“All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.
I can’t even give you hope that it will be different someday— that they’ll come out, and forget death, and lose their technology’s elaborate terror, and stop using every form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level— and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive.”
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Although people like to imagine dystopian futures like The Road, or even The Walking Dead, if you wish to see a more possible vision of the future, especially in Europe, go see The Hunger Games.
Part 1 has been out for some time, and Part 2 is coming to theatres late this year. I read the books when all the kiddos were reading them a few years ago.
They not literary classics, but diverting and well worth reading. And I recommend them to you, so that you can at least know what many bright young people are thinking about the world which we are creating for them.
And when you see or read about the frivolous excess and self-important obsessions of the incredibly out of touch ruling elite in The Capitol, and their perfect records of achievement in games in which they make the rules as they go, recall that telling phrase of Hannah Arendt's, the banality of evil.
They would be as gods, and so revel in violence and death which, unable to create life, is their greatest power and the means of their control.
And the winners will owe their allegiance to a faceless System. And if they use power and money to pervert justice, instead of bombs and bullets, so much the better for its efficient use of resources.
