Tough Guys Read Fairy Tales

... and delicate snowflakes read dystopian fiction.

The past few decades have seen a profusion of “young adult” fiction—books written for a teenage audience—which seem to have a peculiar obsession with future dystopias.

There’s the one where everything is controlled by the Capitol and teenagers are forced to fight to the death for a televised audience. There’s the one where teens are locked into a narrow career path for life based on their apparent aptitudes, which seems like a perfect way to capitalize on the anxieties of college-bound kids in the later stages of the higher education bubble. There’s the one where emotions have been outlawed, the one where teenagers are forced to run through a giant maze for some reason, and so on.

I would argue that the reason for the glamorization of zombies, criminal violence and apocalypses is that our bellies are full, there are roofs over our heads and we don't really have any existential threats. Heck, you can stay on your parents' health insurance until age 26. Back in the day, lots of folks didn't have health insurance at all. When life is dystopian, you don't read dystopian.

P. J. O'Rourke said it well in his essay about Somalia in All the Trouble in the World. In the snippet below, a bunch of reporters are sitting around, drinking on a New Year's Eve in Mogadishu.

Still, we thought, this wasn't the worst New Year's Eve we'd ever spent. We had a couple more drinks. We certainly weren't worried about ecological ruin, shrinking white-collar job market, or fear of intimacy. All that "modern era anomie" disappears with a dose of Somalia. Fear cures anxiety. The genuinely alien banishes alienation. It's hard for existential despair to flourish where actual existence is being snuffed out at every tum. Real Schmerz trumps Weltschmerz.

When I was a young pup just out of school, I had an elderly office mate who had grown up on a dry-dirt farm in Kansas in the 1930s. He certainly didn't wallow in Death Metal music, Grand Theft Auto video games and stories about violent mutants in an eco-catastrophe future.

This just occurred to me: Wouldn't it be cool if they made a movie where the inhabitants of a post-apocalyptic world re-embraced the legends of King Arthur and fairy tales? It would be a lot closer to reality, I think.

When the world is tough, tough guys spend their lives thriving in the midst of big obstacles, they don't seek out fiction that echoes what they see all around them.

Yeah, I'm reading Arthur Rackham's Red Fairy Book. You got a problem with that?