Choose Your Own Dystopia

[mic0]

Question in question.

I actually love Captain Obviously Meta's idea of a society obsessed with dystopian stories! Can you imagine being a young, happy, generally optimistic and well-adjusted individual who just wants to lead a happy life but lives in a society determined to make heroes out of adolescents in extremely unlikely situations? I don't know why, but this appeals to me. I am seeing it as a hilarious, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy type spoof on dystopian stories. Sounds amazing.

I started writing a kind of dystopian story with a literal grammar police for nanowrimo. That would be taking the prescriptivism in grammar and deterministic ideas about people and statistics ("oh, you're a [ethnicitiy] [social class] [sex]? then you must be X!") present in today's society to an extreme.

So, what flaw in today's society would you pinpoint for a dystopian story?

[Shrinky Dink]

Personally, my favorite dystopian novel is Gerald Lund's "The Alliance", so I'd probably go with something along those lines where you sacrifice agency for personal comfort. Basically I'd go with the old adage "Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither"

[Whistler]

oh! I was thinking of a dystopia where everyone follows best practices determined through empirical evidence. Or would that be UTOPIA??

[mic0]

Shrinky Dink, that's a good one! Very classic moral dilemma there (or maybe not a dilemma to some, but at least a classic issue).

Haha, whistler! I DON'T KNOW! Maybe it is a dystopia because you can only do things that have been determined to be the best through empirical evidence? Therefore if something has not yet been determined one way or the other, things are at a standstill.

[Digit]

Forced equality: Harrison Bergeron