The Horrors of the Dystopia Sector
In the Multiverse, similarly styled Universes are usually shown clumped together into sectors. I personally favor the Classic Fantasy and Science Fiction Sectors, but I am occasionally directed in school to visit a sector that many enter but few return from with cheerful demeanors; the stagnating, shocking, and thought-provoking horror known as the Dystopia Sector.
As you may know, a Utopia is a world or place where there is no war, anger, crime, poverty, or other perfectly natural negative aspects of human society. A real Utopia is seen as all sunshine, happiness, and an Eden-like innocence. It is purely fanciful (“Utopia” means “no place” in Greek), and EXTREMELY boring as a setting for a short story or novel, unless outsiders bring in the bad stuff. Dystopia achieves a Utopia-looking surface with everyone content and nice to everyone through autocratic repression and mind control. It is a cesspool of monotony and emotional rot disguised with claims of “progress” where Utopia is more like a society frozen in time with real bliss; a purified and total paradise.
There are a lot of famous Dystopia novels out there: 1984, where endless war and hate keep everyone in line, Brave New World, where compliance and bliss are conditioned into the people, all of which are test-tube babies and not naturally born, and Fahrenheit 451, where books are banned and the citizens are slowly being turned into zombies by televised hologram broadcasts and elevator music delivered through little radios you can fit in your ear like an iPod earphone. More exist, and they all use similar approaches to achieve what I call “progress to stagnation and automation.” In some way or another, the leaders of a Dystopia work to remove the humanity from humans, bit by bit. 1984 created the now well-known “Big Brother is watching” scenario and played with emotions by waging endless war on one-third of the world at a time and using propaganda and the re-writing of history. Brave New World eliminated families and conditioned most of the will out of people from birth.
The real trouble with Dystopia is that it, unlike Utopia, has a bad habit of producing people who see through the system and try to break it or escape it. Obviously, we root for these breakers of the norm, hoping they can raise a revolution and return the world to its proper state. Never works, never has worked, never will work. The hero always has one thing against him: he’s the only one, or one of a pathetic few, that knows what’s really going on and tries to change it. Everyone else is programmed to be happy with their life and absolutely nothing, especially with a very vigilant government, will break that programming.
It takes an army to win a revolution, and Dystopias, to their advantage, are incapable of producing such an army. Not even intervention from another Universe can stop a firmly rooted Dystopia system from a Universe, so it’s best to leave them alone and them run themselves to the automated, mindless stagnation of humanity they are either aiming for or will reach anyway. It’s sad, I know, but true.