My Objectives Were Simple When I Started Writing- Give An Introduction: Social Science Essay, UCD, Ireland

My objectives were simple when I started writing- give an introduction to all the social sciences in a neutral context where people from diverse backgrounds could debate controversial real-world topics without anyone taking things too personally – and make it as easy as possible while doing so.

The first step was to create a society where sociology, cultural anthropology, geography, law, political science, economics, linguistics, psychology, and criminology could be isolated relatively easily and studied. The best-case scenario was to look at the same issues, such as feminism and racism, from different perspectives to make it clear that many areas are social rather than biological constructs.

The concept of the Nudgers and the Miners also point out how behavioral economists and data miners can use hard data to manipulate us for good, or for evil (while I deliberately avoid entering into a debate of what is “right” and what is “wrong”, it is everywhere throughout the book and completely reflect my biases). This is increasingly important in a world where the cliché “information is power” is just as true as ever, but to an extent where others have more information about us, our behaviors, our desires, and our intentions than we do ourselves. This leads to the next idea running through Ireti.

The audience is primarily university undergraduate students. My ‘research’ told me that dystopian worlds seemed to catch their attention. From the Maze Runner to the Hunger Games, to the Divergent series. These dystopian, science fiction worlds are nothing new and I would go back to Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” in 1931 or the German Movie “Metropolis” from 1927 as examples and inspiration for Ireti as much as I would these more recent works of fiction. Of course, Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale”, Brian Aldiss’ “Heliconia” or Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series of books have also bled into my imagination and are reflected here. Finally, the idea of looking at specific areas of society such as Football, Media, Religion or Theatre, through the lens of fiction is something that has always put the late, great Terry Pratchett at the top of my influences in this area.

In Ireti there are six Paradigms, six different ways of looking at the world. From the Priestess led, a collective religious community of the First Paradigm, to the industrial revolution setting of the Second, the extreme free market (that is not so free) of the Third where everything, including people, can be bought and sold, to the agrarian and highly patriarchal Fourth, to the downtrodden, anarchist scholars of the fifth and finally to the conservative and authoritarian police state of the sixth.

I do not like most of these societies to be truly honest, nor their manifestations in the real world and in the countries where I live. I use these Paradigms as isolated and neutral versions of reality where we can exaggerate certain elements and then examine and debate them.

An example is a way women are treated in several of the Paradigms. In the Fourth Paradigm, they are kept at home and treated like breeding cattle. They are denied education, voting rights, and time with their offspring. Even their milk is sold as a final insult. They are the property of their husbands. Why? Well, that is a question that has been asked for thousands of years, and in many parts of the world, it is still being asked. In the First Paradigm where women rule, they simply occupy a role where they sexualize men in a reverse of the way women are often treated. The official reason is that this structure is used to naturally control the population, as it was done in some island matriarchal cultures. Even the idea of romance and true love is laid bare as a thinly covered obsession with physical beauty (poor Itanna in the sixth Paradigm is my attempt to create a tragic expression of this phenomenon). It is littered with exaggerated (and not so exaggerated) examples of how different people are treated depending on their gender.