Fictional stories about an undesirable society have multiplied in the cinema recently. Films such as “The Matrix”, “The Hunger Games”, “Gattaca”, “Children of Men” or “Elysium” have decorated the imagination of many young people, and not so young, in recent decades. In literature, novels such as “1984” (Orwell), “Brave New World” (Huxley), “Fahrenheit 451” (Bradbury), “Fatherland” (Harris) or “Lord of the World” (Benson) sought to warn, in one way or another, that a society can live deceived for a long time, falling into perverse forms of alienation.
The social role played by fiction about undesirable societies is important. Generally, a dystopian story is not intended to be a literal prediction of the future, but rather a metaphor for the dangers of possible collective manipulation. Its real power lies in its symbolic power. Dystopian narratives try to communicate how dark areas of the human condition, usually repugnant, can be introduced subtly, as a criterion for social life or as a principle of government.
In a certain sense, dystopias have emerged as a kind of criticism and protest against the modern-enlightened optimism that, until recently, energized both the right and the left worldwide. Daniel Innerarity, in a recent book (La humanidad amenazada, Gedisa, Madrid 2023) sharply notes: “If modernity asserted itself as a present superior to its past, today we find ourselves in a state of mind that assumes that the future will be worse than our present.”
How is it possible that “dystopia,” which should have its place in purely imaginary worlds, begins to be seen as a “topical” threat, close and real?
The art of manipulation and social deception are the key pieces for this to happen. The most interesting thing is that this fine art, in highly polarized societies, is usually practiced by the most opposite extremes, generating a totally undesirable, but effective, feedback. Let us think of a feverish left-wing dystopia looming on the horizon. Aberrant, contradictory, an enemy of common sense. The reaction of the radicalized right is not long in coming, and offers, as a counterpart, an option that is opposite in its content, but extremely similar in its methods. The enemy that was intended to be defeated ends up reappearing disguised as a solution.
Augusto Del Noce and his disciples have called this phenomenon “subordination in opposition”: be careful with what you hate because you end up resembling it. In essence, highly polarized enemies are “twin brothers,” that is, people and groups inoculated by a common virus that evolved along two trajectories that are, in essence, more similar than different.
It is only possible to get out of this historical and cultural quagmire by looking up. Those who live locked in the dialectic of right-left, conservative-liberal, traditionalist-progressive, do not discover the higher plane that allows them to perceive reality as a polyhedron. It is on this plane that we can find the authentic ways to overcome the arrival of the new authoritarian oligarchies, apparently redemptive, but equally oppressive.
