Literature has long been obsessed with obsessing over the future. We are the future described by the writers of the past. Those who came before us predicted who we would be, what we would do. Here’s what they had to say about us:
1. We all speak Newspeak
According to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, we speak a language of simple, short, one-syllable words. We employ only literal language and have abolished figurative language. Our language is no longer musical or beautiful and therefore less threatening to a totalitarian regime. We translate works of Shakespeare and Chaucer into simplified language.
2. We are all being watched
We are all being watched. All the time. According to Nineteen Eighty-Four, we all have two-way television screens and our homes and streets are bugged. Is anybody thinking webcam or OnStar?
3. We are a bunch of hedonists
to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, we drive as fast as we want, heedless of danger. We care only for our own pleasure, not for the welfare of others. For fun, we memorize lyrics to fluffy pop songs. Thinking is not pleasurable so we surround ourselves with walls that make lots of noise to distract us.
4. Nobody reads anymore
I don’t know if Fahrenheit 451 is supposed to be about censorship, or the loss of literature, or both, but either way, none of us read. Our illiteracy rates have skyrocketed.
5. We love to watch sadistic reality television
Stephen King’s (Richard Bachman’s) Running Man tells the tale of a man who is so desperate to buy medicine for his daughter that he goes on a reality show where he is filmed while being hunted. We, the viewing audience of the future, cheer for his capture and death. Anybody thinking COPS or America’s Most Wanted? The book ends with the protagonist flying an airplane into the skyscraper that houses the television network. The last line of the book is, “it rained fire twenty blocks away.”
6. We use torture and aversion therapy to rehabilitate criminals
Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange, the story of a violent person being stripped of the ability to choose wrong from right. Once stripped, all hell breaks loose and the correctional system gets some bad publicity, so they (we) un-condition him so that he may again choose violence if he wishes. In the end, he simply chooses not to be violent and decides he’d rather live a normal life.
7. Women don’t bear children
We have freed women from the unpleasantries of childbirth and now our children are born in labs and raised in hatcheries and conditioning centers. Aldous Huxley foretells this version of population control in his novel Brave New World.
8. We have lots and lots of sex
In Brave New World, Huxley’s characters get it on. Heterosexual and homosexual sex is encouraged, as “everyone belongs to everyone else.” Due to the whole test tube baby thing, sex is no longer about reproduction, so people are encouraged to have at it from childhood on. There is no need for emotional involvement or romance. It’s just sex, sex, sex, and more sex.
9. Drugs instead of religion
We take hallucinogenic drugs so we won’t need religion. In Brave New World, it’s drugs over Jesus.
10. We participate in physically grueling ordeals in pursuit of an ultimate prize
In Stephen King’s The Long Walk, which he wrote under the name Richard Bachman, a teenage boy participates in a twisted walkathon in which a group of boys walk until all but one of them dies. People who break the rules are kicked out (shot) of the contest. The winner/survivor can then choose anything he wants for a prize.
We’re kind of an unpleasant bunch, aren’t we? The only revenge we can really get is to write disparaging accounts of future generations.
Author: Robin Merrill — Copyrighted © roadtickle.com
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