I have never extracted from a dystopian novel before that amount of ideas embodied in the story as it happened with this novel. The novel in its narrative level may not be impressive, and this is a visible feature in utopian and dystopian literature, but at its intellectual level it is amazing work!The most surprising thing is that the novel was published in 1924, and now, in the 2020, we see clearly, the novel as if Yevgeny Zamyatin is telling the story of our days.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
It Should be announced before this review, it’s not possible to cover all the ideas and significance in this masterpiece WE, the dystopian novel Written by the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. This is why I will write about the ideas that I saw through the novel and their impressions on our contemporary world.
In the novel,Zamyatin envisions a world in which "rationality" has triumphed its final victory. In other words, rationality extends the streak of history, on its integrity, to take this concept of rationality to its limit ... to its final path. The world of the novel, a world entirely based on mathematics, has no nature, no feelings, and nothing but mathematics, and its own logic . The novel begins with a scene in which “D” - the protagonist - talks that they are actively preparing for the transfer of sure happiness "mathematically" to the outside world, after they have succeeded in establishing their foundations in the earthly world, under the name of THE ONE NATION. The expressions of people in this world are all praised through mathematics. The beautiful things are praised as “straight lines”, or “squares” and “triangles” and “circles”, regular, mathematical forms, governed by fixed laws .. Rather, the people themselves, whoIn the end, they are not human beings but rather artificial beings, shaped like forms: women are “triangles of face”, poets are “circular faces”, and athletes are “square faces”, all of whom are two-dimensional beings. Only “The Well-Doer” - the leader of the state, has a cubic face, which is three dimensions. This is a completely rational world, in which he writes "D" his memoirs to us, we the savages, and finds this very difficult, because in his expression “No one has written his memoirs before to his wild ancestors.”
The book of "WE"
The world of the novel, a world without magic, which was produced by "Bureaucracy" that is necessarily rational, and also necessarily, lacking creativity. "D" describes the society which he lives: “we all apart of one system, we all do the same thing, we wear a uniform, we eat at a specific date in minutes and seconds, and we even have sex at certain times regularly and with permission, and all of us, "we", there is no "I", there is no such thing as subjective ideas, we are all one style, we work every day constantly, until bedtime comes, we sleep without any thought.”
If you are thinking about the fascist state today, rethink for a moment the working environment within the capitalist different institutions, then tell me, “Do you notice any difference?”
One of the things that overshadows the idea of removing magic from the world on the novel is the idea of relying on rationality as an interpretation of the universe. In the novel, "D" and the whole society, the universe, is interpreted through the eyes of the "machine" - the basic representation of rationality - so all things are weighed with an "equation".Numbers are the basis of all logic, and this is the main problem of technology, as it provides man, all the time, with a false sense that the universe is completely understandable. The world is completely understood, completely stable, completely “rational”, and things that do not belong to the world of “mathematics” are simply “myths”. The more sophisticated the technology, the more primitive we become," says Nicholas cholas Davila.
The basic technical problem is that it makes the modern human less than a primitive person in skills, abilities and natural intelligence as well, yet the modern human thinks he is better than primitives. You discover with your reading in the novel that, at one point, there was a war called the Two Hundred Years War, in which 98% of the inhabitants of the planet were killed completely. launched by this ONWE NATION, to ensure the survival of the "planet" from the brutal "people"! “D”, whose number is “503,” talks about war and says: The cause of the problems of the whole world lies in two things: Hunger and Love. As for Hunger, we developed food from oil, so we no longer need the nature and the strange things that happen in it. And as for Love, the solution was in the sexual commons, Every man has the right to have sex with any woman as a "sexual production" - of course after he takes permission from the state and on time - and therefore we have eliminated all of humanity's problems.
The most important description was for humans themselves in this ONE NATION, as they are described as their bodies are made entirely of "glass", and that they are "transparent", and that everything in their heads appears to everyone! The other description is that the elections are held, and the result is known in advance, without any opposition at all! What else does the technology do for us? It makes our brains completely transparent! All our data, all our information, our movements, our thoughts, the technical companies know about them the more we know about ourself, and the more our family knows about us. Our brain is completely transparent!
In this technical monitoring community, everything is calculated, and every calculated control, Facebook publishes an experiment to control the feelings of users by changing the nature of the posts that appear to them. Cambridge Analytic uses Facebook data to control election results (well-known elections).
To conclude, Can the novel tolerate all these projections? As a matter of fact this how I read it, I couldn’t read it as just a nice story, I see it as one of the most deep books that critiqued our Modern Rationality. By the way the writer couldn’t resolute the obstacle.
Comments