Is the World Too Dark?

Something I've noticed recently is that there's been a real switch away from dystopias among my roleplaying friends, and among the boards I lurk on. Common refrains about how people don't want to deal with dark subjects pop up frequently, usually with a comment about how the world's dark enough thank you very much, and there being a desire for escapism. This seems to extend into fiction, film, and other genres of media as well (though I will concede that there are a lot of people who are doubling down on the darkness).

Personally, and I'm saying this now to get it out of the way, I don't find the argument and belief that fiction and stories are purely for escapism particularly believable. To me, they're about "how we live now, and how we might live in the future", to quote Jackie Gay my Fiction tutor from my MA in Creative Writing. As far as I'm concerned fiction is there to talk about the world, and explore truths that would probably be unpalatable if we expressed them outright, without a gloss of, well, lies. The fact that so many people see them purely as a place to escape to makes me think that our attitude towards stories needs to change.

If we're starting down that road, though, we hit a much bigger obstacle. I can appreciate that between Brexit and Donald Trump, both of whom will have their fans, for many people the world has become a lot scarier. Certain beliefs we thought were true have been exposed as unfounded. Humanity has been revealed to at once be more conservative, and more radical, than we thought. The thing is, this shouldn't have been a shock to anyone. Nothing in the world as it stands promises that life will be nice, and the vast majority of the things that are happening now have been building up for decades. We could see that when, to take Climate Change, people were protesting and warning about the consequences of human activity in the 1990s. The shift towards more protectionist, less welcoming societies in Europe and America began in the early 2000s, and nobody said anything. There were newspaper articles about one of the effects of expanding the EU to include the Eastern European countries being that the low skilled jobs like fruit picking stopped going to Moroccans seasonal workers in Spain, Portugal, France and Italy, because now Poles, Romanians, Czechs etc took them instead. We have seen a slow retreat from the idea of open borders being a public good to a situation where people are almost running into the arms of autocrats because they promise security.

The thing is that none of this stuff is new. It's been going on for a long time, what's new is that it happened over there to those people we only saw on the telly, or read about in the paper. We didn't really do anything about it then, either because we told ourselves it wasn't any of our business, or that we weren't the "world's policeman", or there wasn't the money, or that those people were "evil" and couldn't be reasoned with like adults. Far easier to impose sanctions or stick our heads in the sand.

And this is the problem, it's far too easy to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that we're informed. We can even watch 24 hour news channels, and somehow still be none the wiser about what's going on the world. The devices and technology we rely upon to inform us about the world, to give us knowledge no longer seem to do that, instead pumping out pretty propaganda that doesn't do anything but leave us marooned among illusions. In this sense television and the Internet have the opposite effect of what we'd imagine, leaving us ignorant and trapped in a world where gossip is taken for news. The investigative journalism of yesterday seems to have died a death in favour of journalists waiting breathlessly outside Downing Street or Parliament for updates... or what we called "spin" under Tony Blair's leadership.

Combined with a whitewashed history, overstretched schools, and a far shallower world view than it feels like we had in the late 20th Century, it's perhaps no wonder that I read online discussions and find myself thinking of an old ad for CND that I used to see at the back of Private Eye. It depicted a mushroom cloud and the slogan "This is what you get when you're kept in the dark and fed on shit". Sad to say, but it feels as if that's precisely where we are now.

Except for one thing. We prize ourselves on being the smartest animals on the planet, on being top of the food chain, and the best thing since before sliced bread. If that's the case, however, then why are we so easily distracted, why aren't we chasing the facts of what's going on; why do the majority of our online interactions seem to involve getting bogged down in mindless arguments that nobody can win? Surely its incumbent on all of us to see to our own education, partly because of personal responsibility, loathe though I am to use the words, but also because it's down to us to make the world a better place?

I would agree the tools we use to see the world aren't helping, but we shouldn't be so dependent upon them. And who profits from us not seeing things clearly? As evolved, cleverer than thou muckety muck humans shouldn't we ask that? Shouldn't we seek out the answers, not by resorting to tin foil millinery, but by holding the officials and companies that we are regrettably dependent on for clear honest answers and clear commitments to make positive changes?

This isn't on the world, it's just doing what it's always done. This is on us to actually be informed, to not give up hope, and to take a lesson from the roleplaying games I mentioned at the top of this piece of writing. Change only happens when we make it happen. For that, misguided, and indicative of American Privilege as it was, I salute Black Lives Matter, even as I want to shake them and ask if they know where their phones, clothes, and trainers come from, and what the cost of their manufacture was in human lives. We must work to uncover the world's secrets and where injustices occur (which might be as near a Leicester clothes factory or as far away as a South African diamond mine), we must organise, agitate, and expose them.