A dystopia is a world where everyone is constantly under extreme pressure from their leaders who uses their authority to control every action of their citizens.
In that world, I believe that a dystopian society is where the citizen are robbed of their free will and are forced to live a life that the people in authority decides for them. In the book 1984, the citizen are forced to not have any attachment, they shortened the dictionary, and they also constantly monitored everywhere they go. If someone broke the rules, the authority would come and capture you. They would subject you to torture until you get to the point where you basically become lifeless with no will. This resulted in having mass fear over all the citizens that no one would break the rules imposed upon them. Overall this made me wonder if the feeling of oppression from a dystopia could be a state of mind? In 1984, Julia was a rebel who broke the rules until she was caught. She was unlike the other because she did not fully give in to the totalitarian government and was still in control of her will.
Another dystopian society where people were oppressed was in Fahrenheit 451. In this novel, books were considered illegal because the government did not want the citizen to have free ideas. If you were caught in possession of having books, then they would burn your house down along with the book, and arrest you. After the main protagonist witnessed someone who was caught having books and refused to leave her house as it was burning, he started to question if it was the right thing to do. This mindset caused him to leave his wife behind because she couldn’t understand the importance of having free ideas. At the end of the book, he left town to join a group of scholars in the woods who help him develop his own free idea. This helped me formulate the idea that dystopia is a state of mind. Usually, in a dystopia, everybody’s lives are so miserable, except the people with authority, that they get numb to everything because it becomes the norm. Just like the main protagonist in Fahrenheit 451, he was an enforcer for that dystopian society, but he became aware of his actions. Overall, dystopia is a state of mind which the authorities have not taken away or a sudden realization of your actions.
