Dystopias

I have enjoyed dystopian literature since well before it became a subgenre, or I knew how to describe it using that term. My first love was 1984, a brilliant book about a dark future of government control and hopeless rebellion. Animal Farm was in the same vein, but lighter and more of a fable. The Giver probably marks the more recent start of the trend toward dystopia, and is an utterly charming book. The moment when the boy first sees something different in the apple is etched forever in my memory, a mind-blowing event and a brilliant way to capture the nature of that particular dystopia. The Hunger Games of course rocketed dystopia to the top of popular culture, and is unrivaled among series dystopias.

I love books that can create alternative realities, and perhaps I am drawn particularly to dystopias because they are often explicitly political. The bleak futures involve authoritarian governments, usually engaged in severe repression, sometimes violently. In this way, they are perhaps more realistic than most fantasy/science fiction. When I wrote my book report on 1984 in 11^th grade, I argued that such a world might in fact be in our future. My teacher responded that such a world had already been created. We were both right. I was well aware of the terror that was the Soviet Union, the closest we have come to 1984 on Earth, but our society did not yet have the technology to gain control in such a totalizing way. The Soviets could not observe every movement of every subject; one day, that might be possible. But they certainly built an everyday dystopia. Such dystopias continue to exist. Descriptions of North Korea boggle the imagination: the average height of North Koreans is a few inches shorter than that of South Koreans, just 60 years after the country split, with the same genetic pool. Stories of prison camps and the absence of food are the stuff of nightmares.

Hence, it frequently surprises me that people express surprise when dystopian novels take the nearly inevitable political turns. People seemed to think The Hunger Games were about Katniss; they turned out to be about control and rebellion. Of course. Reviews of Divergent often express the same sentiment: a supposed “plot twist” occurs 80 percent of the way through. It’s the same event as in many dystopias: the character who doesn’t quite fit in while interacting with a few becomes the center of the social rebellion of the many. This is also the genius of dystopias: they translate systematic terror into the personal and the individual; they make it intelligible and compelling.

Some build these imagined worlds much better than others. I admire most those books that capture something fundamental about humanity while constructing these alternative worlds. Building strange realities can makes us more easily see who we are.

Underdoggedness

Listening to a Radiolab podcast, I learned that 80-90 percent of people will choose the underdog in any contest: business, sports, politics, best landscape painter, etc. This holds if they know nothing else about the contestants.

I have thus learned that I am not in the minority, as I had supposed. I have always thought my underdog preferences were held by others, yes, but only by perhaps 20-30 percent of people. After all, look at the legions of fans adoring Apple Computer, the Lakers, or the Yankees. None of these folks could possibly root for underdogs, could they?

Perhaps they have weak underdog preferences, and when they learn more, those underdog preferences easily get eclipsed by other preferences. If so, then I might still be in the minority: People who cling strongly to underdoggedness.

For example, I used to love Apple. My attachment grew fierce in the mid to late 1990s when Apple was on the verge of folding, being quashed by the dominant and overwhelming PCs and Microsoft. When I came to BYU in 1998, I requested a Mac computer and received one, but computer support steadfastly refused to service it in any fashion and I was soon forced into PC-dom. Now, Apple rules the world, but I can't bring myself to want any of its products. It has become the elite, the costly, the expensive, the desirable. Even if it is the best, my responses to it range from disinterested to repulsed.

Likewise, once my beloved Packers started winning, I became less enamored of them. Same for the Red Sox. Give me a loser any day. It has to scream underdog for me to become interested. Now, I don't love all underdogs. The Cubs have never enticed me. But if I do fall in love, it's with an underdog. As the underdog makes its way to the top, I become wary, unsure, a little bewildered. I associate the powerful with bullying, with immoral choices, and with oppression. That can't include me, can it?

My underdoggedness was probably most strongly shaped in late elementary school and junior high school. I am told now that everyone feels a bit isolated, insecure and weak during those years. I find that hard to believe, still, because some seemed so strong, so popular, so dominant. I felt myself on the outside looking  in, and imagined myself in the firm minority.

Hence, cheering for the underdog, for myself, against brutish oppressors became part of my identity. It's still deeply inside of me. So deep, that I feel only a fleeting happiness when my sports teams win, unless it's a win against all odds sort of victory. So deep, that I prefer mom and pop stores even if it costs me a bit more--and I also hate to spend money. So deep, that it undoubtedly influences my distrust of US power in the world.

So now I'm wondering, not just how many have weak preferences for underdogs, but how many are fiercely attached to an underdog identity. And, if everyone feels weak and isolated at some point in the middle school years, why aren't there more of us identity underdogs? Or perhaps the world is full of identity underdogs and I am again mistakenly imagining myself in the minority.