Thursday, May 17, 2012

A dystopian scenario

Resistance to totalitarian societies is a popular theme of adventure stories (e.g. Wicked, the Matrix, the Hunger Games, Harry Potter, a Scanner Darkly), and I always appreciate it when a writer can concoct a new yet believable totalitarian system. Given the pace of change in our society, there should be no shortage of fodder for imagining new totalitarian systems for literature. While I'm no writer of fiction, I may have come across a particularly gripping scenario for the rise of a totalitarian system, so I want to toss it out there for others to consider.

The strength (or perhaps the weakness) is that it is linked to real world events happening right next door...

The drug war seems to be incubating a police state in Mexico. In some respects, this doesn't make Mexico any different from the US or many other Western countries where new technologies are being combined with old crusades to threaten our freedom. The interesting aspect of Mexico's system is that even as the state is grabbing these powers in the name of combating the drug cartels, those same cartels are infiltrating the state. The end result could very well be a nacro-police state. The culture of such a society would be scary in its own fascinating way. I feel like it could be much more totalitarian than other prospective narco-states such as Afghanistan, or Panama under Noriega. It would be a larger state, with a more urbanized population. To top it off, it would be right on the border with the US... it seems like the US-Mexico border would be a great focus for a story.

Yeah, just a thought...

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