Many people now marvel over how some dystopian novels have "predicted the future." The same can be said for some of the gags on The Simpsons, one of America's longest-running TV series. Nineteen years ago, the cartoon joked about Donald Trump running for president, which shocked several Americans after Trump won the presidential election in 2016. How could the writers have known?
George Orwell's 1984 has gotten a similar treatment. The novel depicts an oppressive surveillance state that is so aggressive, even independent thinking is monitored and policed. Now that it is common knowledge how closely our internet use is tracked, with much of our personal data from sites like Facebook being sold to big-name corporations, people are wondering how Orwell could have possibly predicted such a thing before the existence of the internet.
The answer is simple—they didn't.
Dystopian novels are speculative. Their authors are highly aware of current social problems, and they write about those issues in ways that are exaggerated to make them obvious to the people that have been ignoring them. These books also tend to serve as warnings: this is what could happen if we let this issue continue to go unchecked.
The same thing applies to The Simpsons. The writers amplify current problems or events for the sake of humor (and sometimes social commentary).
Essentially, the events that unfold on topical shows like The Simpsons and in the pages of dystopian novels like 1984 are meant to be ridiculous or horrifying. They evoke these strong emotions to shock our systems and make sure we are aware of the stuff that is actually happening right now. The writers of these events never expect them to occur, or at least, not at the overblown level they have presented.
Instead of expressing wonder whenever the events of a dystopian novel suddenly mirror our reality, we should be concerned. The oppressive things within those pages were never intended to worsen to such a level that they became truths. We were supposed to see how ridiculous and terrible such a reality would be; we were supposed to prevent it.
Another excellent example is Edgar Allen Poe's The Masque of the Red Death. Some people have compared the current covid-19 pandemic to the catastrophic events of Stephen King's The Stand. However, the senseless exacerbation of the issue and the selfishness of some Americans more closely resembles the suffering perpetuated by the haughty upper-class in Poe's story.
In The Masque of the Red Death, the rich attempt to avoid the devastating plague ravaging the country by shutting everyone else out of their mansion, partying and hoarding crucial supplies. Inevitably, the Red Death reaches them anyway, so their selfishness only manages to make everyone's reality worse.
Frankly, it's a little embarrassing how aptly that fits the current situation in the US.
Instead of letting such circumstances become so horrible, we should heed dystopian novels for the warnings that they are, and we should be alarmed when decades-old satire from topical shows suddenly mirror our reality. These books aren't meant to predict the future—they're meant to project unthinkable, long-term consequences for not handling current social problems.
All we can do is act in ways that we believe will change the world for the better. One thing that Americans can do is make an informed #vote.
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