The Evils of Free Will in Literature.
- Nineteen Eighty-Four. The consummate dystopia, where you (if you're a Party member) are being watched, judged and scrutinized everywhere by Big Brother to the extent that you do not have privacy, and even the concept of free will is being phased out by the gradual introduction of Newspeak, a bastardized version of English where all thoughts that oppose the state are grouped together under the label of "crimethink," or in the common parlance, "thoughtcrime." Those who retain enough individual thought to question the system are strung along to believe they're rebelling against it, only to have their hopes (and their minds) crushed through torture and institutionalized Mind Rape.
- In Across the Universe (Beth Revis), Eldest declares individual thought to be one of the three causes of discord, and uses Government Drug Enforcement to limit it as much as possible.
- Ayn Rand's Anthem. Very similar to We, where numbers and letters have replaced names, and there is no sense of self. The protagonists have never even been taught singular pronouns; it takes two thirds of the book for them to figure it out, to the point that it's an incredible relief when the narrator finally calls himself "I" and his love interest "she" instead of "we" and "they".
- "We are one — alone — and only, and we love you who are one, alone, and only."
- It's implied that the man whose execution the narrator witnessed was killed for using the words "I," "me" and "mine", which are outlawed.
- In Tad Williams Bobby Dollar series this is what Heaven is like. The Saved are all eternally happy but only because their memories and personalities have been rendered null and void. While in Hell Bobby notices that for all the unimaginable suffering there it's still far more "alive" than Heaven.
- Brave New World. In an inversion from the Demolition Man example, the populace is kept mindless, carefree and obedient by making sex and drugs readily available. Not only that, but they're also consequence-free. They've engineered a drug whose only negative side effect is a shortened lifespan, and women are taught from a very young age to regularly use contraceptives (with others engineered to be sterile). The population is also kept brainwashed via Memetic Mutation and sleep learning.
- The idea is outlined in a story-within-a-story in The Brothers Karamazov called the Grand Inquisitor, where Christ comes back and is arrested by the Holy Inquisition for giving humanity free will, consequently allowing misery from the ability to sin. The Grand Inquisitor of the title accusing him wants to bring everyone into the church, and to indoctrinate them so fully that sin will no longer be possible, and he considers Christ an opponent as a bringer of freedom. He claims that Christ should have given in to the temptations of Satan in the wilderness, and used his power to make the world paradise again. Christ never says a word, but kisses him on the lips, at which the Grand Inquisitor recoils, opens the cell door and tells Christ to leave and never return. This was part of the Nietzsche Wannabe Ivan's Breaking Speech to Alyosha, his monk brother.
- Candle by John Barnes focuses on the conflict between the last man on Earth with free will and the agent sent to bring him in. The agent narrates, so it starts off anti-free will yet oddly sinister ("You get the help you need, but you never know"), then passes through five different Shades of Conflict as more and more background is revealed. The eventual conclusion seems to be that Hive Queens are bad, but Mental Fusion is okay—which is completely contradicted in the sequel.
- While the authorities aren't seeking to create an entire world based on this trope, when prison is unable to reform Alex from A Clockwork Orange, he is subjected to conditioning that takes away his ability to commit violent or sexual acts, eventually driving him to a suicide attempt.
- In Delirium Series, all teenagers are to be evaluated, mentally and physically, by a team of civil servants who will determine which career they are suited for and what sort of person they should marry (they choose from 4).
- Divergent:
- In this dystopia, teens are forced to take an aptitude test that matches them with a "faction": Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless, or Erudite. The faction they choose, however, is where they end up for the rest of their lives. If they choose no faction, then they become factionless and are forced to be homeless. Also, if their test results do not match with any particular faction, then they are seen as Divergent, meaning they don’t necessarily conform to the thought patterns of their respective factions and therefore can't be trusted.
- There are shades of this in Abnegation. Basically, any part of free will that serves the self is prohibited.
- This is also in Amity, due to "happiness serum" being put in bread and given to everyone without them noticing. Anyone who acts negatively will be taken to a room and given some directly.
- This is the dark side of several "good" factions in Dragonlance, and the main point of disagreement between them and the neutral factions. (It's been demonstrated that this won't actually work—when the evil goddess Takhisis was banished from the world, the Church of Paladine effectively became evil by persecuting the neutral factions.)
- Ender's Shadow: Achilles believes in this, when we get him as a viewpoint character in Shadow of The Hegemon. As he's engineering the domination of the world, he muses on how very difficult free will makes it to get anything done. He even cites such figures as Napoleon and Hitler who expected their subordinates to "offer up their heads" as a way of blind obedience. Irony of ironies that he, like former protagonist Ender, actually admires the insect-like Formics, but for the reason that they were smart enough to stamp out free will, with each soldier merely being an extension of their queen. Achilles firmly believes that, for humanity to reach it's intended greatness, it will be necessary for humans to adopt a similar societal approach... with him in charge of course.
- In Freedom, the Major tells a captured Peter Sebeck that people need to be told what to do and that modern civilisation needs management by professionals.
- The guiding principle behind the dystopian "Community" in The Giver. The elders make everyone's choices for them, including their career and their spouse, because if people were left to their own devices they might make the "wrong" choice. To limit people's choices even further, they go so far as to make the population colorblind.
- In Chris Barfield's novel Hidden Histories, this is the ultimate goal of Christianity; the breakup of Christianity into so many different sects is just an argument over method, not over the ultimate goal.
- In the Left Behind book Kingdom Come: The Other Light faction outlines in their If It's True manifesto that by God not allowing "naturals" to live past 100 years of age as unbelievers, then He is against mankind having the right to choose for themselves and thus is considered "evil". This is part of their clarion call to have their teachings be passed down to the next generation of its converts so that the generation that gets to confront God and Jesus Christ at the end of the Millennium will be "assured victory" when Satan is released. Unfortunately for the Other Light, it didn't turn out as they hoped.
- A major theme of The Licanius Trilogy. The universe is set on a pre-destined track, which causes an ideological rift among the characters. One side believes people should be free at any price, while the other believes that a lack of freedom doesn't mean a lack of meaning — and that achieving this freedom will accidentally destroy the world.
- In Matched by Ally Condie, the Society decides every aspect of your life based on statistics, what you eat (specific meals are given based on your height and weight), what job you have (based on what you are good at), who you marry, and even when you die (according to the Society, 80 is the best age to die because living to be less than 80 is not a long enough life and living after 80 leads to more age-related diseases).
- A Practical Guide to Evil has Dread Emperor Imperious quoted as expressing such opinion:Imperious: See, this is exactly the kind of trouble I’d be avoiding by mind controlling the entire world. You fools are making my point for me, can’t you see?
Imperious: I imagine the High Lords would be inclined to protest the mind control, if I hadn’t seized control of their minds, which just goes to show this was the right decision all along. - The Big Bad's goal in Snow Crash. What makes this especially odd is that free will isn't the natural state of humankind, but an ancient computer program written in the subconscious universal protolanguage of human thought, by what was effectively a Hive King for the human race, inspiring the Tower of Babel myth.
- "The World" of E. E. "Doc" Smith's Subspace Explorers was set up generations before the time of the story as the perfect serf planet: everyone is born, lives, works, and dies in a caste defined by their life-long worknote ; they have serial 'numbers'note instead of personal names; they live in barracks until welded into a breeding pair by dictate of their manager castenote ; their entire language is trimmed to the barest bone, with no proper names and no words for concepts that they shouldn't think; the Company is their god, its Agents their rulers, and producing its Products their only reason for living; and throughout their lives their every word, breath and heartbeat is monitored by a device around their necks which can deliver a lethal electric shock if the Agents decide they are 'mal'note .
- Touched on in The Tripods at times. Will notices the Capped are happy and free from fighting for the most part, and does wonder if being Capped would be so bad. But he does still realise that the happiness comes at a high price, since free will is mostly gone. The Capped also tend to talk about how evil humanity was before the Tripods came.
- Villains by Necessity: In a rare twist, it's said by the "good" guys, who "whitewash" villain's minds to make them good citizens.
- Oberon from John C. Wright's War of the Dreaming wants to relieve Earth of its evils, chaos, and agonies by applying this trope. Predictably, the heroes tell him to get stuffed.
- In We, the name of the disease is imagination. The location of it in the brain has been discovered, and an operation has been devised to cure it.
