[ExI] Consequentialist world improvement

[Tom Nowell]

While 1984 may be a caricature, it was exceeded by reality - the East German Stasi managed to have 1 in 5 Germans informing on the rest of the citizens. 1984 was intended as a warning against Communist Totalitarianism, and it turned out the horrors could easily be exceeded in the real world.

I found a copy of the Faber Book of Utopias in a charity shop, so have been reading up on old visions of societies both envisioned as extremely good and extremely bad. Has anyone read Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We"? It appears to be a horrific dystopia and is said to have inspired Brave New World and 1984. The section quoted in the book of utopias is about the recommendation of "fantasiectomy" - an operation to reduce the imagination and make people happier workers within The One State.

Hmm...there's a lot of utopias and dystopias out there, I could spend years reading to try and capture a representative sample.

Tom
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