Is future going to be terrible? This idea keeps coming to me whenever I read something. Every fiction book or movie is predicting a very bad future for our kind. After I read Salman Rushdie's article about reality tv, I started to think about this: Why are so many people pessimistic about future? There are a lot of dystopia novels and short stories about how terrible the life would be. A few good examples would be "1984" by George Orwell, "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley or "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut. They do not agree on how our lives would be ruined but they do agree on this thing: our lives would be ruined.
I started to think about the cause of this pessimism and I decided that this is related to world politics of 20th century. Starting from WWI, the world was constantly tense and ready for a warfare. WW2, the cold war between US and USSR and so on always kept worrying the people from the upper level of the societies. With the introduction of nuclear weapons to the world scene, it has become easier to put pressure on people. These conditions lead some people to have a very pessimist point of view about the future.
However, I personally started to believe that it is not going to be that bad after all, because although it became easier to kill people, it also made it harder to start a war. The wars usually started for economic purposes in the past. However, with the new technology, rich people are no longer safe from the actual warfare because nuclear bombs can be easily wipe out a city. And that conflicts with their interest to maintain their wealth. This is not the only reason for my opinion but it is my main point.
In simpler words, I believe that such fear is no longer logical. Yes, I also believe that humans are evil by their nature as William Golding shows in "Lord of the Flies" but I know believe that it is a little bit exaggurated to conclude everything is going to be terrible. Back to Salman Rushdie's opinion, I believe that people won't be more demanding so that reality tv will become a collessium. It will simply fade away as public finds another entertainment with different context. And it will probably be mocked by the next generations as we mock the 50s and 60s.
Yes, the world we live in has a rather pessimistic outlook in general, people as well as the media and literature seem to focus more on all the bad things that are or might be happening than on any positive events or prospects - think of the news, for example, it's usually quite depressing to watch / listen to the daily news and it hardly ever happens that we hear about something nice such as peaceful demonstrations that didn't lead to any oppressive action by the police... Does that mean that good things never happen? Nope, but they don't meet the criteria for something to be considered important enough to be included in a news bulletin:-(
YanıtlaSilI'm glad to see that you've been able to maintain a more hopeful attitude and haven't given in to all these abounding doomsday predictions:-)
Thanks for this very interesting and dense blog entry, you definitely made me think on the points you raised...