How to Survive Dystopia (With Your Humanity Intact)

By Starr O'Hara

In this story, you are the hero.

 

In times of real-world dystopia, dissenters must not surrender to fear and delusion, but become active protagonists in the story of realignment. 

 

As in all good stories, the path will be difficult, with many obstacles in the way. And like all heroes, the dystopian survivor will need to develop his character in response to each struggle. Only in this way can he gain the strength he'll need for the final battle.

 

The Great Reset, technocratic agendas, mass delusion, and economic insanity may create outer crises, but they can't crush the protagonist's spirit. By devoting ourselves to inner growth and outer integrity, we hasten dystopia's end and acquire the qualities that will be needed for rebuilding. 

 

How to Survive Dystopia (With Your Humanity Intact) is a guide to the hero's journey through the dystopian landscape.

 

Be not afraid.

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Starr O'Hara
• Release date: Jul 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201125745

Book preview

Preface

Fictional dystopia is often depicted with a great sense of finality: the threads of human progress—of freedom, discovery, and innovation—once arrested, are forever frozen in place, and all of humanity is eternally doomed to suffer in a hell of its own devising.

This finality is partly borne out of the structural nature of story. A good story, even though its setting feels palpably real, must represent just a slice of the larger world. Only the places, people, objects, trends, events, and history that are most relevant to the protagonist’s inner journey are fit for inclusion. The story must begin at the exact place and time—or very shortly before the time—that the protagonist awakens to the call of inner change. It must end at the place and time when the protagonist either accomplishes this inner change or fails, ultimately, to bring it forth. Everything in the middle, if it serves to illustrate what is happening in the wider world, does so only as much as it needs to. Only enough to give the hero important clues and insights that will assist him on his inner journey, to provide his needed kick in the pants. 

This is true of all stories, and yet in the dystopian work, the exact angle of the slicing serves a secondary purpose: to dramatize the terrors that the author believes will result in our real world if we do not heed the warnings of our own time and place.

Some of the most impactful works of dystopian fiction are so haunting precisely because of the way the endings are sliced. The protagonist, though he tries and tries, does not succeed in accomplishing his inner change, and thus he must be swallowed up completely by the dystopia. He becomes a cog in its machinery, an insoluble part of its substance. 

We do not see anything that happens after the dystopia subsumes the hero, and that leaves us with a lingering sense of dread, long after we’ve finished the last page and set down the book. Subconsciously we accept that dystopias are forever. We are very well educated in the identification and classification of dystopia, but woefully unprepared when it comes to the practical skill of surviving it—and defeating it seems out of the question. Our modern myths have not taught us that.

Our society did not heed the warnings of its seminal dystopian works, and thus we stand witness to the birth of a very real dystopia. It is most likely too late to stop it. Instead, we must prepare to outlast it. For dystopia in the real world, unlike in fiction, is not final. It never lasts forever, though it may last a long time. The world is too unpredictable for unilateral control, and, as a whole, humanity is too slippery to pin down. Change is a constant. The pendulum must swing back eventually. Until then, despite the circumstances, your life will continue to be what you make it.

Each one of us is the protagonist of our own life. You may not be personally responsible for the world-building of the dystopia in which you find yourself, but you are responsible for your own salvation from it. Not the government. Not academia. Not the media. Not a third party. Not the resistance. You. 

This book is written in the hope that we will do just that, each of us individually, and in partnership with our communities. In its pages I have outlined a primer covering what I see as the most crucial aspects of survival. Part I deals with principles: the unseen aspects of survival. Call it Spiritual Survival if you swing that way. If not, Psychological Survival will suffice. In Part II, I discuss material survival and provide a number of practical tips to help you in that arena. Make no mistake, outlasting dystopia will require skills from both sets. 

PART I: TAXONOMY

The Nature of Our Present Dystopia

At the time of this writing, two years and some change have passed since the entire world went bonkers. One day we were chugging along, no more beset by global problems than usual, and then BAM! All of a sudden we were all locked down in our houses, the economy screeched to a near halt, and nobody could get toilet paper. Previously stable people started obsessing over face masks and hand sanitizer and lived in dire fear of the briefest skin-to-skin contact. Politicians at every level down to the small-town mayor were letting their inner petty tyrants shine through. The media, already known for peddling half-truths and being prone to amazing feats of intellectual contortion, completed its divorce from reality in a stunning show of solidarity between rival networks. A cold civil war broke out, drawing a bright line of social distancing between those who accepted the official narrative and those who rejected it. We were pitted against each other, brother against brother, parents against children, HR against Accounting.

But let's get one thing straight. Our present dystopia did not just pop out of nowhere in 2020 with the Coronavirus pandemic. It has been gestating in the sick currents of society for several decades, if not centuries. It is a result of civilizational trends, growing and compounding over generations. Among these are the trend toward centralization of power and abdication of personal and local responsibility, the trend toward shallow group identity as a replacement for genuine human connection, and a certain unconscious nihilism that has gripped the masses, who yearn for truth and meaning but can't find it, and so conclude that truth is relative, and thus nothing really matters. Or they become blank canvasses on which  caricatures of truth and meaning can be painted by media, pop culture, political movements, and other perceived authorities.

What It Is

We are not, as a species, as oblivious and unteachable as many of us tend to think we are. We do learn—slowly, in fits and starts, and with many mistakes made along the way. For instance, humanity has confronted the violence of mere dictatorship many times, and some elementary lessons about it have been uploaded to the collective consciousness. Though dictatorship still crops up here and there, we are unlikely to fall for it again on a large or global scale. The more obvious forms of theocracy and slavery have also been vanquished to a large extent, and are now only able to operate in the shadows of cults and criminal organizations. Likewise, the dystopian vehicle of absolute communism has nowhere near the wide appeal it once held, even if some countries are a bit behind the curve, and certain ideologies naïvely attempt to salvage the used parts. Once humanity has experienced a particular evil enough to get fully acquainted, we lose our taste for it.

And so, each time evil comes knocking at humanity's door, it must wear a new hat. Otherwise, too many people will recognize it from last time and its goals will be shattered before it gets a foot in the door. When it comes wearing a disguise that no one has ever seen before, recognition will dawn on only a relatively few people, and they won't at first be able to convince others that this is, in fact, the same evil that came knocking before, just with a different jaunty cap.

This is why our present dystopia is of a nature markedly different from all the dystopias of yesteryear. It looks different, sounds different, appears to have different aims, but is, at its core, the same old evil.

In this case, evil has donned a disguise of technocracy. Like all dystopian movements, this political ideology presents itself as a solution to the most pressing problems of our time. Technocracy promises to alleviate the specific sufferings most common to modern lives: the overwork, the stress, the loneliness, the material inequality, the environmental degradation, and most important, the unbearable complexity and futility of individual and collective decision-making. But of course, underneath the jaunty cap is the same old anti-human, life-negating evil.

What's really fascinating is that you never hear the architects of this agenda refer to their ideology by name. This, to me, signifies a more sophisticated program of deception, crafted to fool a more sophisticated audience/target. The totalitarians of history had no qualms using the words communist or fascist to describe themselves and their ideas. But today's totalitarians are loathe to use the word technocrat, even though most people are unfamiliar with the term. Why? Because people are, in fact, a little smarter in some ways than they used to be, and the tyrants need to be trickier. They require a disguise for their disguise. If they used the word, everyone would go Google it and find out what it really meant, and most of them would not support it. So a hat of nebulous-but-benevolent globalism hides the technocracy hat, which hides the evil underneath.

Thankfully, not everyone falls for the lies. Those who recognize evil beneath its many creative disguises do so because they possess a more complete understanding of the principles evil seeks to corrupt: the principles of truth, freedom, and justice, among others. Even if they are unaccustomed to articulating these principles, they have a good internal sense of them, which forms a subtle armor against the deceptive disguises of evil.

Later on, we'll discuss ways to build upon and strengthen that subtle armor, making it impregnable against all sorts of dystopian influences, not just deceit. But before we do that, let's explore the particular features of our present dystopia in Chapter 2.

The Troubles We've Seen

With the 2020 pandemic , dystopia was birthed out of the collective unconscious and into the material world.

My main readership will be highly alert to the social, economic, ideological, and (primarily) political causes and effects of the global situation that has emerged out of that event. But there may be people who pick up this book who aren't, or who are only beginning to see reality. So, for the sake of thoroughness, let's enumerate the manifest features of our present dystopia, before we go on to speculate about the likely direction of its evolution in the next chapter.

Social Isolation

Perhaps the most traumatic fact—the stand-out characteristic among the many traumatic aspects of the mishandling of the pandemic—was the prohibition of community, of human connection. For over a year in many places, there were no birthday parties. No pub nights. No holiday dinners with family. No church services and