Every time I read or hear about the dystopian futures laid out by Huxley, Orwell and in fact, many others, I can't help but think of the future imagined by Banks. In the Culture, people are free to do pretty much whatever they want, which eventually brings crime within the Culture to a near-zero. Even the most atrocious crimes, albeit rare, are punished (if ever) by a slap on the wrist. What I find particularly interesting about this is that Culture people being free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, they in fact end up in a state of lassitude and ultimately, a form of self-servitude and meaninglessness (hence the expansion of the Culture and so on).
This shares Huxley's view of servitude through content, but it brings the interesting point of whether the Culture could be qualified as a Dystopia or a Utopia. It's funny to see that the majority of Culture people (as written by Banks) think of the Culture as the closest thing to a Utopia, yet Banks himself has pointed out on a number of occasions that he would not like living in such a society. It also brings up the question of whether a Utopia is really defined by (at least near-) complete freedom, or by individual comfort.
I very much enjoy my freedom (or whatever it is I think I have) and I do have a tendency to reject (or rather circumvent) authority, but the more I think about it the more I realize this view isn't shared by everybody. A lot of people don't want to have to make decisions, question things and whatnot, their comfort lies in the absence of having to do so, a view I can understand (though do not share). I don't know if it's right, or wrong, and I'm certainly not in a place to decide for others, but it does show the subjectivity and flimsiness of the concepts of u/dys-topian societies.
The problem is that the definition of freedom has some assumptions most of Enlightenment philosophy (being so bizarrely focused around thought experiments dealing with yeoman farmers on homesteads) has direly neglected, namely: relationships with other people.
What is freedom? Freedom, we're told, is when you can make decisions for yourself. Therefore, are we in servitude to the laws of physics? Well no, those are impersonal. Yet are we told that we can be in servitude by force, by deprivation, or even by manipulation of our own desires? Yes.
So what's freedom? Freedom really means having our own actions unconstrained by the values or goals of other people (for a large value of "people", including institutions, the State, and in the limit God Himself). There the problem emerges: the only way to be completely unconstrained by other people, to be totally free, is to have no actual relations with other people whatsoever.
Total freedom, therefore, is total isolation, but this fact is never acknowledged because so much of our philosophical tradition assumes that freedom proceeds from the individual alone and precedes social relationships entirely. It assumes that everyone is a yeoman farmer on a plot of land who should always be able to retreat to his property and do exactly as he pleases -- which never happens in real life.
Then, are people really so stupid for choosing "less freedom", or are they just finding more meaning in the presence of voluntary relationships than the absence of compulsory ones?
This shares Huxley's view of servitude through content, but it brings the interesting point of whether the Culture could be qualified as a Dystopia or a Utopia. It's funny to see that the majority of Culture people (as written by Banks) think of the Culture as the closest thing to a Utopia, yet Banks himself has pointed out on a number of occasions that he would not like living in such a society. It also brings up the question of whether a Utopia is really defined by (at least near-) complete freedom, or by individual comfort.
I very much enjoy my freedom (or whatever it is I think I have) and I do have a tendency to reject (or rather circumvent) authority, but the more I think about it the more I realize this view isn't shared by everybody. A lot of people don't want to have to make decisions, question things and whatnot, their comfort lies in the absence of having to do so, a view I can understand (though do not share). I don't know if it's right, or wrong, and I'm certainly not in a place to decide for others, but it does show the subjectivity and flimsiness of the concepts of u/dys-topian societies.