We live in a world of Monopoly. The higher people control what we “middle class” people do. At work there is always a manager that is above you, at school there is the teacher or professor that you listen too and believe what ever they say. You trust that what they are lecturing is correct information. There are laws that we abide by and police officers that are there to enforce those laws. There is always someone or something higher than you that you must follow or listen too. The oligarchy always has his place somewhere in your life.
In the Dystopian novel, “Fahrenheit 451”, the reading of books is outlawed and no one is to be seen reading them. The setting is in the future where self-control has been abandoned and there are no laws to control what people do. No laws equal chaos and unruliness amongst the citizens who live there. They have banned the books “for the good of humanity,” because books contradict what actually takes place in real life. If you are caught reading a book then you are carried off to a mental hospital while the firemen stay behind and burn those books. The ban on books was a way of putting control of on the people’s minds and what they take in. Their spiritual self were also being controlled because the Bible was one of the books that were absolutely not supposed to be read, along with historical texts and books by William Faulkner and Walt Whitman. By putting a ban on these books the government does not want people to know about the past, present and future. With no historical books in sight then how would the people know what happened in the past?
Students go to school and read what they are assigned by their teachers or professors. You go to the doctor’s office and there are magazines already chosen for you on the table so you could read through. The billboards and advertisings that we see on a daily basis have been planned out just for the viewing audience. You go to the car dealership to purchase a new car and they have you read all sorts of contractual agreements but they also have the fine print that no one ever pays attention too. Now all of these signs, contracts, advertisings and magazines amongst many other things are there for us to read and agree with. Once you are enrolled in a class you must read the assigned readings in order to pass the class and gain knowledge in that section. You do not have a choice of the material that is being assigned too. You either read it or you don’t but most of the time you end up reading it. Isn’t that somewhat resembling what was happening in Fahrenheit 451? Yes in Fahrenheit 451 there was a ban on reading and they told you what you can not read, in our daily lives we are told what to read. It might be the opposite of 451 but it is in the same control. So we do live in a mini dystopia ourselves and are influenced by others.
In “Discipline and Punish,” Michel Foucault, he talks about how knowledge is tied power. In our daily lives, knowledge is power. You are familiar in a field, you automatically get power. We are going to school to gain knowledge to have more power in the work field in the future. Without that “power” where would we be? We would not have degrees and have no careers. Foucault talks about the prison system and the death penalty and how it is just a way of having order and generalization. For a prisoner that is on death row, he committed such a crime that the government believes a similar “torture” should be given to the prisoner. Foucault argues that by doing this it was a non economical way of using the body and it cost too much to put the prisoner on death penalty. However, this is needed to show us citizens that there is order in the system and it is needed to send out a message to us that if we do commit a crime, it will not go unnoticed and there will be punishment depending on the crime sometimes involving death. We contradict ourselves with this death penalty. We kill a person that has killed a person. But we do need it to have control in our society; without the government putting those laws in effect, people would do as they please.
Search for the definition of capitalism and you will find an economic system based on private ownership of capital. The world we live in is all about power and being on top. In the 1971 film Clockwork Orange directed by Stanley Kubrick, the government uses Alex, the main character, to gain public liking and raise positive awareness. In Randy Martin’s essay “Where did the future go,” and Louis Althusser essay “Ideology and Ideological state Apparatus”, both touch on capitalism as an issue. Money is power and that is what everyone strives for and in the film and the two essays capitalism is the focal point in achieving the goals of those involved. Yes money is power, but labor is needed to get profit. Labor gives profit to make capital and capital is really social relations.
In "Where did the Future Go" by Randy Martin, he says that former President of the United States, George W. Bush is not going to come out and say his decision to go to war was because of capitalism. They play it off as if it were another thing yet we all know that money was an issue to where we are as a country today. Bush was in high power and he used that to do what was best for him and his party. Same goes for Clockwork Orange as the ruling party which again is the government uses Alex, the main character, for self gain. Alex is a troubled guy and is very violent in his actions. He kills the cat lady and ends up going to jail where capitalism takes over and he becomes an experiment for them in exchange for less time in jail. The higher power will do as they please and in this case did just that. Althusser talks about a person not perceived as what they are rather than from what society they are in. his views are that of the battle of the classes and this dream like state. In his point of view the nation thinks as a whole and not as individuals, ideology.
All three of these works relate and have capitalism in common. The higher class will always have the upper hand in doing things. In Clockwork Orange they did just that with experimenting on Alex and as Martin states, George Bush did that when we went into war with Iraq and Althusser says that social practices determine the human being and determines the limits that individual will have. The society that you live in has a major influence whether you think it does or not. You might try hard or think that it does not but you live and breathe the norms of that society so in one way or another you are going to conform to it. The upper-class has control over the middle class and capitalism rules in our society today.
Take our own personal lives that we live in. There is Big Brother watching us, the government controlling us and the oligarchy being above us. With big brother we are constantly being watched whether it is the traffic light cameras catching us running the red light or the security cameras all around the mall. We are constantly being watched by someone else. Even in the building I live in we have cameras all over and even some are pointed directly at certain people’s doors and balconies. The higher powers, which are the managers of the building, are choosing to watch what certain tenants do because of some questionable behavior that the tenant might have done. The managers of the building are attempting to get some information and track their every move to prove their power and their knowledge in what they know is going on. After a few recordings of what the tenant is doing, the manager types up that eviction notice and the tenant is out of the apartment by the third day. The managers are the “government” of this building because they set the laws and if you do not follow it, you get ticketed. Although pointing cameras at someone’s door might not be the legal thing to do, they still do it because they have the upper hand in the situation.
The society that we live in has a major affect on how we live and what choices we make. In Anne Kerr’s “Eugenics and the New Genetics in Britain: Examining Contemporary Professionals’ Accounts” the discussion of selective abortion, new and old eugenics testing for prenatal diagnosis are brought to the table. People in society have very strong opinions especially when it comes down to abortion. A woman can choose to get an abortion and go to the clinic and there she will encounter protestors that are very vocal and will make sure that you are killing a life and you are wrong. So everywhere we go our own judgments are questions by ourselves and most definitely by other people. The testing and diagnosis to find out whether the fetus has genetic defects is discussed in this article and whether it is a good idea to abort that fetus. This causes an immoral debate of whether we are killing off the handicapped. One of the interviewees said that during one of the meetings someone stood up and said they would not have been born had it been for the diagnosis. “I go to certain meetings where we discuss the new genetics with the public and we often get people themselves who were born with hereditary illness. There’s a very angry reaction very often to what we’re doing or what they think we’re doing…“you wouldn’t allow me to be born nowadays if you had a diagnosis.” The interviewee goes on to say “and only the brace person stands up and says, “well, no, I’m sorry…if I had a fetus that had your condition I might not allow that, when I had the chance of having someone perfectly healthy.” Even in a forum there are people influencing and posing their views on other people. No one can have an honest opinion when it comes to topics like this and not be afraid to hurt someone else’s feelings. Not one person wishes to have a “not normal” baby and when you ask a pregnant woman if she prefers to have a baby boy or baby girl, almost all of the time the response is that same, “As long as it is a healthy baby, I do not care if it is a boy or girl.” If people are too scared to admit the liking of eugenics due to public scrutiny, behind closed doors a lot of people like this idea.
Is eugenics a way of discriminating towards the handicapped? That is a very difficult question to answer. The best I can think of is no one wants to be in that situation. If they are then they are. It is difficult on both the child and parent. For the parent that has to care for him or her and for the child not having the ability to do things on his/her own. Now this all depends on the type of disability. So once again, society is having a voice in the individual choices one wants or chooses to make.
In the end, we are all part of a society that has to abide by laws, rules and common courtesy. It might not be as stern and mandatory as the texts that we have followed in this class, but it certainly has a taste of each. All everyone is concerned about is the greater good of them. The government is considered about the greater good of the people. The managers, teachers and others are concerned about the greater good of the people they are somewhat responsible for. So in the end in our semi dystopia, we are all being watched and controlled.
Bradbury, Ray. “Fahrenheit 451.” Ed. Del Ray. New York. 1978.
