If you know me or have read any of my blog posts before, it is no secret, I love dystopian stories. From “1984” and “Fahrenheit 451” all the way to “2085” (that is a great book by the way), I love how dystopian novels show in vivid color the danger of living under “unhinged governmental control.”
Dystopian is a kind of literature that is the polar opposite of Utopian. Instead of describing the perfect world where everything is wonderful, a dystopian society is meant to paint the picture of a place where nothing is good, and the government is tyrannical and oppressive. In most dystopian literature you are motivated to sympathize with the main character and you want to fight for the oppressed peoples. The author wants you to feel the heavy chains of obvious injustice. And a good writer makes you feel the darkness of evil rising up out of the book strangling the life out of you. And when it comes to having compassion for the hero’s plight, you cannot help but care.
The beauty to me of the dystopian novel is how easy it is to show humanity’s passion for freedom and how a person will do everything he or she can to break the shackles of evil and to fight the tyranny of bad government. And by reading it, the hope of the author is to make the reader a better person and willing to fight for their freedom when it is being taken away in real life.
But then along came the movie The Purge. Produced in 2013 it was a new kind of dystopia. Instead of fighting against the heavy hand of the man, the creators of The Purge had the opposite occur – unrestrained personal freedom became society’s villain. The plot of The Purge is simple: each person was allowed for one whole day to act upon their “unhinged passions.” If they wanted to kill or steal, for one whole day they could kill or steal without any consequences. The storyline revolves around a family who locked themselves inside their home like a fortress because roaming bands of murderers and thieves were out in the streets ready to get all they could: blood, money and anything and everything thier evil hearts wanted.
It turns out even neighbors were not to be trusted. They too would kill you if given the chance. It was a truly dark plot.
Even though this storyline is categorized as dystopian, it does not have with it the same ability to inspire or teach as classical dystopian narratives do. This new type of “bad world” had no attractiveness to me. There was no hero, there was no chance offered to humanity to prove it had a soul. Instead, all people just were repulsive. For me, this was the death of dystopia.
Most of all I was disturbed by The Purge on a moral and philosophical level: the premise assumes that if evil became legal and even sanctioned for a day by the government, people would eagerly embrace it. They would seem to have no restraint against acts of passion, so it was natural to act out, even violently and maliciously, against their better natures.
The lesson is simple: If murder ever became legal, naturally everyone would be doing it. If stealing will not be punished, looting will become the new norm.
The new dystopian narrative teaches that man has no guiding moral vision outside of governmental fiat. Where in the old dystopian novels, there were higher ideals to live for. Mankind was internally moral. So when government said books were illegal, or falling in love was verboten, the human spirit would resist and give the hero courage to read and kiss a girl even at the cost of his life. Goodness was something found inside a person.
But in the new dystopia, government is it. And once restraints are taken away, humanity will obviously devolve into brute beasts and savage murderers. People in the new dystopia are only good because the law and government made them good. As a result, there is nothing to aspire to reading or watching this trash.
And then I turn on the news, and I wonder, have we adopted the new narrative?
As a society, more and more everyday it seems like we have moved both ethically and philosophically in the same direction as The Purge. Since God has no place in modern society, we no longer believe a person can aspire to higher or more noble ideals. Surely man can’t be good in and of himself, can he? So we need government intervention to enforce goodness. Racism isn’t a matter of the heart, it has become a policy. Why should we be shocked when cops murder innocent people since we now let mothers murder their own children? And if the government chooses not to enforce looting, stealing, and lying, then that must mean it is now sanctioned behavior.
We no longer know how to be good on our own.
This is why I am a pastor. Man can never be good through force, or through unhinged personal freedom. Goodness comes from God, and until people start to realize this truth, we need to get ready for more looting, stealing, killing, crying and lying.
Old dystopia was often written from a Judeo-Christian worldview where standards of right and wrong were agreed upon. But the modern liberal mind said “God and his law” was repression. So we threw him out: Out of the house, out of the schoolroom and out of the stories we tell. Hollywood is thoroughly secular, and now so is commom culture.
So what is the result? The Purge is alive and well in Minnesota!
