It’s impossible to avoid now, but for future generations: Squid Game was a TV series on Netflix. It got a viral marketing boost and now all of social media is teeming with foaming-mouthed fanatics insisting that everybody MUST WATCH this show immediately or there will be consequences.
Now I will tell you why, not only am I not watching Squid Game, but you should not watch Squid Game either.
We’ve seen enough class-struggle dystopian sci-fi
The first 10 times I saw a class-struggle-based dystopian sci-fi movie, I thought, “Yeah, great socio-political commentary!” The next 50 class-struggle-based dystopian sci-fi movies I saw, I thought, huh, neat take, but it’s been done. After that, every class-struggle-based dystopian sci-fi movie gives me the kind of heartburn you get from too much grease and not enough substance.
I’ve seen Snowpiercer, The Platform, and High-Rise. Somebody else already pointed out that they are exactly the same movie. I’ve also seen The Hunger Games, and Squid Game is literally the exact same premise. I’ve seen The Purge, Elysium, They Live, The Running Man, Freejack, Soylent Green, and V for Vendetta. Not to mention, as the above image forecasts, that Metropolis fits in this category too; the very first sci-fi movie ever made.
Let me save you some time and tell you all about every single one of the above movies. This is the entire point:
“Proletariat vs Bourgeoisie”
- There are RICH PEOPLE, and they are EVIL for the sake of being EVIL!
- There are POOR PEOPLE who suffer because they are POOR!
- The RICH stay RICH by exploiting the POOR people and keeping them POOR!
- Nobody can seem to do anything effective about it.
- You should be MAD about this! MAD MAD MAD!
That’s all this is. A class-struggle sci-fi movie is not inspirational or instructive or educational or witty or original. It is not deep or profound. It’s not even a story. The entire point is to invoke the Krodha rasa and turn the viewer into the Incredible Hulk. Hulk hate rich people now!
Not only that, but we have a whole wing of literature devoted to the exact same effect, called dystopian literature. They include The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Brave New World, all of which are at the top of the list of most recommended books for required reading in school. I’ve written this same blog post about why force-feeding students these novels is a crime against intellect.
But we’ll go over it again, this time with movies and TV, because what I am saying really IS an original thought which is currently absent from all of world culture.
Dystopian fiction is bad for you because…
…because it short-circuits your intellect, stopping you from doing something about the problem. Dystopian fiction is nothing but a big sign in your face that says “the world is hopeless: GIVE UP!”
Mind you, the problem of class inequality is our oldest unsolved problem in society. It is literally the whole reason we have the concept of government. If people weren’t such assholes all the time, we wouldn’t need any government at all. We would be a happy hive-mind, sharing all for one and one for all.
But we can’t. Our animal-nature, still in us because we have so recently descended from beasts without a society at all, dictates that we will naturally take all we can for ourselves and immediate family at the expense of everybody else. Humans aren’t built for civilization any more than bees are built for free-market capitalism.
But we try to enforce that civilization anyway, so we struggle to come up with a government that will fix these problems. Except we can’t seem to do that. Every system of government we can think of requires a flawed human to have some kind of power, even if we distribute that power equally to all flawed humans. If humans were capable of coming up with a perfect system of government, we would have no need of governing.
So there are no easy solutions. If there were, we would have applied them a long time ago. Most people, excluding complete psychopaths, want a fair society with a balanced power structure. Some systems manage to come close, but never approach perfection.
Dystopian fiction lies to you
Dystopian fiction consistently tells you one thing and one thing only: “The solution is easy! Just kill all the rich people!”
Don’t think it hasn’t been tried. Just ask… meh… anybody on this list.
In dystopian fiction, whomever has the power is the immediate bad guy. There are only two endings after that: Either the bad guy crushes the revolt and stays in power, or the rebels overthrow the bad guy and conveniently end the story before we see the rebels become the new bad guy.
And there you go. That is the big, damaging lie that perpetuates the cycles of dictatorships and revolutions and more dictatorships that have plagued mankind since there was a mankind.
Comic book superhero fans defend their genre by pointing out that the simplified morality of their stories teaches the difference between right and wrong. But here again, simplifying things to black and white terms does nobody any favors. In real life, villains may be any alignment from evil psychopaths to damaged cowards with a tragic backstory to genuine paladins with a narrow agenda that damns their efforts even through their good intentions.
Likewise, when people think they like class-struggle dystopian fiction, what they are really hungry for is a course in philosophy. Which is an entire branch of academics which would not exist if we didn’t have problems in the first place. Philosophy tries to think hard about our problems and why we have them, and to conjure solutions. Dystopian fiction tells you “never mind all that boring stuff; your enemy is RICH PEOPLE!”
I’m going to give you a prophecy: There will NEVER be a time when everything looks exactly like Nineteen Eighty-Four, or The Hunger Games, or whatever Snowpiercer damn thing. I just linked you to the world history of revolutions, which shows that people revolt before this kinda crap even happens. That’s why these stories are fiction. Study non-fiction to actually learn things. Fiction makes a nice allegory that’s easier to remember, sure, but take your degree from textbooks.
I hear academics rushing to defend dystopian literature all the time. All the teachers recommending Nineteen Eighty-Four have a united motive of (trumpet fanfare) RAISING ZE AWARENESS! But this is a solution in search of a problem. Every child who has ever had to put the candy bar back because mom said we can’t afford it knows about unbalanced power.
If we never get our awareness raised about anything ever again, we will all be better off
The concept of “raising awareness” is itself a social ill made worse by communication technology. When we see a call to “raise awareness,” we forward the message or retweet the tweet, which gives us the illusion that we have done something to solve the problem.
But we haven’t. We’ve just performed an empty gesture that makes us feel morally superior.
And your humble author knows that feeling! I, too, at the advent of the home computer era, when the World Wide Web was launched, ran around preaching that we should all get on the Internet and learn how to access all the information. Utopia, I swore, was right around the corner. Sir Tim Berners-Lee thought so too. A bunch of us did. We thought as soon as we turn information and communication into a perfect socialism, that we will march in unison as an informed society, towards progress.
Yeah, it wasn’t that.
We HAD a utopia; we tore it down!
The year 2021 has been yet another year in which we have to re-learn the rottenest, most painful lesson of all: Human society will blow up a utopia and seek out a return to dystopia. Knowingly.
We have a global COVID pandemic. We don’t HAVE to have one, right now. If we’d all quarantined until the shot came out and then lined up for it, COVID would be history by now. You would think that of all the obvious courses of action, the basic concept of “stop the disease before it kills all of us” would be one where everybody was on board.
Oddly, that was not the case. What did we do wrong? Did we not raise enough awareness about disastrous global pandemics? We had all those movies like Outbreak (1995), Contagion (2011), 28 Days Later (2002), The Andromeda Strain (1971), 12 Monkeys (1995).
So take that as an example: If solving a problem with society were simply a matter of showing them movies about the problem, all the pandemic sci-fi that went before would have prevented the pandemic.
Indeed, we have a shot, we have several vaccines, miraculously all concurrently developed in record time by our top medical minds. People refuse to get it. They go to their death bed still refusing to get it. They know they are wrong. They will tell you to your face that they are in the wrong. They will cheerfully admit in TV interviews from their hospital bed that they’re assholes. They will die suffering, but love every minute of it.
Has it occurred to anyone that not everybody wants a utopia?
If there were ever a last-ditch effort to create a perfect system of government, putting all we’ve got into it, the United States system should have been it. By God, we have had some nice decades here. But it’s all falling apart. Why? Because people don’t vote. People do not exercise their power. They know that the power to run their country is in their hands, but it turns out when you put people in charge of their own freedom, they will charge for the nearest cage and lock themselves inside.
If and when (it’s “when”!) the United States of America fails, it will not be for lack of government design. It will be because it was too perfect, and its citizens tore it down out of spite.
THAT is the problem with people. You can lead a horse to water, can’t make it drink. In a human’s case, you can lead them to a buffet feast and they will stand there with their mouths closed and starve to death just to spite you.
So, getting back to Squid Game:
What Have We Learned About Squid Game?
We have learned that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” That is not, as some misunderstand, an admonition against idle curiosity, but rather to say that some subjects should be understood deeply or else left alone. Shallow understanding of politics is how we get a Pol Pot revolution. Take my word for it, those are bad.
We learned to beware of simple, black-and-white answers to complex, multi-hued problems. Believe me, if it were a simple matter of “get all the rich people,” we’d just burn all the damn money and be done with it.
We learned that dystopian fiction is fiction, and is beholden to the limits of the author’s understanding of socio-political systems. So if we take any work of fiction as our soooooole education on the subject, that’s worse than if we’d never bothered to learn a thing about it. It is a warped mirror we hold up to the truth. Trusting in fiction to inform you about politics will have you watching out the window for Godzilla while voter apathy eats your dinner right off the table.
We learned that people’s problems have been around since there were people, and whatever answers we can provide to those problems are a continuous, ongoing battle of progress by inches, across generations.
Or, you know, until we just have the Netherlands FAX us a copy of their Constitution. By God, they make it look easy!
