The Black Magic of Dystopias
Orwell and Huxley were conjuring the future, not just warning us about it
Life imitates art far more than art imitates life
Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying”
It’s time for another free piece, and I hope you enjoy this one, dear readers!
A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prophecy that comes true as a direct causal effect of finding out about the prophecy in the first place. A player who is told by a fortune teller that he will win the match, suddenly finds himself much more relaxed about the outcome and as such, is able to play a better game and win. The placebo effects of a drug, its potency a result of the patient’s psychological conviction of its efficacy, is another example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. These prophecies are not evidence of magic, but rather of the powerful effect of the psyche on external events--believing something is one step to conjuring it.
As the events of one life are linked to one psyche, so the events of a society, a civilization as a whole, are linked to a collective psyche, or as Carl Jung wrote about it, the collective unconscious. This is not a complicated philosophical phenomenon; all this indicates is that we are all affected by eachother, and the collective effects that emerge are called the social forces that direct trends in fashion, the arts, in philosophy and in patterns of governance. What a single member of society believes is a “normal idea” at any given point in time, is actually his connection to the collective unconscious, the invisible social forces, that tell him this is normal. He is not consciously aware about how he came to this idea, only that he is inexorably convinced of it, unless he removes himself from his society in a significant enough way to extract himself from the collective unconscious (not always a pleasant thing to do, but I’d say it’s a prerequisite for all serious philosophers).
The collective unconscious is a living system that connects people together in its web. The most important mode of transmission in this system is, and has always been, the story. The stories that were told by the fire, wrote down in novels, songs, and poems, heard on the radio, and then eventually saw in the latest Netflix series, were the modes by which important ideas were transmitted person to person and “normalized”. Once you see that gay couple raising an adopted asian baby in Modern Family enough times, you start to think two men getting married and raising a family is a normal thing. You don’t question it. You have to opt out of that system of thinking, rather than opting into it. Yes, yes, I won’t insult your intelligence any further by explaining the basic mechanisms of propaganda, but listen, I’ve gotta cover my bases. Alright. Let’s get to Black Mirror.
Utopia means no place, and there are many people throughout history who have triesd to imagine what a perfect world might look like. It is an excellent exercise for a creative mind because it forces you to stop complaining and actually imagine what a better world would look like, in as much detail as possible. This exercise is powerful because the creative mind then unwittingly finds solutions to many of the key problems facing society. A dystopia is a version of utopia. The purpose of writing a dystopia is to describe a world that is terrible. It is fundamentally a nihilistic exercise because it begins with asking the question, “what would the world look like if everything went wrong?”
The first dystopia I ever read was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It is a story about a future world of complete sexual degeneracy and breakdown of the family structure. Each individual is born from an artificial womb, and assigned a caste based on the level of alcohol exposed in utero. The slogan is “everyone belongs to everyone”. All sex is a fulfillment of lust and nothing more. There is no such thing as love, attachment, art, or emotion. Each person in society is mandated to take “soma” a medication that stops one’s emotions from becoming a problem. Another one I read (but I admit, never finished) was George Owell’s 1984. A society where the history is continually altered to adhere to the modern political trends. People who remember the truth and don’t go along with the new truth are severely punished by the state. If this sounds eerily like the modern world to you, you would not be wrong. Elements of these stories are so similar to the modern world, it’s as if they got the idea for these things directly from these novels. It’s as if the villains used these novels as instruction manuals.
Were Aldous Huxley and George Orwell brilliant geniuses whose prescience guided them to write their brilliant works of literature? I believe this is true to some extent. They were geniuses. But genius does not guarantee wisdom or morality. Any ordinary person would read these stories and conclude that the worlds they depict are not worlds that one would like to live in. Nevertheless, by describing and articulating these horrors with such excellent detail, the writers have already opened Pandora’s box despite how good their intentions might have been. I believe that by writing these stories, they were instrumental in conjuring these worlds.
Human energy is an extremely valuable resource. The advertising agencies have already figured this out and daily alchemize human attention, outrage, etc into real money and profit. Human energy is what gives a performer on a stage the immense high that many performers report feeling at the end of a show. Human energy is a creative force and when it is directed, even via fear, to focus intensely on very specific things, it can conjure these things into existence. This doesn’t need to be a completely supernatural discussion. Thinking about something specific, means you talk about it with people, the ideas pour into your examples, references, allusions and eventually into your creative ideas about how to organize the world. These are not conscious decisions. This is what it is said that these ideas get incorporated into the unconscious and work at that level both on an individual and a cultural level. The popularity of Huxley and Orwells’ books had the opposite effect to preventing the future they warned about, they actually conjured them into existence.
Praying is also powerful because it is a concentration of human energy and attention on something true, important and good. By a similar mechanism to the above, regular prayer also seeps important ideas into the unconscious and cements them there so that they nourish the rest of our thoughts, actions and unconscious motivations throughout the day. Repetition and poetry form an important element of prayer because this is how ideas penetrate the unconscious most efficiently. This is why dystopia is most dangerous when it comes in the form of artwork and literature: it is using powerful method of unconscious modelling but to a nefarious end.
The same can be said of tv shows today like black mirror that show terrible things like how we can torture people by putting them in simulations that make their brains feel like they are in solitary confinement for decades in the space of one minute. They show people with computer chips in their brains that record their every waking human experience and then being compelled to show all the “footage” from your life before you are permitted to do things like take out a loan or board an airplane. Even the extremely famous movie, The Matrix, is a dystopian story about people living in pods and spending their entire lives in a simulation of reality, while their real bodies are petrified in a living purgatory. On some level, even the writers of the Matrix understood the power of human energy, as the people in the story are used as living batteries for the aliens.
Many people love The Matrix, Black Mirror, Huxley and Orwell. They believe that these dystopias “warn” us about the dangers of abandoning morality, nature, religion and humanity. However, what has happened since these works were exposed to society? They have served not merely as prophecies, they have actually called their descriptions into existence because they have instructed us on how to create these nightmarish realities. They have given us the vocabulary and linguistic architecture to describe these nightmares, which is the first step to creating them. Even God used the word to conjure the world into existence. In a similar way, these dystopia writers use their words to conjure dystopias into existence.
Just like pressing down on a bruise can cause perverse masochistic pleasure, or a depressed person suffering severe anhedonia can feel euphoria cutting her leg with a blade, so dystopias are a form of self harm for an increasingly nihilistic collective unconscious. When we have no hope for the future, it can be deliciously euphoric to lean into the fear and pain of imagining the worst tortures imaginable for humanity, perhaps as a way to snuff ourselves out, punish ourselves. It is always easier to punish yourself than it is to figure out how to improve the situation in any way. Self-pity is always more convenient than self-improvenent.
I call you, dear reader, to reject this self-harm. Reject the dystopias. You know deep down, as you have always known, that they are black magic, and call into existence your worst nightmares because you don’t want to do the work of becoming the hero. You do not want to take the risk of failure, but attempting to hope, and fighting for that hope. But let us encourage the nobler parts of ourselves instead. Let us imagine utopias. Let us conjure the courage to be heroes and heroines and call a better future into existence. Let us make ourselves vulnerable to failure, simply by taking up the sword and fighting, rather than laying down in the pod, and plugging ourselves into the dystopia.
While I understand and somewhat agree with the premise here, I think the missing piece - touched on near the end - pertains to the importance of heroes in our stories and their mimesis.
Dystopias are "hells without heroes." This is as true in art as it is in life. An artist is free to observe and convey any nightmarish vision of hell. But if he fails to cast any heroes into that hell, to do battle with its demons and their thralls, then he has sketched a nihilistic map to it as you claim.
In fact, I think that *does* describe the theosophy-adjacent Huxley's work (if not quite Orwell's, though an argument can be made). You might say that Brave New World wasn't a dystopia but a utopian playbook, even in his own conscious thoughts. And I suspect that's a danger inherent to "utopian" visions as well, because heroism demands the solving of problems in linear spacetime. There are no heroes in heaven either, and no need for them. We immanentize the eschaton at our peril, as usual.
Moreover, a human life will contain much tragedy, so it's true we should set our minds on how to improve conditions for ourselves and others. But if we, as artists, draw those plans too rigidly or hubristically, the painting we end up with could be like the rabbit-duck illusion. We'll swear up and down we made a portrait of a rabbit. But others might only see the duck, and pursue their dire duck strategies just as they would in the hero-less hells.
But when the heroes are cast into these "perfect" hells (or duck-heavens), we are drawn back to the truths of our condition and purpose in the world. We understand that the situation can get very dark - midnight black at times - and that these times are when we'll be tested in the crucible. A hero may or may not relish such tests. But he knows he must face and overcome them, and he does. The harder the test, the greater the hero.
And so, Winston Smith escapes O'Brien's machinations, gathers the forces of the Brotherhood, rises up like Paul Atreides on the hellscape of Dune... none of that happens, of course. But if it did, then the dystopia that Orwell crafted becomes all the more a translation of the Divine for the horror of its monsters and structures.
Have not read Huxley. Orwell is a lifelong favorite, and I have read everything by him except for one early novel. I don't agree that he was conjuring up the world of Oceania and Big Brother, or if so only inadvertently. The book is a reimagining of the world he actually lived in, Soviet Russia and its torture chambers, the Western Communists who would change their beliefs and their public statements in the blink of an eye, and who would justify any malicious action to advance their fanatical ideas, the wartime BBC where he worked, where facts were ignored or fabricated for the war effort, the ignorance of the proles who just got on with things no matter what the regime was, or what it did, the disintegration of liberties under war conditions, the fading away of religious belief and its replacement by political cults. All of this was lightly glossed realism; it was a dramatized version of his own lived and observed experience. He wrote 1984 while he was dying, and it was written in despair and as a warning. And in fact we mostly did not get the world of 1984, a world of overt government violence and cruelty, possibly, in part, because Orwell scared us away from it. The world of Huxley, however, seems more like what we have now. People are apparently less afraid of being rendered comatose by drugs and sexual stimulation than they are of having their faces eaten off by hungry rats, which is not surprising.
Your final point is well taken. Stories about better alternatives are sorely needed. I'm not sure that utopias are the answer, though if someone writes a good one I may read it. I would suggest instead plausible stories of overcoming the current chaos and malice, which provide a hopeful foundation for action. I am currently writing something which I believe is in that category, but it is slow going.