A dystopia is a society where much of the population is oppressed and unjustly treated, while also forced to conform.
I would justify my new definition by referring to Young’s Five Faces of Oppression. These five faces showed me why “most” of a population is oppressed and the faces are powerlessness, marginalization, cultural imperialism, exploitation, and violence. Throughout the activities we’ve done in this class, I have found several sources where these five faces were applied and showed me how society for these people was a dystopia. For example, one of the articles I read talked about an Asian woman getting attacked for no reason essentially. So now she has to live life in fear, which can be dystopian for her.
Additionally, society is forced to conform because although many people do have free will, I learned that people are nearly under surveillance and don’t even have full privacy. If people tried to go against anything, they’re overruled because at any point something can be taken away from them since they are being watched all the time such as in the novel 1984. Conforming also connects to oppression because most have to conform to the simple fact that they don’t have enough resources on their own to go against what the masses are saying or doing. These are all examples of dystopian elements that people have to live with.
