Before I begin, a few words from a George Carlin routine that I have cherished for years (here’s a link to a 2006 performance of it, if you want to get it all in context)…
“They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking … That doesn’t help them … You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it … and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fucking place! It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it!”
Carlin saw a vision of that dystopia, as did many others—even before the early part of the 2000s. The pieces were already being put into motion decades ago. All the way back in the 1980s—maybe even earlier.
Yeah, I said dystopia. Just like in those sci-fi novels.
It’s funny that I’m saying that, though. Despite growing up with father who was a fan of all things science fiction, particularly Star Trek, I have never been a fan of the genre. Which makes it all the more amusing that I spent nearly 20 years married to a nerdy guy who loved science fiction. Even our daughter is a fan of the genre.
I have always said that I was too much of a realist to jump into escapism—that I prefer to face life head-on and I prefer reality. That defines most of my taste in novels, movies, and television. (Drama, at least. Comedy’s a different escapist beast.)
How ironic, then, that our reality—the reality I’m facing day to day—so closely mirrors a lot of what’s been seen in dystopic fiction, especially speculative sci-fi. And, as it turns out, sci-fi isn’t as “escapist” as I typically assumed; a lot of it is more “canary in the coal mine.”
I realized this a few years ago when I discovered the work of Adrienne Marie Brown. Then I ended up taking a side tour and reading the work of Octavia E. Butler, who Brown mentions often in her work.
At the time, I found it fascinating that Brown’s strategies around organizing for change came from what to me at the time just seemed like a trippy little dystopic novel (Parable of the Sower, to be precise, which also has a sequel Parable of the Talents). After the last several years, I find myself struck by the fact that Butler’s work was less a novel and perhaps more a premonition of what is to come for all of us.
“Dystopia” is defined as an imagined state or society where there is great suffering and injustice. For anyone paying attention, we are living in a state where great suffering and injustice no longer has to be imagined. It is literally in our faces, all the time.
Like much of the United States, Maine (where I live) has seen a significant surge in homelessness, to the point where tent encampments and police sweeps of those encampments are now a regular thing. And these ground-level collections of suffering people are located just down the street from insanely overpriced housing in multistory buildings.
I live on a barrier island, just a few miles off the coast where Portland is, so I go back and forth via ferry. In 2021, suddenly there were tents popping up around the area of the ferry terminal, which from a logistical standpoint made a lot of sense. After all, the ferry terminal has public restrooms and warm shelter, things that are increasingly hard to find without money.
Having worked with the unhoused in Chicago, prior to relocating to Maine, I am not particularly bothered by the presence of such people (although I’m troubled by the conditions that put them there), and when I have cash on hand, I will often pass it along—because I experienced poverty and housing insecurity as a child.
What I am bothered by is how tourists and the well-heeled flock to the area and spend ungodly sums on pleasures—while driving out of the city the people who work in it to provide those pleasures—all in the face of this human suffering. And to those people with money, these people living in tents are beneath notice. Nobody will to do the hard work of figuring out how to address the problem, much less solve it. They’d rather just sweep it away with police force.
This happens all over the country, but each community seems to think it is only a problem in their community. We have simply accepted that people camped out on streets with no real shelter is acceptable at a time when many cities are seeing an influx of migrants who have crossed the border and are now regularly bussed to Northern states. Just this summer in Portland, there were reports of migrant families with children sleeping on sidewalks. In the richest country in the world, people seeking better are sleeping on sidewalks with small children and babies. Why do we allow this?
If rampant homelessness and that pesky COVID (which has simply been accepted as the norm even though it isn’t “just the flu”) aren’t enough, there is the matter that increasingly, people are not financially secure and have to turn to social media to raise funds for urgent needs or to earn a living.
We’ve been trained to see it as an “à la carte” world of knowledge and work where the internet allows us to work as we like. We’ve been told it’s entrepreneurial. It’s been marketed at the “gig economy.” But it’s really about people desperately scrabbling to survive in a world where healthcare is not a given, wages are too low, and everything costs too much. Hell, that’s why I’m here on Substack, adding another venue for my writing hoping I can stay ahead of the bills.
And you know what? That’s what the people in the “big club” that Carlin talked about want. It’s why the movie Idiocracy feels less like a comedy and more like a dystopian prediction of our near future with every passing day.
They sit in gated communities or high-rises or whatever with more money than many of them can reasonably spend—certainly tens of times what they need to live—while the rest of us suffer. And the more we suffer, the more accustomed to it that we get. And the more they heap on.
Eventually, it will come crashing down, just like in Butler’s novels. It will come crashing down for the well-to-do folks, too. It may even come crashing down for the richest if they can’t find enough people with guns and armor to prevent the desperate rabble from getting in.
And now, with the atrocities occurring in the Middle East, we are seeing the reality that most people are checked out. They either cannot face what’s happening or they wave it off as inevitable or they grab on to simplistic explanations of why ethnic cleansing and genocide is somehow OK.
Folks are numb. The harshness of the world has taken its toll on many. COVID specifically and life in general have stripped a lot of people of their executive functioning beyond the simple need to survive.
The thing that is most jarring is watching the apathy. Watching people go about their lives as if this is normal.
We are so desperate for normal that we are willing to accept anything, as long as we can have a few minutes of pleasure. We lie to ourselves and tell ourselves that someone is going to handle this mountain of misery. But no one is coming to help. The powers that should be helping are the ones pushing us down. Here and abroad.
We have seen bad times before. But this feels different.
This really does feel like the prelude to dystopia. I don’t want to live in the world Octavia Butler wrote about in Parable of the Sower. Do you? If we are going to turn this around, it has to start with us. No one is coming to fix this. No one is coming to save us. Only we—as normal, average people—can rally to prevent dystopia.
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