Which book’s world would be the absolute worst to live in?
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I can probably think of at least a half dozen books that would be really terrible places to live if that’s what the real world was like. Not in any particular order, I’m thinking The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984…
I think for me the most frightening thing about The Handmaid’s Tale—having watched at least season one of the TV series—is feeling like we are really not that far off as a society from turning into that kind of dystopian nightmare. I remember I was dating Jessica a few years back and she wanted me to get into the show, so I watched season one. Of course, that happened to be the exact same week that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. I agreed to finish the season, but I didn’t want to go any further than that. It just seemed too real at that point.
Margaret Atwood wrote the novel back in the 1980s, but that’s always the thing with any sort of terribly suppressive system or totalitarian regime: they don’t necessarily take all of your rights away at once. They gradually whittle away at them, just as they did with the women in Gilead. Watching that happen alongside the real-world shift in reproductive rights—where federal protections vanished and states started passing laws that wouldn’t even grant exceptions for rape, incest, or saving a mother’s life—gave the show an uncanny, chilling weight.
Why does The Handmaid’s Tale edge out something like Orwell’s 1984 for me? For one, it’s the weaponization of domesticity and the way fundamentalist religion became the prevailing law of the land. Now, don’t get me wrong, we already live in a massive surveillance state. Ever since 9/11, cameras have been everywhere, and between our phones and public tracking, it’s pervasive. But if I give the edge to The Handmaid’s Tale, it really comes down to that timing—watching it hit so close to home.
Plus, look at how oppression actually functions. In any occupation or takeover, you’re always going to have collaborators—people who go against their own best interests, turning in their neighbors and doing the heavy lifting for the regime, much like the informants in Nazi Germany or the Aunts in Gilead. It makes you wonder how compliant a population really is. You see discussions online or on social media about worst-case political scenarios, and people wonder what Americans would actually do if a leader refused to step down. Honestly? A lot of people might piss and moan about it online, but I wonder if most folks wouldn’t do much of anything as long as it wasn’t immediately disrupting their daily routines.
That apathy and everyday compliance is what scares me the most. We assume a dystopia arrives with a sudden explosion, but more often than not, it creeps in while everyone is just trying to get through their Tuesday.
I’ve read a lot of dystopian short stories and novels and seen a lot of movies over the years, but if you were to ask me right now which world we are closest to, it would be The Handmaid’s Tale. And for that reason, I think that’s the one I really would not want to live in.
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The article “Why The Handmaid’s Tale Terrifies Me More Than 1984” first appeared on Rebuilding Robhttp://rebuildingrob.com
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