Human Quality

[Marie the Fallen]

So I, like most of you, am writing this story. It is a mainstream peice. It is a dystopia.

The plot is as such:
The government had united all productivity into units that are a part of itself. They run everything now and use fear (as is custom) to effectively manipulate the social situation. Everyone is a government employee. Mediocrity is encouraged, but failure is not permitted. Excelling makes you an individual.

A common slogan is: individualism is decadance, decadance is counter productive.

First character is a boy, 17, who at first shows no sign of individualism. Then slowly he develops the self. He is shipped off to the testing facility

Here we learn that control is monitored by a single person called the Controler. She enforces the slogan while persuing her own interests( inner conflict) Control is a woman.

There is a third boy outside who just decides he doesnt like his family and makes a break-his parents a more or less drones. He runs and meets up with a man (who in old times used to date the control in his youth) This man is anti-establishment.

At the test sight we meet a girl and boy who have been there a while. Together boy 1, girl and boy 2 plan to break out...

this is as far as I got. I have the main points for later chapters written out but I wanted to know what you think so far, despite my generalities  

[bluecherry]

"The government had united all productivity into units that are a part of itself." So it's a socialist government basically? (I tried looking it up in my dictionary, but even there the lines between socialism, communism, and fascism can get blurry. I know one of them though includes as part of it that the government owns the means of production.) "They run everything now and use fear (as is custom) to effectively manipulate the social situation." I take it these people are familiar with The Prince then too, huh? If so, they'd better remember to put out some propaganda painting them as just stern, but well meaning familial figures. Even Machiavelli advised against relying too much on fear alone when you don't have to. Being that these kinds of governments are not good though, they won't get people to honestly like them, so brain washing of course is in order, especially through repition. Things like that slogan would be one example. Speaking of the slogan, lol, oh equivocation, what a stupid, but slippery fiend thou art. Any particular reason one person is ultimately in charge of control? I can guess fine enough at her motive for taking the job, I'm just wondering why they let so much power rest in one person without a lot of checks on her (at least from what you've said so far it doesn't sound like she's being monitored closely herself.) Random curiosty now, not picking on your story, but why is it in these cases the people are always old men and never old women? Statistically women average longer lives than men and so there tend to be more old women. And what is that a test sight for? I take it by the way the theme of this story is on the importance of independence to the essence of being human, yes?

The story so far sounds like it has a lot of standard dystopian elements, so be careful not to let the thing drift too far into "been there, done that" territory. If the theme is indeed independence, see how many unique ways you can find to play up not just the fear and oppresson, but the dependence in the majority of people in your dystopia. Hell, it may be to your advantage to play down and make subtle the fear element and instead have the majority of people fanatically in support of the system they leach off of and then most of the remainder who aren't fond of it having to somewhat anxiously feign being fanatically supportive too, maybe even more for fear of their neighbors turning on them than just what the government itself would take upon itself to do.  

[Marie the Fallen]

Wow, I am so glad to see your reply. Honestly nobody comes here anymore it seems. But yes you are pretty much on the dot. There is more present than just fear. Fear was just the first stage to send people into remission. It is necissary to make them believe that opinion of authority is what it is (when it isnt really- see Cialdini) The second phase is going to be a more indepth path-where the mass people are persuaded by every trick int he book.

I thought about making it similar to "Revolt in 2100" by Robert Heinlein where the art of persuation is broken down into a mathematical assignment. But I wasnt sure on the accountability of it.

As for the message, yes and no. It is dystopia, along with the full elements. It is on the essence of humanity. But it is also on the essence of Psychology. Most of the characters except John, Lillian and John's father are based on singular aspects of my own personality. ie the need for someone to love, the need to appear intelligent etc.

About your question of female leadership-yes statistically you are right women are loner lasting, there were more needs of a matriarch instead of patriarch but the former only exists exclusively if the society accepts it.

Incidentally John is the head of the board of directors-he knows Lillian well and liked her from the start. Lillian had a relationship with John when they were young but what you dont know is-
[I dont want to spoil it but I will if you want to hear it]

Also the reason why they dont have checks on her is simply because they DO. She has a continuous pile of reports to send in. The council that John's father is on does not fully trust her- but john's father (Ill call him roland for now) has faith and trust in her.

An interesting comment about faith-religion is going to be a big key in reclaiming human civilization in this book. John is religious, roland is not (though he used to be a priest but stopped when his wife died as a result of his 'faith in god')

However you may guess that these are not the main character. Who is-is Lillian (the prompter)!  

[bluecherry]

Yeah, it's been slow of late here. Lots of people are busy (me included) and especially when there's nothing new to respond to it may be hard for people to think of something new to say here even when they do come looking in here.

Oooh, yay Heinlein. ^o^ Heinlein is one of my other favorite authors, though I haven't read that particular story by him yet. heart

There are plenty of things out there written on persuasion, both from just the standpoint of general psychology understandings to help you be understood and get attention and be remembered and such to sneakier and more unscrupulous things like frequent bias mistakes people can make which can be exploited and other common tactics of con-artists. I recommend checking some of them out perhaps as it could give you some good ideas to draw from given the direction you want to go with this thing. Perhaps you might also like to take a look into something like Asimov's book "Prelude to Foundation" where a character or two together sort of learn about sociology and the general tendencies of large groups of people under various conditions over time in order to predict what will happen to the society and how to manipulate them into a certain particular path.

Second, listening to a few lines you said there suddenly gave me an idea -- this is a pretty damn AWESOME idea I think to have in a story, it sounds like what is going on is a freaking ENORMOUS case of Stockholm Syndrome. As in, country-wide this is happening. The people were first basically taken captive by some really dangerous, scary people and then gradually worked over to support those people. If you aren't much aware of how Stockholm Syndrome generally works, look up a brief summary on wiki. One thing especially of note for Stockholm Syndrome to work is that the people have to be isolated, so you need to do, as many past dictators have done, a process of having the government cut off contact between people in their country and people outside who may present dissenting views (think of things like how China censors the internet or other countries have banned books that criticize the government.)

Be careful about one aspect of this story you mentioned. You said you want to explore the essence of human psychology. This is something to be careful about first because psychology is actually still a field that is very much in the works, it is nowhere near having all the answers solidly yet. Additionally, you say you want to explore the essence of psychology in general, but then say most characters are about things in *YOUR* particular psychological state. You =/= all of humanity. Do be very careful about overgeneralizing here. Also, just identifying that something is in the psychological state of you or anybody else, no matter how strong it is, should not be taken as an irreducible primary automatically. For example, you mention a strong desire to be perceived as intelligent by others. Don't just act as if you and/or all people were born with that desire. A baby has no clue what "intelligence" is to have any such desire. Hell, until a certain point there are studies which point to a baby not having a concept of self developed yet much the way other animals never develop the idea of a self. So such a desire as wanting to be perceived as intelligent by others has to come from somewhere, to be developed along the way somehow for some reason, whether for good reasons or flawed ones.

About the female thing, I was talking about how you mentioned at one point that a character met up with a man who sounds like he's old since you said "in old times he used to . . ." I just wondered why even in fiction when somebody meets up with a smart old person it is almost without fail an old man in spite of the fact that there are fewer old men in existence than old women.

I didn't mean "checks" as in having to file lots of paper work or being told what limits exist to her power, I meant why nobody was paying much attention it seems to her generally, to scrutinizing her character, not just taking her claims at face value, but trying to watch what she does when she thinks nobody is watching.

What craziness must Roland have indulged in if his wife could have died in the process of it consequently? Did he thinks "god" was talking to him and told him the way to "save" her was to kill her in her sleep and let him, "god", take care of her personally or something like that?  

[Marie the Fallen]

Oh no! The individualists are the only characters who imbody my personality. Everyone is generalized to the point of vanilla. Yes they are like stolk holm victims. But not int he sense as traditional. It is their own government that are the captors...not outsiders. But they have been subtly coerced over a period of say 30 or so years(I know its relatively short and unlikely...)
Old men in this case are not "old", nor are the old times that old either. Old times=time before the current rulers(which is a bad generaliztion too :p )

How might you make the female become scrutinized (since shes the one who reports indivuals) to be more consistant in the story?

As for Roland...Im open to possible ideas since I havent gotten that far yet.  

[bluecherry]

Yes, that's what I meant, that in this case the government are the ones holding basically the entire country captive.

I would figure when it comes to that female character that any kind of government like that would be full of paranoid people trying to watch everybody in their inner circle for possible traitors. So before she ever gets the job she'd be carefully scrutinized first off, including being secretly spied on for a while (she may be able to expect such would happen though even though they may have tried explicitly to make her believe they wouldn't do such and so she might try for a while to put on a show of living like the kind of person they are looking for even while she is supposedly not under surveillance.) Maybe as time goes by in her job she finds out there is actually some sort of system they adopt for spying on her, like checking out what she's saying on the phone or mailing every Monday and Thursday and screening all her e-mails everyday, and so being aware of what is being watched when she knows when and where she is safe to be herself and where to put on a show to keep lulling them into a false sense of security.

As for what Roland did, you will have a much easier time figuring out what to make this event be if you keep a few things in mind: First, do you want Roland to have been doing anything illegal to have caused her death? If so, either he probably spent quite a while in prison or has been trying to hide his guilt for quite a while and that surely will be impacting his character greatly, both that he was responsible for his wife's death and that he never took his proper treatment for what he did and maybe even that he is in hiding now trying not to get caught. Second, what kind of events related to religious belief could get a person killed? Just come up with a list of stuff and which things could fit to be possible in the world of your story and with what particular brand of religion Roland was supposed to be following. Third, think of what things which fit with what you decided for those first two things would contribute to the theme of your story again. Since this story has a big thing about people believing whatever the government says rather unquestioningly, probably having him do something because he either thinks god told him to or somebody told him god said to do it would contribute to the theme of the dangerous of unquestioningly following authority. You know, maybe Roland and his wife had gotten involved in what turned out to be a suicide cult kind of religion. Roland already went through before, on a smaller scale, what happens when you get people isolated and dependent and unquestioningly trusting of an authority and perhaps even he started working his way up in the ranks of that cult religion and now holds he was responsible for his wife's death because he was the one charged with dispensing the lethal stuff even though everybody else of their own doing chose to ingest the stuff and as he watched what was happening to everybody else as they were dying, because he was the last one to go because he was dispensing the stuff, he saw them all and realized that something was terribly bad about what was going on, that it wasn't this great experience like they'd been told it would be, and so he decided not to kill himself and got out of there.  

[Marie the Fallen]

PM me your real name would you? I want to include you in the 'thanks and dedication' page  

[bluecherry]

Wait until you've got the story done when you'll know if you actually have anything used from what I've said in there before you start compiling a list of contributors. razz