The hall is large and looks old, a Gothic castle it seems from the doorway and arches. An old man sits impassively in his chair in front of an ancient, partly ruined, fireplace without any visible gesture of approval or disapproval about my sudden apparition. The chimney fire subtly changed his colour, and shadows played hide and seek with his piercing eyes in the low light of the dusk, while his long hair and flowing beard were of a terrible and intensely white hue. Before him, a skull-cap and a long mediaeval tunic of dark colour are unorderly discarded on the table. The crackling and hissing wood fire sound was the only thing in the hall giving me any sense of calm.
I am disoriented; he is gazing at me without saying a word and I have the uncomfortable
feeling of knowing this man in a different time, a different place. From a lateral door a middle age lady, walks up and sits down at the opposite head of the table. They start to talk as though I was not there even though they look from time to time at me. I can’t hear anything. I finally gather some courage and make a step in the direction of the table, then another and after a few impossible long seconds take a seat somewhere in the middle. When seated I started to hear their voices. It was like passing a test and being rewarded for it. The lady was talking about us, like us the human species but somehow as she was
something different.
“You have lost almost everything, even your dreams; they don’t belong to you anymore
being only state of the art psychologically-induced events via a mass culture dominated by special interest groups. Even your futuristic writers don’t dreams on their own any longer, they are pushed into distressed dystopian and escapist fantasies area, and this is inducing fear and indirect thought control. They write about things which have already happened in the past, only with more advanced technologies, more sex and more violence. They, therefore you, are incapable dreaming of a better world”, and with a sudden almost nervous gesture, somehow at odds with her majestic appearance, she threw, out from nowhere, some books on the table and went fumbling through them as she was talking. I was aware of their content, books foraging hundreds or even thousands of years in the future while people were still struggling to pay taxes, mortgage and medical insurance. “Where is the novelty in all this?”, she asked. “Never a new social concept, never a new way of life, everything always centred on the concept of money being the common denominator for everything, and everybody thinking day and night along how to make more of them, how to be as those enviable crooks on the top of the social pyramid, crooks elevated at the rank of glorious figures. Don’t tell me that Facebook is a new way of life, a way of gathering people together, the opposite is true, it’s a sophisticated tool to push people apart, making them vulnerable. You must dare to dream, you must fight for your right to dream.”
“We are in a transition phase, things will go for the better in time.” the old man protested not very convincingly.
“I agree with the transition, but it is going in the wrong direction. You are in danger, your future skilfully led in the direction of a world without too many expectations by an invisible mischievous group implementing evil philosophical scripts. And that philosophy is important as it determines strategy, and strategy determines future social life. It matters greatly to have options, to have different ways open into the future. Look what you have now; you have plenty of choices between money and violence, or more money and more violence. Nothing special, nothing sensible, nothing really alive! When your collective
psyche really dreamed you realized big things. Your future is no longer what it used to be, you are absorbed in a full dystopian cognitive winter.”
The next moment I was back on my bed with a bitter conclusion haunting my mind: we are no longer living humans we are dead men walking, the end of a long history. The completely opposite despondent finish of the Fukuyama’s apotheosis: ‘The end of history and the last man’.
Dystopias have become a fascinating genre over the last century as disillusioned writers witnessed and reacted against imperialism, two world wars, including the Nazi and Stalin regime. These writers played with the darkest sides of humanity, unearthed by war and technology and used satiric irony to present a destructive vision of the future. Dystopian novels are characterized by a lack of individual freedom, heroes that know something is wrong and contain many WTF moments that make you rethink the current status quo and become aware of the constructed nature of our values and standards. That was in the past. Now there is a flood of novel promotiing violence only because it sells.
that’s really nice research on time travel.