If you were living in a dystopia, how would you even know it?
The current situation certainly raises the question, as we experience unprecedented restrictions on individual freedom adopted in response to the Chinese coronavirus, coupled with left-wing riots that undermine the legitimacy of America’s core institutions. It’s becoming clear that these social changes are dystopian, not merely because they are harmful and coercive, but because they seek to replace the American way of life with a new social order rooted in utopian visions.
In a January 2019 essay on the overuse of the word “dystopia” in American political discourse, Miami University of Ohio professor Ryan J. Barilleaux wrote that the defining features of an actual dystopia are “social regimentation, dehumanization, abuse of technology, state terror, a new class of rulers, propaganda instead of truth, inevitable totalitarianism, and the tragedy of the individual.”
“When combined, these features sketch the map of dystopia,” wrote Barilleaux.
“Dystopia is what results from the attempt to create utopia,” he explained. “Consider the society of Brave New World, which is horrible precisely to the extent that the World State was designed to be exactly as it is.”
This year’s warp-speed cultural transformation has brought about all of Barilleaux’s hallmarks of a dystopia. The utopia today’s bureaucrats and elitists are striving toward is a global, communistic police state. This police state is sold to ordinary people not as that, but as a safe, virus-free society. Who wouldn’t want that?
Its architects admit that they won’t stop at a vaccine. “We will not, we cannot go back to the way things were,” World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said August 21.
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