Our Future is Our Past: Corporate Medievalism in Dystopian Fiction

Summary

When next you eat a golden Peach

And lightly throw away the pit,

Consider how it shines with Life –

God dwelling in the midst of it.

“The God's Gardeners Oral Hymnbook,” Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

When economists and political scientists warn of the “new medievalism,” they are referring to a new feudalism governed by a corporate-government hybrid to which the whole world is doomed to be enslaved. Companies like Google create “villages” for their employees while banks indenture us through escalating interest rates on credit cards, mortgages, and loans. Monsanto's iron-fisted control of land, water, and seed echoes injunctions against hunting on the king's land. As corporations consolidate power at an alarming rate, the onset of a new Middle Ages seems all but inevitable.

Predictions of a return to the past have also inspired the dystopian visions of Octavia Butler's Earthseed duology, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake duology, and Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy, all of which predict dark worlds where corporation, state, and church have merged into ideological, financial, and agricultural conglomerates, manipulative institutions whose power structures mimic medieval feudalism and whose abuses of power have created neomedieval societies. The novels also critique the myth that free-market capitalism is permanently sustainable and self-regulating, suggesting instead that feudalism is capitalism's logical conclusion. Each author offers us a highly plausible scenario in which water, food, medicine, and jobs are scarce, owned by corporations that have subsumed government.