A century after Yevgeny Zamyatin released We in 1924, the literature of controlled societies reads less like speculation and more like documentation. Across time, authors have studied how populations can be guided toward collective obedience without open violence. The methods have varied – chemical, architectural, mechanical – but the objective remains consistent: stability through predictability.
The following six works provide a cross-section of that pursuit. Each outlines a system for maintaining order through design. Their details differ, yet the mechanisms align with instruments of modern life; regulated environments, convenience technologies, and tranquilliser suppression.
We (Yevgeny Zamyatin, 1924)
The One State operates on mathematics. Every citizen lives in a glass apartment where curtains are permitted only for state-approved activities. Names have been replaced by serial numbers; privacy has been redesigned out of existence.
Mechanism: The regime’s principal device is the Great Operation, a surgical-chemical procedure that removes imagination by targeting brain centres associated with emotional spontaneity. Those who undergo it describe a calm absence of conflict. Behaviour is also managed through the Table of Hours a schedule dictating every movement of the day. Group marches, state music, and collective recitations create synchronised emotion. Transparent walls perform continuous surveillance, removing the need for enforcement.
Observation: Zamyatin’s society achieves obedience by narrowing consciousness. Once fantasy is excised, compliance becomes physiology, not ideology.
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1932)
Huxley’s World State is maintained by laboratories, slogans, and good chemistry. Humans are produced on assembly lines, assigned to castes before birth, and conditioned to enjoy their predestined labour.
Mechanism: The Bokanovsky Process multiplies embryos to create uniform groups – eighty or more copies of a single genetic source – ensuring social homogeneity. The Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Centre shapes infant reflexes through electric shocks and auditory stimuli, establishing lifelong preferences and aversions. The population’s emotional equilibrium depends on “soma”, a synthetic drug dispensed like a national vitamin. One half-gramme calms mild irritation; two induce cheerful detachment; three erase grief. The dosage chart functions as moral arithmetic: the right chemical level equals the right civic attitude. Continuous entertainment supports the pharmacology. “Feelies”, films enhanced with tactile and olfactory effects, occupy attention, preventing reflective thought.
Observation: Huxley’s innovation is compliance through pleasure. Coercion is unnecessary when contentment is industrially supplied. Citizens are tranquil not by rule but by ratio.
The Machine Stops (E. M. Forster, 1909)
Forster imagined networked isolation long before the internet. Humanity has retreated underground; each person lives in a hexagonal cell, communicating via screens while the Machine provides air, light, and sustenance.
Mechanism: Environmental sedation replaces discipline. Air is perfumed, temperature constant, and the hum of machinery continuous. The Machine dictates sleeping hours, nutrient intake, and intellectual exchange through its terminals. Curiosity is pathologised. Direct exploration of the surface is considered an act of disloyalty. The population’s dependence on environmental control is total: to question the Machine is to question survival itself.
Observation: Obedience here arises from comfort. When infrastructure anticipates every need, independent thought is redundant. The calm is infrastructural rather than psychological.
High-Rise (J. G. Ballard, 1975)
A modern apartment tower becomes a self-contained civilisation. With supermarkets, schools, and pools stacked vertically, residents no longer require the city beyond their walls.
Mechanism: The building’s “design logic” enforces hierarchy: lower floors house families; upper floors professionals and executives. Access to amenities increases with elevation, aligning geography with social status. Centralised air-conditioning maintains identical climate throughout the structure. Continuous power, soundproofing, and elevators create frictionless movement and sensory insulation. As minor faults accumulate – flickering lights, power fluctuations – residents internalise aggression but remain within the tower, unwilling to abandon convenience.
Observation: Ballard converts architecture into a psychological agent. The building conditions its occupants through ease; the absence of external reference breeds compliance until decay becomes the new equilibrium.
The Stepford Wives (Ira Levin, 1972)
In Stepford, Connecticut, the lawns are perfect and the wives are identical. Their voices are soft, their smiles fixed, their kitchens immaculate. The uniformity is the result of replacement, not reform.
Mechanism: The Men’s Association has developed a process for substituting human partners with mechanical replicas. Each replica reproduces the subject’s physical appearance but is programmed for unwavering docility and domestic efficiency. Maintenance occurs discreetly. The artificial wives never age, argue, or fatigue. Emotional interaction is automated through scripted empathy responses, ensuring perpetual harmony within the home.
Observation: Levin’s method is literal engineering of behaviour through technology. The emotional economy of marriage becomes a closed circuit of performance, erasing unpredictability by redesigning the participant.
The Giver (Lois Lowry, 1993)
Lowry’s community has abolished pain, colour, and memory. Every individual follows precise routines; deviation is addressed by medication or “release,” a euphemism for euthanasia.
Mechanism: Daily pills suppress hormonal development and emotional intensity. Genetic standardisation eliminates variation in skin tone and sensory perception. Climate and light are permanently moderated to remove discomfort. Language functions as a regulatory tool: emotional words have been replaced with controlled vocabulary: “upset” instead of “angry,” “release” instead of “death.” Collective memory of the pre-controlled era is stored in one individual, the Receiver, isolating history as a single point of containment.
Observation: Sedation here is both biochemical and linguistic. By narrowing vocabulary and chemical range, the system prevents even the conception of unrest.
The novels above describe total systems although the outcome differs in scale, with a goal: stability through enforced order. From Zamyatin’s glass apartments to Lowry’s pale households, the century’s literature of societal engineering traces a single equation: order equals tranquillity divided by variability. The transition runs from external enforcement to internal automation. Control begins as a surgical, chemical or closeted intervention and ends as environment, routine, or language. Once embedded in daily function, obedience no longer requires enforcement; it sustains itself. Each mechanism mirrors common innocent arrangements. Mood stabilisers, substances, drugs and stimulants manage productivity and or elimination curves; climate-controlled offices regulate temperature and attention; automated assistants preempt decision-making; curated feeds narrow perception. The resemblance is structural rather than conspiratorial. Whether achieved through drugs, architecture, or syntax, the objective is for constant order.
