Utopian dystopia

I've been reading a lot of near-future dystopian stories recently.  They drew me in and made me believe the world the writer had created.  They tackled important issues, and are totally believable, but there's always a part of my heart that rebels against these extreme portraits of the future.

Usually the regimes who keep these dismal worlds in order are brutal and totalitarian.  They have grabbed authority to control not only the characters' lives but also they way they believe and the thoughts they think. They're a beaten, cowed, people.and I have to confess that this total destruction of the human spirit depresses me.  I want to rail against the injustices of those worlds.

That's part of the writer's purpose in showing us such a place.  We're meant to object to it, but sometimes I feel that their characters don't do so enough.  I want l know where the Resistance is.  If we want to see the things the human spirit is capable of, look at the stories of the wartime Resistance, or the fortitude of Viktor Frankl and other Jews who survived the concentration camps. Frankl is the very embodiment of the best of the human heart.

I would have to have someone like him in a dystopian novel if I wrote one.  Someone who still believed that there was a better way to be in the world, and who quietly worked towards making it happen.  But I think I'd also have to have revolutionaries, people who took direct action to bring down the totalitarian rulers.   

I'd have to write utopian dystopia.  I can't spend time in a place that is totally devoid of all hope.  It depresses me too much.  I question and challenge every statement on a news programme, asking who said that, and what their agenda is.  And I believe this is the essential nature of humans.  We agree to disagree, and somehow manage to get along.  

And I think in the future we will continue agreeing to disagree.  So I think our dystopian futures are move likely to have idealists in them fighting to change things, people who aren't taken in by the majority view, a Resistance against the evil.  

It's a sort of utopian dystopia that draws me, the imperfect societies with a kernel of pure good morality at their heart that I can identify with best.  Utopian dystopia lives.