A dystopia is a society permeated and controlled by oppressive tactics. The people are hopeless and unhappy as the consequences of mounting hasty decisions erode the society’s framework.
In Hobbesian’s jungle, the role of a central government is to protect individuals from the inherent dangers of human nature, maintain social order, and prevent chaos. However, within these dystopias, the structure and social order within society are restructured, where chaos and the dangers of human nature are at the forefront and heavily influence everything. The leaders create chaos and tension when they let their desperation and self-interest take control, unabiding a sense of justice and injustice. These actions perpetuate a series of violence and unrestrained conflict until a dystopia-like structure is maintained to their benefit.
The oppressors within a society use, as pointed out in Iris Young’s Five Faces of Oppression, exploitation, marginalization, deprivation of agency and power, erasure and replacement of culture, and violence within society to prevent their feared outcome, which in many fictional pieces is the end of civilization. Heavy surveillance is also a tactic used almost like a threat of violence to let the oppressed know they are always watched. The use of these oppressive tactics creates a miserable life for the oppressed to the extent that they are unhappy and no longer have hope for a brighter future. Freud contributes these feelings of despair and unhappiness to the suppression of an individual’s instincts and desires by the constraints of society. The destruction of hope from the morale of the oppressed is a distinct characteristic of a dystopia, indicating the severity of oppression in the state is far beyond just and injustice. The oppressors within the society will continue to make more progressively heinous decisions and forms of oppression to try to gain control of the situation but inevitably continue to spiral to the civilization’s demise.