The Dystopia: A Horror Beyond Fiction
They fear indifference. They fear you realizing that you don’t have to participate. That you don’t have to buy, or clock in, or raise another child to feed into the machine. | The Dystopia
Fouad FARJANI
2/7/2025
It started subtly. Not with sirens or martial law, not with the iron grip of a dictator. No, the real horror was quieter, more insidious. It was dressed in neon signs and two-for-one deals, wrapped in the smooth efficiency of next-day delivery and the ever-smiling faces of employees who had forgotten how to frown.
You never saw it coming, did you?
The Cycle of Servitude
You woke up this morning, didn't you? Checked your phone before even rubbing the sleep from your eyes? Scrolled past the news of another war in a country you couldn’t point to on a map, ads reminding you that happiness was 20% off for the next 12 hours. You clocked in, worked your eight—or was it ten?—hours. Clocked out. Repeat.
They told you it was for the best. Work hard, they said, and you’ll be rewarded. But rewards turned into obligations, and obligations turned into chains. The horror of it is not that you’re shackled, but that you hold the key and still refuse to unlock yourself.
In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the assembly line—a marvel of efficiency. A century later, Jeff Bezos perfected it, stretching it beyond factories, into offices, homes, even minds. Workers didn’t just assemble products anymore; they became the product. Their time, their energy, their ability to dream—packaged, distributed, monetized. Capitalism had evolved past the need for permission. The moment you were born, you belonged to it.
The Experiment No One Knows They’re In
This was never about individual ambition. That was the lie. The real experiment? How many generations could be raised to believe that corporate slavery was normal?
Case Study: The McDonald’s Model.
Look at the teenager flipping burgers, his hands moving on autopilot. He could be anyone. He is you, twenty years ago. He is your child, twenty years from now. The brilliance of the system is that he doesn’t need to think. Everything is segmented, broken down into mindless, repeatable tasks. He doesn’t need to know why he does what he does, only that he must.
Anthropologists call it tradition. Economists call it progress. You might call it survival.
The Butterfly Effect of Suffering
You eat junk food, not because you want to, but because it’s easier. The sugar, the salt, the preservatives—they were engineered to keep you wanting more. The people who made it? Paid pennies. The people who profit? Billionaires. And you? You are neither.
You think suffering is an accident? It’s not. It’s the fuel that keeps the machine running. You’ve seen it before. Wars that conveniently lead to reconstruction contracts. Recessions that magically create billionaires. The poor suffer, the rich harvest that suffering, and the cycle continues. And you? You’re somewhere in the middle, working just hard enough to keep from falling, but never hard enough to climb.
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Here’s the twist you weren’t expecting: There is another way.
Not rebellion, rebellion is the predictable response, the one they’re prepared for. You see, they don’t fear protests. They fear indifference. They fear you realizing that you don’t have to participate. That you don’t have to buy, or clock in, or raise another child to feed into the machine.
What happens when enough people say no? When they decide they don’t need what’s being sold? When they stop showing up? That is the real nightmare for those in control. The most dangerous word in the capitalist world isn’t "riot." It’s "irrelevance."
The End You Didn’t See Coming
Let’s rewind for a moment. This isn’t just about capitalism. This is about you.
You were given a choice, though no one ever told you. You could accept the world as it is, or you could see it for what it was always meant to be—an experiment waiting for a new hypothesis.
The horror story ends when you wake up.
The question is: Will you?
