Thursday, April 23, 2009
Blog #5
This book is reminding me of a dystopian movie I saw called Equilibrium. In the film, the society of Libria has outlawed all emotions on the basis that human emotions are the main cause of all the world's turmoil. They sacrifice the good emotions of happiness for the elimination of the bad emotions, such as sadness and anger. The founders of Libria argue that sadness and anger result in violence and suffering. Thus they require every citizen to take a daily dosage of a drug called Prozium, which suppresses the human emotions. The citizens of Gilead are also forced to take a "drug" to suppress their human characteristics. This drug is their own fear instilled by the authorities through various means such as the Wall decorated with the corpses of dissenters and threats of forced labor in the Colonies. They also may have spread rumors about various failed attempts at escape in order to discourage those considering fleeing the society.
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Lemons, this sounds very interesting-I'll have to check it out!
ReplyDeleteI've never watched that movie but from what I realized is Libria is such an ironic name for the society, because it sounds like liberty which represents freedom but the citizens are not even allowed the freedom to express their emotions. There is no difference between them and that of the living dead, it's just that the citizens of Libria does not like human flesh, hopefully. I absolutely agree with you about Gilead enforcing obedience with the usage of fear. It really reminds me of what I learned in my American Democracy class where media likes to label everything as either positive or negative and usually the labels are used constantly to heavily expose the idea to the audience, so that it influences their own thought process and opinions. Another method was the use of lies similar to what you wrote about possible rumors spread by Gilead, news networks would deliberately tell lies to encourage other networks to follow such as the example of the Fox network planting the winning vote for president onto Bush even though not all the votes were counted and many of the other influential channels followed. This may have been the reason why Bush won the presidential election even though votes were extremely close.
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