How to Consume a Human
My last three reads, in order, were Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars, Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous, and Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh. (It was a terrifying experience, I assure you.)
Beyond intense gore/body-horror, they share a common theme: humans owning other humans (or pieces thereof). Eventually, my head spun off and I had to get it out. In Parts 1 and 2, we outlined mechanisms required to implement a human-consumption dystopia, and various reactions that its occupants exhibit. In the final section, we’ll see how the authors deal with the topic of fundamental human rights.
Part 3: Rights & Dystopias
“But what about rights?” the reader may ask. “Basic, fundamental human rights? Where do these come into play?”
The authors’ unanimous answer is simply, “They don’t.” The ease and plausibility with which they are trampled in these books affirms that these so-called “rights” do not exist, and never have in any material sense.
It is a cynical, yet compelling viewpoint: for rights to be real, they must be guaranteed and immutable. Though (some of) our institutions claim to be guarantors of (certain) human rights, the bald fact is that they are far too vulnerable and fickle in the face of personal greed and economic demand. The only “rights” we think we enjoy are those that those humans with lawyers, guns, and money are willing to grant us—for now.
Returning to our characters from Part 2, this realization leads to a variety of responses:
Embracers: I control who has which rights, and who can do what to whom.
Endurers: I scrape away what comfort I find within the rights I’m allowed, and hoard it.
Fighters: I must take back my rights, by whatever means necessary.
Criminals: Fuck rights, I’m on my own here.
Fodder: Fuck me.
To be fair, the elimination of what are generally considered to be fundamental human rights is the basis of every dystopian novel. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, they are co-opted by a totalitarian oligarchy. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, they evaporate in a cataclysmic dissolution of civilization, resulting in chaos.
But our human-consumption dystopias stake out different territory. They assert that, given:
The current and historically demonstrable malleability of morals in the face of large-scale economic demand,
The inexorable imbalance of economic wealth amongst the human population,
And the facility with which institutional systems have and are being reshaped to meet the demand of the wealthier class,
then an enforced equilibrium between an above-the-line class, consuming a supply of below-the-line human property, is arguably the most plausible of dystopian scenarios.
Fire in the hole.