Dystopian Society

A Dystopian Society is a society with extremely undesirable society qualities.

• AKA: Dystopia.
• Context:
  • It can be predicted by a Dystopian (who believes in a dystopian prediction).
• Example(s):
  • a Techno-Dystopia (with mass unemployment).
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a Utopia.
• See: Totalitarian, Environmental Disaster, Luddite Prediction.

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References

2014

• (Wikipedia, 2014) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dystopia Retrieved:2014-5-21.
  • A dystopia (from the Greek δυσ- and τόπος, alternatively, cacotopia, kakotopia, cackotopia, or anti-utopia) is a community or society that is in some important way undesirable or frightening. It is the opposite of a utopia. Such societies appear in many artistic works, particularly in stories set in a future. Dystopias are often characterized by dehumanization, totalitarian governments, environmental disaster, or other characteristics associated with a cataclysmic decline in society. Dystopian societies appear in many sub-genres of fiction and are often used to draw attention to real-world issues regarding society, environment, politics, economics, religion, psychology, ethics, science, and/or technology, which if unaddressed could potentially lead to such a dystopia-like condition. Famous depictions of dystopian societies include R.U.R. (which introduced the concept of Robots and the word Robot for the first time)  ; Nineteen Eighty-Four, which takes place in a totalitarian invasive super state; Brave New World, where the human population is placed under a caste of psychological allocation; Fahrenheit 451, where the state burns books in response to the apathy and disinterest by the general public; A Clockwork Orange, where the state undertakes to reform violent youths; Blade Runner in which genetically engineered replicants infiltrate society and must be hunted down before they injure humans; The Hunger Games, in which the government controls its people by maintaining a constant state of fear through forcing randomly selected children to participate in an annual fight to the death; Logan's Run, in which both population and the consumption of resources are maintained in equilibrium by requiring the death of everyone reaching a particular age; Soylent Green, where society suffers from pollution, overpopulation, depleted resources, poverty, dying oceans, and a hot climate. Much of the population survives on processed food rations, including "soylent green"; and Divergent, where people must fit into one of five factions based on character traits: Selflessness, Bravery, Intelligence, Honesty, and Peace. Those people who possess more than one quality are hunted down for fear that they will not conform and that their multi-trait personalities make them difficult to control. Jack London's The Iron Heel was described by Erich Fromm as "the earliest of the modern Dystopia."

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