Kallocain by Karin Boye

Kallocain

First of all, I want to thank Peter from Dystopiate for sending me a copy of this one. Coming home to a package from Sweden on my porch was very cool. Also, I don't like to read books online, but if you do, you can find the complete text right here. It's well worth reading in any format, honestly.

Kallocain pretty well sums up my biggest dystopian nightmare: not only are you being watched and listened to 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from bed to bath to work and back again (yeah, no wonder the population is dropping with everyone knowing they're being watched and judged in the sack), but now the government can even access your secret thoughts!

It's amazing to me, sometimes (the rest of the time it's just depressing) how easy it is to convince so many people to assist in their own degradation or enslavement. Plenty of stick, a little carrot, a healthy dose of "it's for your own good," a double helping of "everyone does it, don't rock the boat" and you wind up with poor Leo Kall. Working his ass off, between mandatory service nights and pep rallies, to give the government new and exciting ways to control him and his loved ones.

Even in our society, if they (that nebulous they) could hear your hidden thoughts, of course none of us would be found innocent. As Leo's coworker and eventual breaking point says, "no one over 40 years old has a clean conscience." What do you think you'd confess? Weird sex fantasies, violent urges, racist leanings? Falling in love with the wrong person or people? Hating your parents? Kicking puppies, watching American Idol, voting for Bush? God save us.

final thought: This novel should be better known, right alongside Brave New World and 1984.

If you'd like a few words about Kallocain from a Swedish philosopher, check here.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Brave New World

Back to straight up, state control dystopia.

People USED to imagine that knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value. ...People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years' War. That made them change their tune all right. What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled -- after the Nine Years' War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We've gone on controlling ever since. It hasn't been very good for truth, of course. But it's been very good for happiness.

Anthrax bombs as an excuse for state control. You know, what makes classic dystopian fiction powerful is the ability to apply it to any generation's reality and still come up worried.

I'd honestly never read Brave New World before now. It's one of those classics I just never got around to. I read it right after First Men in the Moon by, more or less, accident, but it worked out well. Both concern societies in which the citizens are made, body and mind, for their alloted tasks in life. This prevents the longing and hustling that creates societal tension and individual angst. Of course, it also robs us of free will, creates a slave class, and prevents the striving and work that can carry us to the loftier heights.

You know, I'm going to look around for written defenses of the World State as outlined in BNW. It's no good for me simply to say, "This is obviously a horrible and frightening vision of the future," with no one offering any of the other side's arguments. I suspect such defense will just make me either disgusted or angry, but at least it would help solidify why it's such a disturbing image of society to me.

final thoughts: Beats the hell out of Rand any day.