Hey,
In the final chapters of Evgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We, the authorities have finally figured out what was causing the turmoil that has permeated the otherwise perfectly calibrated society of synchronised workers and glass houses.
The problem, it turned out, was that some humans suffered from a disease called imagination. The ever watchful guardians identified the part of the brain responsible, and invited all citizens to submit to a simple X-ray procedure to zap it – and get rid of their pesky imaginations once and for all, to get back to the perfect harmony.
(I marvel at the fact that Zamyatin wrote We over 100 years ago and managed to predict both the worst of the Soviet Union – it was written in the midst of the civil war and before Stalin’s purges, but not published in the USSR until 1988 – and the capitalist society we live in right now, in the “west”.)
Today, we don’t need such radical treatment. We are numbed out by the onslaught of content and never ending breaking news, we get hooked up on reality TV and celebrity drama we distract ourselves with to cope. We work more hours than medieval peasants (not even an exaggeration), trying to earn a living to keep a roof over our heads and food on our tables (something that should really be a fundamental human right, but is not).
There’s no time to imagine otherwise.
Even our children no longer have time to daydream – school, exams, homework and extracurriculars to pad their future perfect worker CVs leave no space to get bored and to actually think beyond what’s in front of them.
And now there's AI that we are willingly outsourcing the job of “imagining” things – atrophying our brains in the process (here’s a link to the findings of a recent MIT study about that).
“Thinking outside the box requires courage,”, writes Kristen Ghodsee in Everyday Utopia. She quotes research by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky that found that people want to avoid feeling regret, and that they are more likely to feel regret about a bad outcome resulting from a decision they made, compared to a bad outcome that came from inaction.
Basically: People feel safer doing nothing and not letting themselves imagine.
In Zamyatin’s We most citizens willingly submit to the imagination-zapping procedure in order to get back to “normal”, to their happiness in conformity, forgoing a perhaps once in a lifetime chance to forge something different, something new, something better. To get free. It is easier for them to not imagine, to numb themselves with work and the status quo.
Is it any different for so many of us?
Antonina x
