The Paradox of Dystopia
This week in the cultiverse
Welcome to Postmodern Dystopia
In today’s episode of the Dystopian Diaries where we take a look at the bewildering parade of doomsday headlines within the cultiverse, this one’s hot off the press: Anti-Vaxxers Think an Emergency Phone Alert Will Cause a Zombie Apocalypse.
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
Yes OP, we’re all waiting for someone to wake us up from this bad dream. The ‘bad dream’, of course, is not a Stephen King sci-fi action comedy where billionaires are plotting to cull humanity through the misuse of technology, authoritarian rule, or societal collapse.
Oh, wait.
When the Math Ain’t Mathin: Clashing Realities
It’s almost poetic how much life imitates art. While conspiritualists are concocting fantastical narratives about imminent zombie doom, the viral TikTok “math” trend reflects our collective struggle to make sense out of senselessness where things just don’t add up. What’s logical and reasonable often gets lots in the sea of misinformation, internet echo chambers, and capitalist propaganda.
That’s the thing about dystopia. It highlights the paradoxical nature of reality where we mistake abstractions for real entities. Dystopian narratives often involve inversions of societal norms, values, and realities. These inversions can reveal the darker aspects of human behavior and societal trends, where what appears to be "positive" or desirable may, in fact, be the result of underlying absences or distortions.
In the context of misinformation and conspiracy theories, this paradox is evident when people treat abstract, unfounded claims as if they were concrete truths and in doing so they completely miss the plot.
For example, believing that technology is being misused to activate a deadly virus through electromagnetic radiation misses the plot that technology is actually being misused to spread harmful misinformation which can be deadly.
For example, believing that enemy infrastructures disguised as bureaucratic agencies are secretly plotting to cull humanity misses the plot that global powers like the U.S., EU and Russia are actually holding secret talks that lead to mass ethnic cleansing of indigenous populations.
For example, believing that democracy is under threat due to a cabal of powerful elites who are engineering vaccines and other medical interventions to turn people into zombies misses the plot that democracy is actually under threat due to billionaires who are engineering economic inequality to turn people into commodities.
I love the "math" trend because it asks us to please for the love of God be more fucking discerning between wildly unsubstantiated beliefs and concrete, evidence-based truths. Be a LOT more discerning.
What started out as a light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek trend has become a roasting party for activists to call out the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and gaslighting that goes on within their industries, as creators put their on twist on the “math” trend.
So here’s mine:
Conspirituality math is concocting doomsday scenarios while ignoring or denying real threats to our existence like gun violence, fascism, and climate change.
The zombie apocalypse is the inverted reality of our postmodern zeitgeist. It’s giving *bad vibes* a whole new meaning. As I said, life imitates art.
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
Exhibit C:
The thing to note is that all of these headlines (including the zombie apocalypse scare) were released in the same week. This is what gives our society its particularly dystopian quality; the clashing of inconceivable realities that tell an unsettling story of our times.
Conspiracy Theory v.s. Actual Reality: The Cost of Peace
Those who know the cost of peace don’t need conspiracy theories; they’re too busy trying to survive actual reality.
Those who know the cost of peace often live at the intersection of corrupt politics that threatens their existence, institutionalized violence that threatens their human rights, and generations of ongoing genocide that threatens their peace.
Amalia is just one example of amongst millions of immigrants, genocide survivors, refugees, and otherwise socially disenfranchised communities who bear the brunt of the real dangers that conspiracy theorists conveniently ignore or deny: mass poverty, economic collapse, and environmental degradation.
Those who know the cost of peace often face overlapping layers of oppression which makes their crisis multifaceted and complex. When individuals are acutely aware of the challenges, inequalities, and systemic injustices that threaten their existence across a lifespan, their perspectives becomes layered with deep understanding of how the world actually works and the issues that plague our society. This is why we must listen to them.
Imagine how privileged you have to be to miss the plot and go straight for the conspiracy theory. When you’re that economically and socially privileged, peace and freedom are just abstract concepts; to have the luxury of not being directly impacted by the very crises that you deny or misinterpret reflects not only a level of detachment, but a serious lack of empathy. Offering simplistic, sensationalized explanations or ‘theories’ for the real and complex problems that disenfranchised communities face is a slap in the face for immigrants like me who feel it in my bones even though I’m historically and geographically far away.
This sentiment by Liana captures my feelings well:
It is an extremely challenging time for immigrants and migrants everywhere. We are exhausted, angry, and quite frankly fed up with the bullshit of White nationalists and their asinine conspirituality theories.
Dejavu and Disinformation
If you were following me back in 2020, all of this might feel eerily familiar. When COVID set the stage for QAnon to creep into mainstream consciousness, I was quite literally fighting a digital warfare with robots. The mass disinformation campaign launched by Azerbaijan in the 2020 military attack on Nagorno-Karabakh was my first-hand experience of how misinformation works to control public opinion, and how destructive it is to the social fabric of our democracy.
Perhaps no one got a better view of this unraveling than Armenians that year, who were caught in the middle of a physical, spiritual, and digital war. The 2023 sequel is even more devastating.
Here’s where conspiracy theories fall short: although they might satisfy our psychological need for certainty, truth, and security, they don’t stop genocides from happening.
In fact, I would argue that conspiracy theories perpetuate genocides and other humanitarian catastrophes because they cloak themselves in the illusion of special or exclusive knowledge. Conspiracy theorists often see themselves as the ‘awakened’ ones who hold this special knowledge while everyone else is ‘asleep.’ This sense of specialness and superiority are the sowing seeds of hate and violence. When you’re brainwashed to believe that other people are literal zombies, you’ve already dehumanized them. From there, it’s a slippery slope to be committed to and complicit in all kinds of crimes against humanity.
Conspiracy theories are weaponized warfare in the form of information and thought control.
Conspiracy theories are manufactured in a lab by mega-corporations, mega-churches, and mega-governments to effectively sever people from reality and make them more susceptible to authoritarian agendas. That was one of the biggest lessons from 2020. Apparently, we did not learn this lesson because here we are again. More conspiracy theories, more catastrophes, more wars, more dystopia.
When will we learn?
Plot Twist: We Are the Zombies
Perhaps the plot twist in all of this is that we are all zombies, unwittingly caught in the capitalist hellscape of navigating grief and loss on top of paying bills, on top of going to therapy, on top of having a life outside of work, on top of having an existential crisis, on top of keeping appointments, deadlines, and promises, on top of caring about the human catastrophes that are happening thousands of miles away that are beyond our immediate control. It’s…a lot. The survival response is to numb out, tune out, and escape into fantastical narratives of an imminent zombie meltdown. I get it, I really do. Some days I feel just like a zombie when I’m sitting on the toilet, doomscrolling through horrific headline after headline interspersed with graphic images of war scenes, click funnels, and kitten reels—feeling numb and desensitized to it all. Perhaps that’s what capitalism is meant to do: desensitize us toward injustices and atrocities so we can be too busy to notice, too distracted to care, and/or too burnt out to do anything about it.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. If you take anything from this post, I hope it’s not all doom and gloom. I hope it serves as your weekly reminder that caring about social change is free, and it’s a choice. Hopelessness is not the final destination to our dystopian saga. Neither is denial, disengagement, and disillusionment. We may not have free will in a society where the game is rigged in favor of those who are economically and socially privileged, but every single person in this world has a God-given right to self-determination and a responsibility to exercise it.
This starts with educating ourselves. Sharpening our critical thinking. Being loud with our voices and voting with our dollars. This doesn’t mean being perfect and doing everything right—it just means being conscious, truly conscious of how our actions impact people now and in the long run. Everyone has impact within their own sphere of influence. Our actions alone don’t impact social change, but our actions together do. Align with real humanitarian causes and learn what it means to be an ally to marginalized communities.
The “bright” side of corruption and injustice is that it is pervasive enough to impact every industry and sector that intersects with our personal and professional lives. The other good news is that we’re not actually zombies. And it’s never too late to turn things around. But if we give into hopelessness, despair, and senseless paranoia, it might as well be (too late).
Being conscious in postmodern dystopia means being aware of how racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other instances of xenophobia rear their ugly heads in our day-to-day life (if even within ourselves), and then calling it out. We don’t have to look far to notice it. Much of the time it’s occurring right in our own backyard—at our dinner tables, as well as our places of work and worship. Being conscious means not being complicit to humanity’s dark side by bringing it out of its shadows, much like I’m doing now. It is uncomfortable as hell; it’s not sexy or fun or exciting, but it is important and necessary. If anything, do it for the 100+ Amazon dolphins who died this week from severe drought and high temperatures. They deserve better.
And maybe, just maybe, we are the ones who will wake each other up from the bad dream.
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If you haven’t already, please take the following Call to Actions for the 120,000 ethnic Armenians who have been ethnically cleansed from their homelands due to oil-rich Azerbaijan’s military actions and the Western world’s interests in placing profits over human lives.
Here’s how you can help Armenians facing ethnic cleansing in Artsakh:
Educate yourself about what’s going on. Read:
Take action: Contact President Biden, Vice-President Harris, and Congress:
Send this pre-written letter to demand the U.S.’s role in the UN to protect the people of Artsakh. This is the quickest, and most passive action you can take right now.
Listen to refugee stories:
Mary (@mary8black) and Ashot (@ashotgabriel) are documenting their lived experience of ethnic cleansing in Artsakh. Following and sharing their stories humanizes a political conflict and demonstrates solidarity to let them know that people from around the world care about their plight and stand with them.
Astrig (@astrig) and Marine (@marinezaslanyan) are independent photojournalists who are risking their lives to document the atrocities committed by Azerbaijan. It’s important to follow them for unbiased reporting of this humanitarian crisis that is getting little on-the-ground coverage.
Miaseen, Inc. (@miaseen_inc) and Center for Truth and Justice (@cftjustice) are Diaspora-run organizations that are also on the ground and giving live updates.
Donate to humanitarian organizations:
All for Armenia is an NGO founded and run by volunteers who are providing immediate aid to displaced Armenians with housing, clothes, food, and other basic necessities.
Kooyrigs is another Diasporan-founded NGO that has been doing important work in building and finding shelters for displaced refugee families.
SPREAD THE WORD!
Please talk about it, share about it, help amplify Armenian voices during this critical time. Your support, voice, and action are powerful and so appreciated.