Immortality as a Dystopian Counter-Ideal

Pain, sickness, ageing and death are some of the flaws of human nature that more ambitious utopians tried to expose by imagining different solutions for eradicating them. However, the attainment of immortality, as the supreme remedy for old age and death, was not seen by everyone as an affordable or desirable ideal. Dystopian writers offered a different perspective, showing that extinction is inherent to all beings and that avoiding it would destroy humanity itself. To allow this conclusion to emerge, one of the dystopian devices they used was reductio ad absurdum. Staging some kind of “thought experiment”, dystopian writers took on the utopian premises for obtaining eternal life and put them to work, in order to show that the final results to which they inevitably led were not eudemonic, but nightmarish. I analyze in this paper how such a demonstration a contrario functions in some significant works, such as the Fable of the Bees by Bernard Mandeville, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, Erewhon by Samuel Butler, and Moderan by David R. Bunch

Dehumanization · Dystopia · Humanity · Immortality · Reductio ad absurdum · The Imaginary · Utopia · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Legal and Social Philosophy · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction