucratic machinery. There is some resistance to this domination, but the resistance is futile: Big Brother has the power to make us betray those we love and to believe that falsehoods are true.
Huxley’s picture is different again, portraying a hierarchically divided society in which drugs and virtual interaction have taken the place of real interaction with particular human beings.
Each dystopic vision tells us something about the world in which we actually live, and provides us with warnings about our predicament: in this way, we can construct critical dystopias, just as we can construct critical utopias, such as Rousseau’s egalitarian participative democracy – as measuring sticks by which to evaluate our own societies.
dystopia. (2007). In J. Pike, Political philosophy A-Z. Edinburgh University Press. Credo Reference: https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/edinburghppaz/dystopia/0?institutionId=5171
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