The Realized Dystopia

What does freedom mean to you? How are you free? Whether it is the freedom to speak, consume, protest, bear arms, or believe whatever one wants, people want “freedom” because of ideology. Ideology is deceiving in that it is the creator of principles. The reality that humans perceive to hold universal truths are merely a creation of a false reality that humans have been indoctrinated into in order to perpetuate the power of higher classes. Taking a deeper look into the American psyche, one can begin to draw conclusions that the freedom we take as the most important and superior of human ideology is actually a means of domination. We are blinded by our own individuality because we do not understand that it is a product of what the other perceives in us. We live in a world with no true meaning or purpose, only what past generations have handed down to us as truth. Our perceived freedom to choose is what gives humans the power to believe they have control over their reality, but it is in actuality those with supreme ideology who choose what is good or bad.

In America, freedom of speech and the right to vote gives everyone an equal opportunity to speak out about any political issue that will make human life better or worse. Any issue one can think of can be questioned dealing with consumerism, technology, religion, art, love, etc., and those stances accepted by society are what are eventually engrained in our minds as what is normal. Through this free-will there is always push-pull of opinions, which is supposed to create equilibrium by which people find contentiveness in living. What dystopian texts beg to ask is: what makes reality as it stands today the ideal way to live? Taking a closer look at our ideologies and institutions put in place to perpetuate them, we are indoctrinated into a line of thought that strives towards utopia, which alienates real individuals who want to truly be free. Take consumerism for example. Americans have adopted the capitalist ideology as a means of allowing everyone in society to have an equal chance at becoming who they want to be. This ideology allows people to achieve the ideal style of comfortable living, but through consuming objects. It is through consuming things that we define ourselves because the commodities we think are important to us tell something about our individuality to other people that share similar ideologies. Theodore Adorno addresses this problem with mass culture today in that “every detail is so firmly stamped the sameness that nothing can appear which is not marked at birth, or does not meet with approval at first sight.” (Adorno 6) What he means by this is that people will never learn to rationally agree or disagree on anything if it has not already somehow been established as good or bad in our ideology. Think about Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 where people in the future are led to believe that firemen have always burned books instead of putting out fires. Today we put out fires in people’s homes because fire is the destruction of what is already established in one’s life, including books, photographs, and art; which are all constructs of human thought and creativity. The people in Bradbury’s world however did not question the meaning behind why books or any form of art existed because it was engrained in their history (i.e ideology) that books were negative to the human existence. When Montag begins to grasp this rather simple notion that books try to reveal some truth about the world, he comes to the conclusion “how long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?” (Bradbury 52) This realization is a good example of how humans do not understand what is really real and meaningful to them, only what they are ideologically taught is real and worthwhile.

The problem with this streamlining of ideology is that people who think they are they are individuals have no actual original thought. George Orwell’s 1984 is a critique of capitalistic ideologues who believe that their point of view is better than another, and what could happen in the future if one ideology dictates every aspect of the majority of people’s lives without them knowing or caring. Wouldn’t it be great if we could all just get along? It sounds like a good thing to strive towards for the human existence, but by what means would one be willing to take in order to get there? From an Orwellian standpoint in 1984, “orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think” (Orwell 53) and that is what made everyone equal. Without being allowed to have conflicting points of view, everyone believed the same things, thus making what fundamentally makes them human (thinking), less than human. In our world today according to Fredric Jameson “we as individuals entertain a relationship with money and greed, with property, and we are thereby led to wonder what life would be like without these things.” (Jameson 39) What this argument shows in comparison with Orwellian “thought-crime” is that the language we use to explain our thoughts and establish ourselves as individuals is something entirely made up by humans, for humans. An example of this from the film Twelve Monkeys is how psychologist Kathryn Railly tries to define functions of the human mind, but realizes that the occupation by which she defines herself by doesn’t really reveal any truths about the world. What this suggests is that because humans have the thought capacity to describe their world with language, everything is open to interpretation. In a psychologists role, they are simply copying the procedures learned by other psychologists, eventually causing people to believe psychology is important and True. Since Kathryn realized that psychology is all a construct of ideology, her identification as an individual quickly faded.

One of the more interesting topics that are brought up in a progressively dystopian reality is the unknown direction of eugenics. Humans perceive themselves as the dominating force in nature over animals and technology as other means of intelligence because they have emotion. Emotion plays a huge role in ideology that is often unrecognized, because in order for a structure society to thrive, people cannot solely rely on their emotions to make the “right” choices. Cloning is often questioned as right or wrong because it has the potential to cure many diseases and increase longevity in humans, but it is also emotionally feels wrong because it involves tampering with human life, which is perceived to be precious because of ideologies like religion. Why don’t we hold these same kinds of emotions for animals then? Why do we slaughter and eat them? Aren’t they life as well? This is the problem with the human mind in that it rationalizes its decisions based on how it benefits the individual as a whole. Donna Haraway takes the idea of a cyborg (half man, half machine) to explain a similar concern about how people interact with nature, “the cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.” (Haraway 151) It is ironic that humans would fear their own creation because every thought that it would have would have been given to it by humans. It is feared that cyborgs would eventually reign over humans because they are superior physically and mentally (in you can call it that), but it is once again ironic because humans essentially fear robots becoming more than human, although what makes us human is being imperfect. This fear of perfection is firmly stated in the creation of a cyborg, and it is be paralleled with ideology because once ideology is too perfectly streamlined, one loses sight what makes them human. We can read modern technology today as dystopic because tasks that were done by humans a decade ago are now all done by computers. To compare Fahrenheit 451 to modern day society, knowledge was lost because books were the most prominent source of information, where today a lot of knowledge in books is becoming obscure and obsolete because of the vast amount of information that is on the internet. Technology has replaced the pen and paper, and whether or not it propels humanity into a better future depends on how ideological positions progress. Today, the reality of cloning human beings and “perfecting” their DNA is a more apparent uncertainty. The problem with eugenics as seen in the movie Gattaca, is that it could lead to profiling; making naturally born humans underclass citizens. The main character, Vincent explains the devastation science possibly wields, “I belonged to a new underclass, no longer determined by social status or the color of your skin. No, we now have discrimination down to a science.” (Gattaca) This is a great example of how ideological standpoints are always conflicting because often religious and semi-religious people today do not want to tamper with eugenics because they feel it is messing with God’s will, but still many ideologues embrace science as the savior to humanity.

What else do we have besides ideology? It has weaved it way into every part of our existence because it is a part of human nature. As humans, we feel like we need to establish a point of view because it is what gives us credibility in making the right decisions. In a Marxist critique of capitalistic ideology, it is the difference between doing a job for self fulfillment and doing a job one dislikes solely as a means of attaining money. The argument from a communist’s standpoint is that self worth is lost in the worker who doesn’t have the economic means of doing what they want to do in life. Jameson also critiques this capitalist notion, “capitalism cannot flourish under full employment” (Jameson 37) because in true American ideology of the “American Dream” it is believed that all people should work and strive for a better economic life in order to be more fulfilled. Ideology is something that one must hold onto because without it, no one would be an individual any longer. In establishing ourselves as individuals we allow ourselves to be interpellated, meaning that people are open to being subjugated. Loius Althusser illustrates this, “the existence of ideology and the hailing of or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one in the same thing.” (Althusser) There is always someone ideologically higher with more knowledge; whether it is authority who tries to assume power over others, or society making sure everyone follows the same “correct principles.” (Althusser) There is “no ideology except by the subject and for subjects” (Althusser)

It seems apparent that ideology is something that humans cannot control or begin to dismiss because it is so deeply ingrained in our existence. For some unknown reason the human mind is able to make decisions according to their emotions, but ideology is a means of controlling our inner most desires. Until humans can change their perspective of themselves, we will always be subjecting the world and others through our individuality. Foremost, think of our emotions and they develop our ideology. Our emotion is something that is all humans have because nature made us that way, and nature is filled with unknown possibilities. Unless we can learn to be ‘more natural’ in the sense that we can act upon on emotions and not be subjugated by ideology, controlling the future will always inspire unequal certainty.

Works Cited

• Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1944.

• Althusser, Louis. La Pensee. 1971.

• Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. Westminster: Del

• Jameson, Fredric. "The Politics of Utopia." New Left Review Jan.-Feb. 2004: 35-54.

• Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Ed. Frederic L. Bender. Boston: W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 1988

• Orwell, George.1984. New York: Signet Classics, 1950.

Dr. Wexler,
Thank you for everything this semester. I really feel that I learned a lot although the subject matter can be rather depressing. It found it to be quite conscious widening in that there is more to politics than just two points of view. I really enjoyed the blogging too. It was exciting to do for my first time, and hopefully more classes will adopt your paperless methods because it allows people to communicate ideas constructively amongst each other rather with solely with the teacher. Hopefully I can take another english class in the near future. Thanks again, Professor!
Sincerely,
Sean Donahoe