Turn the page on dystopia
Dystopian fiction tends to warn us not to fall to the devils of our darker natures. But in the age of Donald Trump, those broken worlds have both gained new relevance and lost their escapist appeal.
Sales of George Orwell’s 1984 spiked since Trump’s inauguration. Demand is so high that publisher Penguin recently ordered another 75,000-book run – 68 years after the classic was first published.
First Trump press secretary Sean Spicer insisted – despite evidence to the contrary – that Trump’s inauguration was bigger than Barack Obama’s in 2009.
The petty lie could have disappeared after a healthy dose of online mocking, but Kellyanne Conway, another spokesperson, doubled down on the doublespeak, arguing they were merely presenting “alternative facts.”
It’s a line worthy of 1984’s Ministry of Truth. It so paralleled Big Brother that Orwell quotes soon went viral. The most popular was a chilling condemnation of the baldfaced refutation of basic facts: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
But my favourite Orwell line is: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.” Facts are not relative things, even if “post-truth” was the word of 2016.
Many of the best dystopian novels condemn a populace that allows the wool to fall over its eyes in times of crisis. Think of the ban on learning in The Handmaid’s Tale or the book burning in Fahrenheit 451 or even the Capital’s control of all media in the Hunger Games.
We live in an age when knowledge is more accessible than ever before. Nonetheless, people are also rejecting expertise and intellectualism as never before. Climate scientists are liars; vaccines cause autism; wi-fi causes cancer; banning immigrants will stop terrorism; mass shootings are staged; 9/11 was a hoax. All completely unproven, yet all helped birth Trumpism and so-called populist movements worldwide.
Even those who profess to support veracity have a way of spreading misinformation. Ironically, the danger of accepting a post-truth era is best summed up by a quote that is wrongly attributed to Orwell himself:
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”