Dystopia: A society where most of its inhabitants live in horrid conditions due to the oppression put into place by the rules and whims of its ruling authority, under the justification of a better society.
I think that my original definition of dystopia was a bit limiting and just focused on the powerless aspects of oppression that were shown in Iris Young’s “Five Faces of Oppression. I think this is much broader and focuses on the lives and conditions that the inhabitants would have faced when dealing with the aspects of oppression. I also make it clear that these issues are sourced from the authority that presides over these people. In a lot of these fictional dystopias, we see a lot of these governments try to justify the laws that forced their populace to live in these conditions using different methods, but I think a lot of them end up, to some level, using the Hobbesian Jungle. When pressured they usually say that things are better now than they were in the past and that without doing this society would be chaotic or dangerous.
While I do think this definition is much better than my previous one I will admit that I’m also missing the aspects that I have critiqued someone else for not having. That is an example of oppression that the inhabitants may be dealing with.
