Nation States 3 of 4 - Dis
Third of the four city-states, or states of being expressed through the metaphor of place, is Dis.
First, let's address the elephant: yes, the name of the city of Dis comes from the city described in the Inferno of Dante Alighieri, the great City of Hell, which stands in opposition to the (I think flawed) idea of the City of Heaven as proposed by Augustine of Hippo (who was still a genius, though, in my opinion; he just had to work without a lot of reference works that were lost after the deaths of the Apostles). It also derives its inspiration somewhat from the city built by the children of Cain in the Land of Nod, the "other Enoch."
That's the nomenclature, and I'll freely admit that it's a start to a pretty heavy handed metaphor-composite, but what I've got is what I'll present. Here's what Scintillant Camor has to say about the place, taken from Chapter 14 of the book The Man from Rock Bottom:
The evil of this place was like a scent in my nostrils, so awful that it was making me want very badly to bury my head under a pillow and pull the sheets up over my whole self and never, ever come out again.
And here's what the Man has to say, in Chapter 15:
The depths and breadth and all-pervasiveness of lies in human psychology, though, is why nobody realized this city was down here: it was wrapped up in a great lie, a darkness of such magnitude that no sane person, not a precognitive, not a telepath, certainly not an empath, would ever consciously locate the place, out of simple self-preservation. Not until now, as I see the people scurrying around its streets, preparing for a war of conquest.
There is an evil here that kills the soul. If I stay here too long, it’ll kill mine, too.
Instinctively, I know the name of this city: this is Dis, the City of Hell.
All of which leads to some pretty big questions, all tied to the metaphors surrounding this place. So let's start with a simple one: what exactly is Dis?
Simply put, Dis is a parasitic city, a place built in secret below Sunflower City, where those who plotted the downfall of the bright city above could build their power base. The place was made possible by diverted resources, done through the acts of corrupt human bureaucrats who were able to slip into the Republic power structure while Scintillant Camor, Gret, and others were working frantically to build a place where the humans that were trapped in the wasted lands could escape and find safety and rest.
One of these corrupt souls was so consumed with guilt over what he'd done in allowing such a place to come into being that he commits suicide fairly early in the book, his death taking place right in front of the Man after he steps outside his apartment after finishing his daily rounds in the Sanctuary. This final act is what finally allows evidence of this darkened city-below-a city to be discovered, and specialists sent down to deal with the problem: Trinidad Del Toro and Susan Six, specifically.
That's the physical place and how it came into being. Now on to what spawned it philosophically.
At the most basic level, the reason that a place like Dis came into being is simply because of human pride. As I discussed in part 1 of the 4 in this series, on the wasted lands, humanity had self-destructed pretty hard. However, as is typically the case, the ones who caused the whole debacle in the first place, our ruling elite, military leaders, captains of business, religious pontiffs, criminal overlords, and of course their essential staff, they didn't suffer: they had other places to be, places to wait out the apocalypse. Then, when matters started to improve, they wanted back what they'd lost. Naturally enough, how best to get back power than to take it from a people - the Republic builders of Sunflower City - who were obviously too naive and idealistic to realize they were about to be betrayed from within.
Once again, that's on the primal, purely physical level. George Orwell's Nineteeh Eighty-four (spelled out because that seems to have been the author's original intent - oh! And cool fact: I recently learned that Orwell's real name was Eric Arthur Blair - just kinda nifty, though otherwise a complete non sequitur) presents the philosophy of the sort of people who would carve out a dystopia on purpose:
Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.
Orwell apparently drew his initial inspiration of dystopia from the Russian novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, about a city that is also a panopticon, and I've linked both the Wikipedia article, so you can have a shortened version of the plot, and the Project Gutenberg link, so you can read the entirety. There's also a Librivox audiobook, for those who prefer that format instead (which would be me: I'm pretty much always listening to an audiobook as I walk to and fro about my day; typically I up the speed to x2 for the really rough ones, or the ones that seriously annoy me but which are still apparently considered "Great Works" for whatever reason...or x3 speed for the worst offenders [I'm looking at you, Great Expectations! And The Three Musketeers as well - the unabridged version just makes me sad at how much the titular characters are failures as heroes, quite at odds with their portrayals in film and the abridged books I loved so much as a kid]).
All of which draws on the great question: "Why are we so drawn to dystopias?" Which is a very good question, since you'd think that we'd prefer not to read about how awful things can get. I mean, seriously, we often live down here in places and times when, as Francis the badger put it in one of my favorite books, "things are not very good around here anymore."
As a start, I think a big draw to dystopia is that it takes a genius to identify a problem. Take Plato and the Allegory of the Cave, as an example. However, figuring out a solution to such problems...that's a bit harder. Harder even than the abilities of a genius can overcome, I'm sorry to say.
Probably the biggest problem that we face as a species is free will. Or, more specifically, what happens when people choose to exercise their free will to make the wrong choices, not as mistakes, but on purpose, because sin feels good? Or, as in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, what happens when people are exposed to new ideas and then allowed to draw their own conclusions without censorship or outside interpretation? This is one of the major questions I've seen brought up in the book The Brothers Karamazov, and especially addressed in the novella-within-a-novel The Grand Inquisitor. Within that novella, the Grand Inquisitor had an opportunity to meet Christ in person, walking as though he were a mortal, and denounces him as tormenting people by giving them free will, including the ability to fail, to choose evil, and to damn themselves. Unlike the agencies behind Big Brother in Ninteen Eighty-four, the Grand Inquisitor and other Church leaders see themselves as saving humanity by leading them into traditions that will make them feel good about themselves, while the few who rule know the truth behind these devilish traditions, know that what they teach is false, but that it will save the ignorant masses, since they can't be judged for what they don't know.
(Image taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satan_Presiding_at_the_Infernal_Council)
All of which is a pretty critical logical fallacy: being saved in ignorance is an impossibility. Yet the idea of free salvation for all is a tempting one, though always at the cost of individual free will, and I think it is the major driving force behind the creation of dystopias in the real world as much as in fiction: people have such good intentions, but they start with incorrect principles, or are too willing to sacrifice things that are right for the Greater Good, whatever that is.
As Gret explains to Thomas Delmonte Cerveau, one of the leaders of the forces massed in Dis:
"There’s no ‘greater good,’ Mister Cerveau: there’s just good."
From a story standpoint, the city of Dis is the center of the Labyrinth, an inverted Tower of Babel, and the lowest point - quite literally in this instance - of the archetypal Hero's Journey (a summary of the literary traditions involved, put against the backdrop of cyberpunk film, can be found in the documentary The Cyberpunk Educator - it's a significantly flawed work, I'll freely admit, but I rather liked it all the same; be sure to skip past all the advertisements and film clips at the start...I think the good bits begin about 8 minutes in, give or take).
Here, in the dark, both of the dynamic protagonists of the story of The Man from Rock Bottom, the eponymous Man and Scintillant Camor, are tested, pushed right to their limits, and forced to face temptations and trials and even death. This is very much deliberate christological symbolism, since Christ in the literary tradition is very much the archetypal romantic hero, descending below all things in order to then overcome and rise above. Of course, since neither the Man nor Scintillant Camor are divine beings, and neither of them can bring themselves back from the dead, they both need help in the end. Which of course is where Susan Six and Trinidad Del Toro come in...but anything more than that would be spoilers.
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