How do we know that what we see is real? This question is old hat for your average philosopher. In early modernity, Descartes posed it in different ways, but one way in particular seems to have captured the Western imagination and has reared its ugly philosophical head in countless sci fi flicks. As he writes, he looks out his window and sees a man below in the street. Then he asks if he can be certain that what he sees is truly a man. How can he be certain that it isn’t, in fact, an automaton? Maybe it’s a mechanical device (Descartes was writing before words like robot or cyborg had been invented). Maybe it’s a wooden contraption wearing clothes.
But Descartes’ skepticism about reality was hardly new. Mystics of every stripe had suggested for millennia that life is a dream, or a shadow of a dream, or the mists swirling around the shadow of a dream. If we were to wake up, we’d discover a world behind our world. “All the world’s a stage” implies that we live in a theatre with curtains and props, and all of it is being directed, not by some benevolent deity, but by a sinister force that is using us in service of its own ends. Truman Burbank sails to the edge of his world and discovers that he lives inside a giant production studio. Jean Luc Picard plays a flute as he lives out someone else’s memories. When Lincoln Six–Echo asks awkward questions about the established order of his life, he discovers that he is merely an insurance policy cloned to provide his original self with spare body parts.
In the West, we tell ourselves that ours is the centered reality. Ours is the measure of all other possibilities. History’s dystopias come from somewhere else. Jews lived in a sham town called Auschwitz and while the world was shown convincing facades of banks and bakeries, behind these were the gas chambers. The world bought the romantic myth of the noble peasant–worker even as Stalin was slaughtering them by the millions. Extreme consequences were possible in part because the victims themselves refused to believe that their milieu was being manipulated. But we are different. We can safely consign these stories to a distant past.
But how do we know that what we see is real? What makes us immune to mass delusion? Perhaps we too live in a dystopia. Perhaps what distinguishes our world is the sheer genius of the deception. Orwell hinted at the key ingredient. In 1984, the state successfully imposes its will because it implicates the characters in the state’s evils. The characters are placed in a prisoner’s dilemma, and so each betrays the other. When Winston Smith and Julia are incarcerated, they reveal their deepest fears. When confronted with their fears, each screams that their particular vulnerability should be inflicted on the other. Smith, who fears rats, avoids torture with rats by opting to have the rats inflicted on his lover. At that instant, he becomes instrumental in her torture. And guilt keeps him nicely compliant.
Could we be living in such a dystopian nightmare, one whose success is guaranteed by our complicity?
If so, then I would call it a consumptive dystopia—a world that promises to ease our disaffections if only we would buy its goods. Whenever I enter into its temples, I feel a strange emptiness. I am overwhelmed. Consider the temple Costco, so grand, goods provided on a mythic scale. Simply to enter upon its hallowed ground causes me to quake. I am so small, a mere speck. Alone, I can purchase so little, but when I commune here, I begin to participate in something larger than myself. Together with my comrades, we are powerful. Our collective force grants us purchasing power. Thousands of us take home our goods—those perfectly uniform goods. Those goods that arrive mysteriously on gargantuan pallets & are disgorged from the bellies of transport trailers & stacked 30 feet high by mighty forklifts. Yes, I despair at my puniness in the midst of such grandeur. But I have my salvation—I can shop until the feeling goes away.
Soon, all those wonderfully uniform goods will have RFID’s embedded in them. Databases will store information about all my purchasing preferences so that, even before I know my own desires, they will have been anticipated, and the appropriate goods delivered to my doorstep without prompting. I will almost be persuaded that big business can read my mind.
Another such temple is the grocery store. Fresh fruits and vegetables whenever I please. When I step within the grocer’s hallowed ground I hardly know the season. I have no idea how these lychee fruit are grown, nor do I know how something as common as a banana makes it from the tree to my table. Do they even grow on trees? Or are they processed in factories? How do they wrap that yellow skin around the softer fruit? Everything in the store is ultra bright and antiseptic. The apples are redder than red. The cucumbers are greener than green. All packaged in glistening cellophane, or stacked in shining tins that wear bright labels. How is it that in the midst of so much food I feel such a hunger?
But when I peer through the door that goes to the loading docks, there is a sign that says I am approaching a restricted area. Employees give me stern looks that warn me off. What will I find if I look behind the facade? What director stands in the wings? Better not to look. For if I do look, I might see things that leave me unsettled. I might discover just what life is like for a subsistence farmer in Honduras who has been thrown off his ancestral lands so that foreign farming operations can give me this day my daily banana. I might see how species have been extinguished as Brazilian forests are clearcut to make way for cattle ranches. But how else to ensure my steady supply of beef steaks? I might see just how all that cellophane is manufactured and what happens to the waste materials after production. But how else to store food as it waits on the shelf to be snatched up by the best before date?
They (whoever they is) are clever. They say: your dystopian story can’t be true; the very fact that you are free to tell it is proof enough that it can’t be true. But that is the cleverness of it. I know just enough to know that I am complicit. I eat bananas and I eat beef steaks and I buy things packaged in cellophane. I will keep my mouth shut to avoid the charge of hypocrisy. I want to do the right thing. But even my guilt will be co-opted in the service of the temple. Even my conscience will become a clearcut field fertilized with despair, then sown with guilt, and the fruits will be reaped by others and sold back to me in answer to my desire. My desire? To be good. And goodness will be marketed to me. I will become a conscientious caring person who buys green, buys social responsibility, buys politically correct. But buys nevertheless. For it is only through the act of purchase that I can confirm that I am real.