Dystopian society and mechanisms of oppression

Throughout history, human beings have imagined new realities and societies, in which everything is different than the world in which we live. The quest for Utopia has been always present as a desire for finding how life would be under different conditions. Could a society be perfect? What does it imply if we said that a society is perfect? Utopia, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, can be understood as “An imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect”, recognizing that this perfection should be related to a safe and peaceful society that defends the values of equality and freedom and ensures its citizens conditions to live happy.

According to Wegner (2013), in the last centuries, especially after the Second World War, an opposite concept has risen as a new perspective of the previous Utopian societies. The concept of dystopia has presented the creation of realities that, unlike utopias, seem to be more disastrous that our current one. As defined by Sargent (as cited in Wegner, 2013), dystopia is a “non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which the reader lived”.

This means that the dystopian society is conceived as a reality that is considered as a negative utopia. They are mostly presented as future authoritarian governments. In order to understand this, let us remember what the concept of perfection in a Utopian society should be related to. An authoritarian government tends to resort to some pressure tactics over the population in order to keep things under control. For instance, in the graphic novel V for Vendetta, the characters suggest that they did what they did in order to “safe themselves as a society” or “avoid chaos”.

On the first volume of V for Vendetta, we can see the following moment:

This moment presents the importance of propaganda as a threat against the basis of Utopian societies. Safety and peace seems to be conditioned by your social status and behavior. If you do not share the ideals defended by the authoritarian government or you are part of a rejected minority, you will not be able to be a member in their “ideal society”.

Equality has no longer value in an authoritarian society.  Propaganda has transformed minorities into dangerous groups that endanger the well-being of the majority.

“Look,you know as well as I do… We had to do what we did. All the darkies, the nancy boys and the beatniks… It was us or them”

Minorities and their diversity threaten the stability of their ideal and “perfect” society and, for that reason, they were allowed, as allegedly “superior” human beings, to exterminate them through tortuous methods.

This moment can lead us to question our perception of Utopia. This implies that Utopia is not a fixed concept of perfection, it is totally subjective and, because of that, also dangerous. What can be considered as a utopia for some people would be a dystopia for others.

A relevant aspect related to this idea is the role of propaganda and government intervention. It is immediately noticed that in V for Vendetta, at the beginning, the population in general supports their authoritarian government mainly because of the certain stability and social order that it established in a chaotic moment as it was after the war.  In moments of fragility, nations tend to look for the option that seems to offer more to the protection of the stability, which are not necessarily the best choice. For instance, remember the previous experience of Germany during after the First World War. That nation was suffering the consequences of the war, leaving it in a fragile situation, which was the most fertile ground for Nazism to rise as an option to return Germany its greatness and order.

 These governments, in order to establish their supremacy, develop an entire system that allows them to intervene in different aspects of the society in order to debilitate it and facilitate their repression and control.

According to Keller (2008):

“Orwell’s 1984 (…) became a paradigm for visions of future societies in which government hegemony has become absolute, the state gone mad with surveillance, committed to the task of obliterating creative and abstract thought, thus producing a culture in which language is so impoverished that is no longer sufficient to conceptualize or express rebellion or sedition.”

This author says that, in 1984, Orwell presents that authoritarian governments debilitate the society through the violation of privacy and the destruction of the cultural heritage of the nation.

“It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized” (Orwell, 1949).

In both 1984 and V for Vendetta, we can notice that authoritarian governments make use of different innovating technological methods in order to put the population under constant surveillance. The violation of the right to privacy is seen as a necessary action if the authorities pretend to secure the functioning of their system. Through extreme surveillance, the leaders prevent insurrection.

The second technique presented by Orwell is the destruction of the cultural heritage, which is also present on V for Vendetta, but let’s focuses first on 1984.

In 1984, there is an institution called “The Ministry of Truth”. Ironically, this ministry is in charge of establishing their truth, which can also be considered as lies. Propaganda is used in order to proclaim the government as the main contributors to create a perfect society, which is a lie considering the violent methods that they have used to establish their control, as torture. At the same time, this ministry is in charge of the censorship of the culture.

There are three main cultural elements affected by the censorship, according to Keller (2008):

1.       Art, as a manifestation of feelings, is attacked and destroyed. This implies a prohibition against the population of expressing themselves in terms of feelings and ideas. The creativity is tried to be controlled by the government, which attempts to shape people’s mind.

2.       The destruction of the history of a nation implies that there is no heritage and no past. Societies need their past in order to build a better future, to avoid making the same mistakes.

3.       The modification and simplification of a language, in this case, “Newspeak”. The impoverishment of the language, its simplification, prevents citizens from finding the exact words in order to reflect on different topics. Without a powerful language, there could not be powerful ideas that could motivate a revolution.

These aspects are progressively debilitated to “prevent” the insurrection, the revolution, since it has been always believed throughout life that, as claimed by Francis Bacon, “Knowledge is power”. Culture is the most valuable source of knowledge that a society has, and, if it is attacked by those who tried to take control of the entire system, it would represent the debilitation of the society itself in terms of power.

In the case of V for Vendetta, we can see something a similar situation.

The totalitarian regime has “eradicated culture”, what implies the destruction of books, films and music. If we pay attention to the second panel, some of the books that are part of that “rescued” personal library are British. This presents a situation that is similar to 1984, since the government attempts to destroy not only art itself through the destruction of the different physical manifestations of it, but also a part of the history of the nation, the heritage. In the case of the music that Evey hears, it is a song performed by a woman that is part of those minorities. That music represents V’s insurrection itself, through the maintenance and protection of that culture that is connected to those groups that were exterminated by the totalitarian regime.

These factors, the extreme surveillance and the destruction of that culture, allow the authoritarian government to maintain their control over the mass through the imposition of a fabricated culture that, in fact, represents a lie itself. The population does not prefer to listen to “military stuff”, but it is forced to do it since it represents the ideology and the ideals related to it that the leaders defend.

As stated by Keller (2008), “the people are conditioned to believe (via constant television broadcasts and misinformation campaigns) that they need the strict controls of a totalitarian state in order to avoid further attacks upon their national sovereignty”.

The totalitarian system attempts to control everything. They replace culture with the omnipresent voice of the master, a daily transmission of “the voice of fate” as a voice that is expected to provide true information to the population but, in fact, it presents a corrupted reality, manipulated to fulfill their own ambitions.

                “We’ll have to see what we can do about that…” (Moore, 1988)

This is an early call to take action and to react against the totalitarian system that has taken advantage of the consequences of the previous war to impose a regime of fear, what is finally demonstrated at the end of the graphic novel.

As claimed by Boyle & Combe (2013), “the ending of V for Vendetta challenges the audience to consider what creative possibilities may follow for any future revolutionary society that must not repeat the mistakes of the past”.

If we think about the ending of V for Vendetta, we can notice that V succeeded in defeating the regime, in the sense that V destroyed those mechanisms that the leader used to control the population. The terrorist attack to the towers in which the Eye and the Ear functioned was a representation of a direct attack to the surveillance from the government. With that action, the right of privacy is re-established and the freedom of acting as you please is ensured. This was the first step for the population to open their eyes and understand the situation they were living in, and that they needed to take action. They needed to adopt anarchism as a way to escape from their violent reality.

Anarchy is the “another way”, the alternative to escape from the totalitarian government and, even if during the regime it was believed to be dead because of the extreme and violent social organization, now, it is more alive than ever. This speech encouraged citizens to take power in their hands, and finally take action against the oppressive forces.

REFERENCES

Combe, K., & Boyle, B. (2013). Masculinity and monstrosity in contemporary Hollywood films. Palgrave Macmillan.

Keller, J. R. (2008). V for Vendetta as cultural pastiche: a critical study of the graphic novel and film. McFarland.

Wegner, P. E. The British Dystopian Novel from Wells to Ishiguro. A Companion to British Literature, 454-470.