Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

Fears about the future are often best expressed through fiction, particularly science fiction that tries to imagine future worlds based on new kinds of technology. In the first half of the twentieth century, many of those forward-looking fears centered around big, centralized, bureaucratic tyrannies that snuffed out individuality and privacy. George Orwell’s 1984 foresaw Big Brother controlling individuals through the telescreen, while Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World saw the state using biotechnology to stratify and control society. But the nature of imagined dystopias began to change in the later decades of the century, when environmental collapse and out-of-control viruses took center stage.