The New Dystopias

By A. Simon March 11, 2017

The Original Dystopias

Prior to the 20^th century, totalitarian societies had been rare. There had been the brief reign of Savonarola in Florence, who imposed a theocratic, egalitarian order, cut short when the citizens revolted. The equally brief Terror of the French Revolution was likewise curtailed by the citizens overthrowing their intellectual overlords, but the French Revolution had the distinction of engendering the totalitarian movement, which saw its greatest culmination in the Bolshevik and Third Reich despotisms of the 20^th century......Spartan society actually rested on the back of a population of non-Spartans (the helots) who were unapologetically enslaved. Plato was an admirer of Spartan society; he was the first of a long, long line of intellectual apologists for totalitarianism. In fact, Plato could be called the Father of Totalitarian Ideology........Hatred of private property is a common theme running across revolutionary w riters advocating utopias....... None of them caught on and propagated to the rest of society; in other words, they remained isolated and rare. Of those that failed, numerous excuses were invented to explain their collapse.  However, the real reason they disappeared is that they went against human nature............Read more