The Failure of Dystopian Literature

What if, instead of spurring us to save the world, the post-apocalyptic tale has become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Images of the last human lurching across a burning, barren landscape or standing atop a mountain of concrete rubble have become so commonplace they now haunt our collective consciousness. Many of us carry their loneliness in our bones. We can’t imagine how we’d survive in that situation.

And, I’m tired of it. Because nothing has changed. In fact, these stories, originally written as warnings, have failed.

As we watch the never-ending procession of post-apocalyptic movies and tv shows, an insidious form of trauma creeps into our psyche. We feel sick to our stomachs. A strange unease grows. We have nightmares and stop sleeping. The real world takes on the same nightmarish quality as the fiction we consume.

And, strangely, as our hope begins to fade, our hunger for more catastrophic stories grows.

I worry most about our children. Our youth are dying by suicide. They’re riddled with anxiety. And that’s not fair. They’ve never heard the good stories. The happy ones. But, then again, maybe none of us have. The idea of the coming apocalypse is as old as…well, as old as the hills, maybe. At the very least, as old as the Bible.

I think it’s time to tell different stories. Imagine other endings. It’s time for us to use our amazing minds to come up with new, regenerative ways of being. We need to step out of the tradition of catastrophe and harness the genius of hope.

We need to save the world, once and for all.

So, what’s stopping us? Why aren’t we telling happier stories? Why do we seem to crave unhappy ones? And why aren’t we imagining ourselves out of the mess we’ve made of the world?

In a chapter entitled “What If We Considered Imagination Vital to Our Health,” Rob Hopkins, author of From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Imagination to Create the Future We Want (2019) and founder of the international Transition Towns movement, argues that anxiety is a major factor impeding our ability to imagine a positive future. He explains how sustained anxiety can damage the hippocampus, the part of our brain that helps us remember the past as well as imagine the future.

“Once the hippocampus has been damaged,” he explains, “we begin to experience everyday events as more stressful, negative potential future events may come to mind more easily and we may seek out information that confirms an increasingly pessimistic world view.”

In other words, the more stressed we are, the more negative we become; and the more negative we become, the more stressed we are. “This vicious cycle,” he states, “results in the release of more cortisol and more damage to the hippocampus.”

(Read Imagining a Better Tomorrow for more about Rob Hopkins and his thoughts on the power of imagination.)

If stress is damaging our ability to imagine a better tomorrow, what are we to do? How can we, individually and collectively, ever hope to save the world?

As a former consulting hypnotist and on-going student of the unconscious mind, I know how effectively the stories we tell ourselves and the ones we are told by others can shape our reality. Since the brain can’t tell the difference between what is and what is not, whatever trauma we witness, whether ours or someone else’s, in real life or in fiction, the brain records as true.

At one point, we need to break the cycle.

In his book, Hopkins discusses the need to provide people with physical “spaces of safety and hope.” He describes Art Angel, a comprehensive and innovative art therapy program founded in the UK in 1997, as one such space. He explains how it “offers people the personal warmth and connection that should be part of all psychiatric care, as well as structure, routine, community, and the chance to create something tangible and meaningful.”

It leaves the artists (not referred to as clients or patients) feeling a renewed sense of hope and a regained ability to see positive elements in the world around them. Even more importantly, they begin to imagine a better future for themselves and the actions they could take to make it happen. “Indeed,” he explains, “at Art Angel I started to get a taste of what rebuilding the collective imagination might look like.”

And, he assures us, those places of safety and hope don’t necessarily need to be art based: “They could just as well be gardening, or welding, or building, or cooking, or baking, or working in the woods, or making music, or dancing, or meditating, or space to sit and talk with other people, or working with animals. It could be school, if school were different to how it is today.”

If, as Rob Hopkins proves, we can restore our minds in physical spaces of safety and hope, can we not also restore them in mental spaces of safety and hope?

I believe we can create safe, mental spaces through regenerative storytelling. Through narratives that offer people a place to rest their minds so they can come back to reality with a restored hippocampus and renewed ability to imagine a brighter future.

We must celebrate movies and tv series that provide people with opportunities to imagine themselves living healthy lives while rebuilding their communities in ways that don’t harm the natural world. We must look for video and board games in which individuals become stewards of the land and find innovative ways to co-exist with all beings.

We must do all we can to stop imagining the end of the world so that we may instead reimagine its beginning. Then, and only then, will we finally shake the dust from our bones, and be reborn.

Thank you for reading. ❤️

By the way, I do not use affiliate links in my posts.

Not able to comment? Send me note Here.