Orwell’s 1984, Make Room! Make Room! and The Matrix, to speak of the most famous anticipations, have a crippling flaw: in the future society described, the one who is scandalized is the human of today, not the one who lives this era. It is highly unlikely that a society desired by a majority of its participants would seem as alienated to them as it can be to a spectator… of the past. The rebels in these stories, thus, do not belong to their time. The contemporary spectator transposes herself with her sensitivity into the future society. Her impressions and reactions are vivid but foreign to those of humans modified by this society.
Are these books really make you think? This flaw raises awareness of their clearly manipulative character. Sometimes with the best of intentions, the author seeks to prevent this world from happening, rather than make us discuss it. It focuses on the fate of a person, forbids a more exhaustive analysis of the level of happiness felt by other inhabitants, from the integration of their society into the physical world. Our descendants are summoned to react instinctively like us, to mimic our sensitivity. Injunction of the past on the desires of the future, which denigrates to our descendants an independence, and the possibility of being more clairvoyant.
All this sets aside Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. John, the hero, is presented as a savage unsuited to his time, misunderstood, marginalized, and finally who commits suicide. More realistic.
Perhaps, before looking for the nonsense that our descendants could do, we must agree on what are ours?
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