“Dystopia defines a society that is almost unimaginable for most as they are being suppressed of the joys of everyday life, almost as if the everyday person is a prisoner.”
Before learning about the true definition of a dystopian society, I can say that I held the same beliefs as many people who don’t know the true definition. As others, I thought it had more to do with some fictional situation in which parasites turn humans into flesh-eating creatures, so it’s up to those who haven’t fallen prey to the mysterious virus to build a civilization and survive through it. I now have a newfound understanding of how a dystopian society sounds like an extreme version of a dictatorship within society, in which the people are suffering because they can’t do the things they want to do. There are strict boundaries that citizens must never cross to survive, which may leave the majority of us to question how one could even live in that situation without trying to escape.
While there are so many examples of a dystopian society in the media, not many convey the absolute powerlessness or fear you might feel if you lived like that. A perfect example is the Handmaid’s Tale. The women of that country are being forced to abide by fundamentalists who believe that women should be nothing more than vessels for children. They are stripped of their jobs, their money, their family, and their dignity and forced into a cult-like environment when they can’t even acknowledge who they were before the war that caused this life. Another example would be North Korea. A country in which its people are isolated from the world and live by strict standards that could result in death when breached. It’s eerie that they have laws that involve making fun of political leaders as something forbidden. These dystopian societies leave the reader questioning how one could push through an environment as controlling as that. It leaves you wondering if you might ever experience something similar. Will we always be the ‘Land of the Free’?