The Alarming Appeal of Dystopia

Sent by Lauren Jane Heller    |   March 9, 2020

Stories are so much tastier than facts. When powerful people say that Coronavirus is no worse than the flu, a lot of folks will happily believe it because it sounds appealing. The same goes for why people might drive with no seatbelt but never set foot in the ocean for fear of sharks. Give someone a good story and the facts simply don’t matter. 

There is something so fascinating about watching an epidemic unfurl. The best and worst of human nature comes to the fore. It’s likely the same reason I love reading dystopian fiction — you get to see how terrible human beings are at risk assessment, how easily swayed we are by political loyalties, how hungry we are for a good story to sink our teeth into. 

People just love disasters but only when there’s someone to blame. We can’t seem to pull ourselves away from gawping wide-eyed at the news headlines for long enough to notice that in the bigger picture there is no mega-villain. The real villain is our inability to take action as a group, to agree on steps to stop the large-scale disaster train before it builds more momentum.

If we’re going to make it through as a species, this needs to be all of us together, not every man for himself. We need to mobilize as a group to ensure that we’re all protected, take reasonable precautions and safety measures rather than panic. But the current state of the world makes me think that we’re in for a lot more willful blindness about the real challenges facing humanity. Our penchant for focusing on sensational stories including villainous scapegoats is just too riveting to kick.

Politicking and sensationalized stories keep us at the edge of our seats, driven to find out every detail of some particular episode without realizing how much the distraction is keeping us from doing the real work. That's why I keep reading what Margaret Atwood dubs "speculative" fiction. She’s not just making things up, she’s extrapolating what the future might look like given the present. In an interview in 2019 she said:

“Somebody asked me on Twitter recently, ‘How do you come up with this shit?’ My answer was, ‘It’s not me who has come up with it, it’s the human race over the past 4,000 years.’”

So...well done, human race. You keep providing us writerly types with facts so bizarre we could scarcely credit them as fictions. That said, I'm still confident enough of us are paying attention to keep the world steered in the right direction. And hopefully, with time, more people will manage to pull their eyes off their screens and heads out of the sand long enough to keep the human train from completely derailing. 

I know it's not chipper but it certainly is fascinating. 

Until next time,

Love,
LJ