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Psychology
The Psychology of Dystopia and Resistance
Orwell, Atwood, Star Trek, Cixin, and Milton understand tyrants and subversion.
Posted May 4, 2020 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
I am guilty of being a slacktivist. I send money to causes I support, sign petitions, write letters, and vote. But you’ll rarely find me making phone calls for a cause and you’ll never find me going door to door. I’m an introvert who finds participating in group activities challenging. Martin Niemoller’s famous quotation beginning, “First they came for the Communists” (see image) gets me every time, and I pay the price in guilt and shame to be able to keep to myself.
Perhaps this very post is a defense mechanism, a way for me to justify my guilt for not being a better citizen.
But those of us who watch and don’t do enough might do something important after all—after all, although perhaps not in this moment. Affective and cognitive stances, and the inner resistance that they fuel, are not to be lightly dismissed. The vast majority of dystopian fiction focuses on the vital goal for oppressors to control not merely the actions of subjects, but their thoughts and, even more important, their feelings. Given the pernicious and insidious ways that ideology works, this is also true of real dystopias, but I will confine myself to fictional accounts.
Let’s take the most famous and influential dystopian novel written in English, George Orwell’s 1984. The government is not content with obedient subjects, nor with brainwashing, but must control the desires of its citizens. They must make Winston betray the love of his life, for only then will they possess his body and soul. And such possession is crucial to absolute control. Let’s fast forward to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The initiation of the Handmaids consists of weeks of brainwashing and indoctrination. Offred ostensibly goes along with it all, and if you’re looking for a slacktivist, or someone who deliberately abstains from political participation, Offred qualifies. Her mother was a second-wave feminist, and she has been reacting against political participation throughout her life as a way of distinguishing herself from her overbearing parent. Offred does not heroically try to escape the training grounds of the gymnasium (unlike Moira), and she does everything in her power to conform and survive.
What makes her so dangerous is the very interiority, distinctively individual and redolent with feeling and desire, that the novel instantiates through her distinctive narrative voice. Here, for instance, is Offred’s poetic description of Serena Joy’s garden (Joy is the wife in the household to which Offred belongs, likely based on Tammy Bakker):
"There is something subversive about this garden of Serena’s a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently. A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon. . . . The willow is in full plumage and is no help, with its insinuating whispers. Rendezvous, it says, terraces; the sibilants run up my spine, a shiver as if in fever.”
The poetic nature of the description reveals that the distinctive individuality of Offred’s perceptions and feelings remain intact. Her poetic use of metaphor shows that she has retained her creativity and autonomy despite circumstances, while her reference to Tennyson demonstrates that she is still very much linked to the world that Gilead has tried to obliterate. And the passage is suffused with the affect that belonged to that world; words with sexual and romantic connotations—"bursting," "swoon," "rendezvous"—reveal that among the things clamoring to be heard are Offred’s own desires. Notably, that which "clamours to be heard” does so “silently” a metaphor for Offred’s own situation: her subversive feelings are active, although quiet.
She will do nothing, but she will not lose her desires—sexual in this passage, but also focused on the daughter she has lost and the freedoms she yearns for. Offred is not a member of the network of activists working against Gilead, but her very state of mind enables her to challenge its authority through her actions when the right time comes (and we see how crucial this is in Atwood’s sequel, The Testaments).
Fast forward again to the Star Trek series indebted to the dystopian tradition through one of its most popular creations, The Borg. The Borg attain the kind of conformity and erasure of individuality that dystopias outside of the delta quadrant and lacking twenty-third-century technology can only dream about. They assimilate other species, replacing organic parts with machinery that enables their victims to become part of a collective mind. The Voyager series often focused on Trek’s most famous Borg rescue, Seven of Nine, and her struggle to regain her humanity (she was assimilated as a child). Much of this struggle centers on her quest to think of herself as an individual and to find and value distinctive creativity and interiority.
Many Voyager fans disliked the late plot addition of Seven’s romance with Chakotay, but this was actually an effective way to demonstrate that she had succeeded in her personal quest. Like the romantic trysting at the core of much dystopian resistance (Offred and Nick, Winston and Julia), Seven’s romantic longings express her ultimate separation from the Borg and its dystopian values. The romantic fantasies she enacts on the Holodeck are the equivalent of Offred’s thoughts of sex with Nick (the Holodeck has often functioned as the subconscious place of the forbidden in the Trek world).
Lest you think that I or the dystopian fictions I refer to are merely propaganda for Western individualism—an emphasis on individual liberty at the expense of collective good—I assure you that the assertion of individual creativity and desire that dystopias struggle to uproot are quite different from an insistence on destructive autonomy. I will turn to a Chinese author to make my point, Liu Cixin. In The Three Body Problem, the first novel in his Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, Cixin shows that the dystopian aspects of the Cultural Revolution, its quest to control and homogenize thought and desire, led to the creation of monsters on both sides of the political spectrum. If you attack people by making fulfillment of innate and “hard-wired” yearnings impossible, the wish for community, love, and trust that we share with other great apes, the results will be disastrous.
Dystopias are a ticking time-bomb. Cixin might be critical of certain aspects of Chinese politics and culture, but he is not a western individualist, and he is not arguing for the kind of “succeed if you can and everyone else be damned” attitude that characterizes the worst aspects of Western individualism. The argument for the value, sanctity, and subversive potential of affect has nothing to do with such individualism, which allows some people’s desires to flourish at the expense of others. And if you’re looking for successful dystopian indoctrination, libertarian thought might be a good place to begin. Try to find some individuality in that crowd.
When the poet John Milton could no longer participate in politics because of his blindness, he wrote his great sonnet "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent," which concludes with the famous lines, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” “Service” or as we might say “fighting the good fight” is not only a matter of activity but also of internal states of mind. We need people on the front lines, doing what they can do at the macro level. But we also need those who support them, and those ready to step forward when the time is right.
