Is it 1984?
Dystopian Literature and the Psyche
George Orwell entered my life during high school, when my tenth-grade English professor decided the best way to get young boys to read was to offer a class on science fiction literature. My lack of attention to academics during those early years resulted in dismal grades, with one exception—this class. Bradbury, Heinlein, Le Guin, and Orwell captured my imagination. Whether or not Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 falls into the category of science fiction or prophetic literature is a matter of debate. Still, for me, I received my first introduction to the politics of imagination through the life of Winston Smith and Big Brother.
Fast forward to our current era, and every bookshelf, no less movie release, features a dystopian plot. Fiction from Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness to Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse depicts heroes or heroines navigating collapsing ecosystems or social structures. The TV series The Handmaid’s Tale, a cinematic adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel, portrays life in a totalitarian society.
What’s going on?
When John Stuart Mill stood in Parliament in 1868 and called parts of Ireland and Scotland “dystopian,” he was making a clever pun on Thomas More’s Utopia—replacing the “good place” with a “bad place.” He couldn’t have known he was naming a literary genre that would become one of our current forms of social critique.
Dystopian literature emerged as science fiction’s darkest child, always looking forward rather than back. From H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine in 1895, which divided humanity into the leisurely Eloi and the laboring Morlocks, writers began using imagined futures to expose present-day failures. E.M. Forster’s eerily prescient The Machine Stops, published in 1909, warned of humans communicating through technology that strips away emotional nuance—a prophecy that feels uncomfortably contemporary.
But it was the totalitarian nightmares of the twentieth century, think Stalin, Mao, and Hitler, that crystallized the genre. Orwell borrowed the bones of other mid-century writers for 1984, creating his vision of control through surveillance and fear. Aldous Huxley offered a competing nightmare in Brave New World—not oppression through pain but enslavement through pleasure. This tension between these two visions remains dystopia’s defining dialogue: which is more dangerous, the boot stamping on a human face or the numbing comfort that makes us forget we once had faces at all?
The genre exploded during the Cold War’s atomic anxieties, giving us everything from Planet of the Apes to Soylent Green, and forward to contemporary works like The Hunger Games, which explore new terrors—infertility, environmental collapse, and moral exhaustion. A theme permeates the literature: human excess punished by its opposite, our hubris answered with scarcity and despair.
The Psychological Architecture of Dystopia
Carl Jung warned against the dangers of mass movements that overwhelm individual consciousness, arguing that only by understanding our unconscious inner nature can we gain the self-knowledge necessary to resist ideological fanaticism. In his work The Undiscovered Self, Jung asserts that humanity must embrace its potential on both conscious and unconscious levels. Without this finely tuned awareness, we risk surrendering control of the individual to external collective entities—precisely the nightmare scenario depicted in dystopian fiction.
The collective unconscious, as Jung theorized, draws upon primordial images that are cross-cultural and have existed in the collective imagination of the human race itself. In dystopian literature, we witness the deliberate manipulation of this collective unconscious by totalitarian regimes. The citizens in these fictional states share perfectly hand-crafted memories across cultures, their individual consciousness subsumed by governmental narratives that compress reality into an officially sanctioned collective unconscious.
This manipulation manifests vividly in Orwell’s 1984, where the Party’s fundamental strategy involves controlling the past to control the present. As Orwell understood, and as we see reflected in contemporary political discourse, language itself becomes a weapon. Political language, Orwell wrote, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” The doublespeak of Oceania—where War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength—represents the ultimate colonization of the collective unconscious.
The Shadow Self and Mass Consciousness
Jung’s concept of the Shadow—the unconscious aspects of personality that the conscious Ego does not acknowledge—becomes crucial in understanding both dystopian literature and our contemporary moment. Jung argued that humanity must acknowledge its equal capacity for good and evil, integrating the Shadow rather than projecting it outward onto convenient enemies. Orwell lived out this theory, recognizing how easily individuals surrender their Shadow to collective projections. As Jung observed, “It has even become a political and social duty to apostrophize the capitalism of one and the communism of the other as the very devil, to fascinate the outward eye and prevent it from looking at the individual life within.”
This dynamic appears throughout dystopian fiction. In Brave New World, the World Controllers maintain stability by eliminating the Shadow through genetic engineering and conditioning. Manipulated citizens are fitted into predetermined roles, their potential for darkness (or authentic individuality) engineered away. Mustapha Mond, as keeper of repressed historical memory, understands what has been lost but considers individual consciousness too dangerous for social stability. His secret library of banned books represents the Collective Unconscious—the repository of memories and knowledge that society has chosen to repress.
The Contemporary Resonance
Jung warned that “it is chiefly in times of physical, political, economic, and spiritual distress that men’s eyes turn with anxious hope to the future.” Our contemporary proliferation of dystopian narratives suggests we inhabit such a time. The near-religious fervor of current political debate, the manipulation of information, and the normalization of surveillance all echo Orwell’s warnings.
The question confronting us is whether we can cultivate what Jung called the “undiscovered self”—a strong individual consciousness capable of resisting mass movements and collective unconscious manipulation. Dystopian literature suggests the answer depends on our willingness to acknowledge our capacity for both good and evil, to integrate rather than project our Shadow, and to resist the seductive comfort of surrendering individual thought to collective certainty.
As Jung wrote: “Where there are many, there is security. What the many believe must of course be true... Sweetest of all, however, is that gentle and painless slipping back into the kingdom of childhood, into the paradise of parental care, into happy-go-luckiness and irresponsibility.” This desire for a childlike simplicity makes us vulnerable to totalitarian impulses, whether governmental or corporate.
Yet dystopian literature isn’t mere pessimism. Unlike post-apocalyptic fiction, which often ends with the mushroom cloud, dystopia typically concludes with someone crying out for a better world. This field of writing usually contains an imaginative spark of hope, however fragile, reflecting our failures while still yearning for redemption. In an era where technology increasingly mediates human connection, surveillance is normalized, and comfort often disguises control, we need these dark mirrors more than ever. They don’t show us an inevitable future but a warning: this is our collective destiny unless we choose otherwise.
If we are to avoid living in a world like 1984, we must heed both Orwell’s warning about the abuse of political language and surveillance, and Jung’s call to discover and integrate the self. Only by understanding how dystopian mechanisms operate—psychologically, politically, and socially—can we prevent their manifestation. The question isn’t whether we live in 1984, but whether we possess sufficient self-awareness to ensure we never do.
More to Come,
James Hazelwood is an author and documentary photographer living in New England’s smallest state. www.jameshazelwood.net. His book Everyday Spirituality is his most well-known work.
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