Is the Early 21st Century of 'Blade Runner' (1982) Better Than the One We Got?
Even a famously 'dystopian' sci-fi film seems better than our Woke present.
Blade Runner (1982) is one of my all time favourite films. Basically inventing the Cyberpunk genre, it continues to present one of the most aesthetically unique depictions of a futuristic society in cinematic history.
The story and themes of the film are of course fantastic, with it asking profound questions about artificial intelligence and what it means to be human; topics that will become more and more topical as AI continues to develop.
However, the story of Blade Runner is not what I’m going to be talking about, as good as it is. I am instead going to be focusing on the setting.
The original 1982 Blade Runner was set in Los Angeles in a fictional ‘2019’. As that year is now in the past, I want to compare the future imagined in Blade Runner to the one we actually got, because whilst the film is widely seen as a dystopian future, one must ask ourselves: is the alternate Los Angeles of 2019 perhaps better than the Western world we inhabit today?
I was originally going to call this article ‘Is Blade Runner’s 2019 Better Than the One We Got?’, however I think that the Covid lockdowns were so utterly dystopian, and such a stark contrast to a Blade Runner-esque society, that comparing the ‘2019s’ would miss out many crucial points. However, by simply extending the date by a few years we can make a more stark comparison, so I decided on the more broad ‘early 21st century’ question.
Of course, it all depends on your personal values. To the Woke left, the world of Blade Runner would naturally be dystopian. It is hyper-commercialist, expansionist, conformist, anti-egalitarian, no concern for ‘health and safety’, ‘human rights’, or ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) whatsoever, and where the ‘White heteronormative patriarchy’ rules supreme. Ethno-nationalists would also dislike it because it shows a future of mass immigration and ‘White flight’.
But compared to our current world of mandatory DEI seminars, constant promotion of White male guilt, the mutilation of children being celebrated as ‘trans liberation’, the entire society at the mercy of Woke activists who police people’s behaviour and manipulate every establishment institution into doing their bidding, and where nothing can be done without endless litigation and legal appeals on behalf of the ‘rights of minorities’, the spectre of a society with no concern whatsoever for ‘diversity’, ‘equity’ and ‘inclusion’, instead emphasizing an aggressively masculine Faustian and frontier spirit, seems refreshing.
In this article I’m going to be exploring the society of Blade Runner, specifically Los Angeles where the film is set. I will refer to the settling of the film as ATL (alternate timeline) Los Angeles, and refer to the present as OTL (original timeline), as the film can now accurately be described as a work of alternate history.
What Makes the Aesthetics of Blade Runner so Compelling?
Video: Deckard meets Rachel scene.
Blade Runner’s aesthetics are beautiful. The electronic score by Vangelis gives a sense of otherworldliness and techno-mysticism that make the world presented in the film seem far more futuristic than today, despite far more primitive computer interfaces.
Indeed, this soundscape was very similar to the early Microsoft Windows sounds, so as a member of Gen Z, the film’s score reminds me of the early years of the internet. With it, comes a feeling of lost promise, that the futuristic society we were promised in the 80s, 90s, and 00s, the sounds, the flying cars, the space exploration; never came into fruition, replaced with the demoralising ugliness of Wokeism.
Peter Thiel has made the same point; we live in a disappointing future where technological progress has stagnated. Whilst the combined intelligence of society has been spent on developing super-addictive, harmful social media platforms and endless bureaucratic regulations, the majority of science fiction from the 20th century imagined the early 21st century as far more technologically advanced in a meaningful, substantive sense than what we got. Indeed, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’s’ depiction of human space exploration in 2001 is far more advanced than OTL 2024, where there is a struggle even to return to the Moon, let alone build bases.
Blade Runner is imagined as a dystopian future. That was clearly the intention of Ridley Scott, and he does a good job at presenting the dystopian aspects of the society.
However, whilst it makes the film look far better, if we’re doing a political analysis of the kind of society that exists in its world, the film definitely has a ‘night-time and rain bias’. We never see ATL Los Angeles during a bright summer's day, only when it is at night, raining, sunset, dawn, or very misty. This presents the world in a very dystopian light; which is of course the intention and a good aesthetic choice, but it paints our view of this world Scott has created in a more negative light than is perhaps justified.
As fans of the film will know, in the original theatrical release, the final scene is Deckard and Rachel driving across a forest, very much showing us ‘another side’ of this world. Mandated by the studio, this scene is very out of place in the context of the aesthetics of the rest of the film, hence why it was removed in the directors cut, as Ridley Scott doesn’t consider the theatrical release as true to his vision.
But what if we really are being shown the world of Blade Runner in the most dystopian light? Perhaps we just see the underworld of a city in dark colours, and nature hasn’t been completely destroyed, like we see in the theatrical release?
There are certain clues throughout the film that suggest this wouldn’t fit, for instance, Rachel says ‘of course it is’ when Deckard asks if the owl is artificial, and Zhora says ‘do you think I’d be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?’ However, for the sake of my argument, these could be interpreted differently, Rachel could be saying the owl is ‘of course’ artificial because she works for a genetic engineering/technology company, and Zhora’s line about real snakes being expensive could be because snakes really are expensive.
The Context of 1980s Anglo-Saxon Anxieties
I say ‘Anglo-Saxon’ because even though the film is set in America and is an American film, Ridley Scott himself is British, so no doubt there is a ‘British touch’ to the vision which shouldn’t be discounted. Indeed, Hollywood has always been a cross-Anglo-Saxon enterprise, with British actors and directors always having made their mark, as well as Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders.
Seeing depictions of the present day from science fiction made in previous decades is always fascinating. On the one hand, it’s interesting to see what they got right and what they got wrong. But on the stuff they got wrong, it is also a fascinating insight into WHY they got it wrong. It is a snapshot into the social and political anxieties of that era, and how they compare to their own.
One political concern at this time included mass overpopulation, particularly in Asia. Alarmed by sky-high Chinese birthrates, many Western commentators doubted that the ‘One Child Policy’ was ever going to be be enforced. Books like Paul R. Elrich’s 1968 book ‘The Population Bomb’, and the Club of Rome’s 1972 report ‘The Limits to Growth’ assumed high Asian birthrates were here to stay, coming to the terrible conclusion that population growth would outstrip agricultural productivity and cause mass famine.
A related concern to overpopulation was environmental destruction, though the specific issues of focus were different to today, more focused on pollution by hazardous chemicals than climate change. Acid rain and the destruction of the Ozone layer were examples of environmental challenges in the late-20th century that were later thankfully resolved.
Blade Runner is not the only work of science fiction that explores these themes of overpopulation and environmental destruction; another example is the novel ‘Make Room, Make Room’ (1966) and its loosely based film adaptation ‘Soylent Green’ (1973).
On the economic and political front, there was widespread anxiety in America during the 1980s that, due to its breakneck economic growth and superior work ethic, Japan was going to become an economic superpower and overtake the United States. Agreements like the Plaza Accord and Ronald Reagan’s import restrictions of Japanese cars were a desperate attempt to try and secure American domestic industry against superior Japanese products, though it seemed a foregone conclusion that Japan would become a larger economy than the US with a much smaller population.
The Reagan/Thatcher years were a period where corporate power rose and trade union power declined. Wokeism was not something that was a present threat, as it seemed, particularly from the perspective of the liberal, that the 1960s counterculture had in fact been utterly crushed, and its advocates ‘sold out’. There was an increasing acceptance that capitalism was the only game in town, ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) was the mantra of Thatcher that would become even more pronounced in the following decade after the collapse of the USSR.
Whilst presenting liberal critiques and anxieties in many respects, the film also presents a ‘Moral Majority’ anxiety around the increasing delinquency and hedonism that characterised youth culture. Prostitution and drug use are seen throughout the film. This was the primary issue the religious right had: the very individualistic, pleasure-focused culture that facilitated family breakdown that took off during the 1960s. Such trends have actually very much declined since then, being replaced with a far more sanctimonious, equality-focused, and reality-denying form of cultural leftism.
This is related to the period’s fears about urban decay. New York had not experienced the revival it would go onto have later on in the 1980s, so ATL Los Angeles has similarities with Martin Scorsese’s ‘Taxi Driver’ (1976) in presenting the logical conclusion of decaying urban landscapes and ‘White flight’, with the contemporary economic and social trends assumed to continue.
So all in all, the concerns that a liberal Hollywood filmmaker would have, aka Ridley Scott, would have in the 1980s about the future, are radically different to our own as Dissident Rightists in the 2020s.
But it is interesting how none of the social anxieties presented in the film came true; almost their opposites did. The world is not in danger of mass overpopulation, but rather the opposite, mass underpopulation, causing a collapse in the welfare state as the elderly take up an ever greater share of the population. Lack of housing development, not an excess of it destroying the countryside, has reduced people’s quality of life. Gentrification, not ghettoization and urban decay, became the key problem of urban centres. Corporate power did grow, but not in the Fordist, manufacturing-dominated way presented in the film, but instead corporations were captured by ultra-feminised social forces within bureaucracies, management, HR departments, and outside third-parties, to sap vitality from the productive elements of society.
The Positives of the World of Blade Runner
I will discuss the various areas where I believe that the alternate 21st century presented in Blade Runner is better than what these years have ended up being in the West.
Expansionist and Colonialist Spirit
In the world of Blade Runner, humans have developed advanced technology to be able to colonise space, enabling the traditional American frontier spirit and quest for expansion to continue, though we never see these space colonies on-screen.
The fact that ATL Los Angeles is majority non-White suggests that it is primarily Whites that have gone on to colonise space. In an era where talk of space colonisation is immediately prefixed by talk of DEI, with NASA making sure, as an absolute first principle, that its next moon landings put the first ‘woman and person of colour’ on the Moon, as well as the development of SpaceX’s Starship being held back by endless ‘environmental impact assessments’ and legal reviews, Blade Runner’s presentation of such an unapologetic quest of colonisation and extension of homesteading into space seems a vastly superior future. It’s clear that the ruling class of the Blade Runner universe has no guilt-ridden urge to engage in utterly hypocritical yet societally toxic ‘virtue signalling’.
It’s incredibly refreshing to see how shameless the ruling class of Blade Runner are about being pro-White, patriarchal, and heteronormative. I can imagine that when faced with the cries from spoiled female student activists that Whites disproportionately benefit, they would calmly say ‘yes…. and so what?’
That is the characteristic of a people that have self-respect and group honour, not the shameful, pathetic disgrace of straight White men taking the knee and ‘checking their privilege’, which a people with any sense of self-worth would see as the ‘lowest of the low’. A self-respecting society would not constantly be trying to prove it is not racist, because it would not care less if it was, and it perhaps would even see it as good. It would not allow manipulative appeals for social justice, from those who will always hate them and always radicalise their demands, hold them back from the pursuit of virtuous self-interest, for themselves, their families, and their ethnic group.
Genetic engineering is freely used in the world of Blade Runner, and all of the replicants are White, suggesting adherence to ‘Eurocentric beauty standards’.
This is a vast improvement our timeline, where the advancement of genetic engineering has been repressed by draconian ‘health and safety’ and ethics regulators, created by the emotional cries of parasite activists, who have done so much to stunt the growth of technological progress through endless red tape around ‘ethics’, and conveniently prevent research that might break the hegemony of the Woke worldview. In the world of Blade Runner, Western men freely embrace their Faustian drive, instead of it being miserably repressed by the Longhouse.
You won’t see #MeToo being celebrated in the news media in ATL Los Angeles. The Longhouse does not seem to exist in the world of Blade Runner. Men are in charge of the public sphere, and the world feels very ‘masculine’. Women are forced to adapt to masculine standards of behaviour and expectations; being promiscuous and sexual without any moral policing, and prostitution is rampant. The women on advertising billboards in Blade Runner are all attractive, rather than deliberately made to be fat and ugly to appease the finger wagging and screeching of a lazy, dysgenic, fat, low-IQ black woman in a position of influence due to affirmative action, which self-loathing straight White male elites have always, over the last 60 years, allowed a seat at the decision-making table out of misplaced moral guilt.
Urban Development and Low Cost of Housing
ATL Los Angeles has vast, magnificent skyscrapers and high rise buildings. There has been no NIMBY stranglehold on planning development, and the emigration of Whites to off-world colonies has made property very cheap. We can see this with Rick Deckard’s home. He has a spacious apartment which he earns on a single income, even able to retire in middle age before being called back into service whilst still being able to keep his apartment.
YIMBY policies, even when it isn’t public housing and is entirely private sector, are a good thing, as prices will decline as more dwellings are built (though perhaps not as quickly as one would like).
Tokyo, which the ATL Los Angeles is in large part based on, has had an easy and flexible planning system that has stopped the chronic rise in housing costs present in cities of other developed nations. Therefore, despite modern Japan’s many problems, like an ageing population and economic stagnation, housing costs aren’t one of them. To give another example, despite its magnificent skyscrapers and luxury feel, Dubai’s housing is comparatively cheap due to its liberalised planning laws. Whilst Singapore-style state construction of housing is probably the best way to maintain affordable housing, and still is crucial if private developers create a cartel to artificially reduce supply, incentivising private sector development is a good thing in and of itself.
High rise buildings are a good thing for society. You can house people with less land. This shows why the giant skyscrapers of ATL Los Angeles are a good thing. In addition to liberal, standardised planning laws, perhaps the city has been incentivised to build high density housing with a high Land Value Tax (LVT), something Estonia has.
Non-Woke, Pro-White Multiculturalism
Multiculturalism has been the target of much hate on the right, and justifiably so, as the term in the modern west means anti-White. It should more accurately be described by Eric Kaufmann’s term ‘Asymmetric Multiculturalism’.
However, there are other societies that have made multiculturalism work and large-scale benefit the native population. For instance, Dubai’s population is majority immigrant, with native Emirate citizens consisting of only around 12% of the population. But far from competing for jobs, the Emirates have become a ‘master class’. The immigrants are all non-citizens, with no long-term claim to Dubai being their home, and only there to be used as a source of cheap labour, with Dubai’s valuable currency sent home for remittances.
With the entire West suffering from low birthrates, the economic incentives for immigration makes sense, but only if it benefits the native population. Constant concerns about ‘equality’ prevent this and turn it into ethnic-spoil politics. But a nation like Dubai does not need to worry about birthrates, because it can always rely on the supply of cheap immigrant labour. In fact, lower birthrates may make people better off as there is more wealth-per-person belonging to the native high caste.
The key issues with multiculturalism is that it is incompatible with notions of egalitarianism and democracy. If you make a claim to egalitarianism, non-White groups will constantly cry ‘racism’ for the smallest ‘microaggressions’ and any unequal group outcomes in which Whites perform better. In a democracy they will be able to create ethnic blocs for their interests, like we saw in the Rochdale by-election.
However, a multiculturalism that is meritocratic and authoritarian can work, and indeed, much as it has become a buzzword for the left, there ‘is’ something to be gained from diversity, for instance with food choice. The key issue however is that it can only work if ethnic grievances, not just Whites towards other groups in our self-loathing ‘asymmetric multiculturalism’, but ALL ethnic grievances, including those crying ‘racism’, are repressed. It is important that the ruling elite does not care about racism, only not causing mass revolts, getting the most capable people for jobs and granting them entry into the elite so they don’t revolt instead, and retaining power.
Some famous multicultural societies include the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that operated under a monarchic system of government. This system operated quite well, Jews were not mass murdered like they would be in the age of ‘liberal national republics’, because the aristocratic elite had an interest in not murdering their taxpayers, and therefore kept majoritarian ethnic grievances under control (though not due to a true belief in ‘equity’ like the modern West).
ATL Los Angeles’ immigrant population is composed overwhelmingly of Asians, that tend to be the most law-abiding American citizens, even more than Whites. Asian-Americans, despite their physical distinction from Whites making assimilation more difficult compared to other Whites, have thrived when it comes to contributing to the state and society. There is only a problem when they are recruited by left-wing activists to hurt White interests and stir up ethnic grievances, for which their physical distinction poses a risk, and is why most Asian Americans still vote Democrat. However, in an authoritarian state like a monarchy, that is not an issue.
ATL Los Angeles has a more Chinese and South East Asian feel in its underbelly than its elite circles, that seem to be composed mostly of Whites (probably disproportionately Jews) and joined by some Japanese. Naturally gifted individuals, disproportionately from high IQ ethnic groups, are able to utilise their talents to further human progress without barrier, whereas lower IQ groups are on average lower in status, though no doubt some individuals rise to the top ranks, and they accept this, because they don’t have a choice if they want to stay. This is a meritocratic society, what Academic Agent would call the ‘Rufo Reich’, except I see it as an unironically good thing, something I will discuss in a later article.
Japan as a Superpower
In Blade Runner, Japan has fulfilled its promise of superpower status, something that was believed to be around the corner in the 1980s, until the ‘Lost Decades’ and plummeting fertility rates brought that to a halt.
In the world of Blade Runner, it is clear that Japan has outpaced America as the cultural hegemon. The clothes Rachel wears are an interesting mixture between mid-20th century Western female dress and traditional Japanese dress, which suggests that Japanese culture is considered ‘high status’ and something White Westerners are trying to emulate.
This is a good thing, as Japanese culture is in many way superior to White Western culture. They were (and are, although globohomo is wrapping their tentacles around Japan as their next target) a society that glorify their ancestors, respect their civilisation, do not engage in any of the pathetic virtue-signalling that the West does, and have a religion based on the ethnos and a circular theory of life and history. Christian slave morality does not rule in Japan, rather a pre-Christian morality with far more basis in reality does. The Shinto religion, combining Buddhism and Ancestor Worship, upholds the realities of human existence, cyclical nature of life, and the primary of genetic lineage. And lack of Christianity did not prevent them from being a modern nation.
In the world of Blade Runner, with Whites adopting the superior Japanese culture in many respects, they have abandoned the hideous slave morals of Christianity, of which Wokeism is a descendant. For instance, the late 20th century Japanese continuation of Fordist industrial capitalism and the relatively non-political society, there being no special role for ‘activism’ or ‘participation’, is not under threat of being eroded by globohomo; it instead has spread to the United States.
I am not saying that the utilitarian role of the Church is without value, the West was the first civilisation to industrialise, not Japan, and in that sense Christianity showed its worth. However, in the post-war period, Christian slave morality has dominated the trajectory of Western society, and because it has shunned the counterbalance of its Greco-Roman and Germanic heritage due to fear of ‘fascism’, it has served as a corrosive force, enabling the domination of pathological victimhood.
Just because Christianity was a positive force for development in Europe in the Middle Ages, it does not mean that it must be revived. It is an inherently superstitious and victim-centred morality, and the rapidly de-Christianizing West should not try to revive a dead horse that failed to stop Wokeism, but replace it with something different and better; something akin to a Western version of Shinto. We will never be able to get rid of its influence entirely, and nor should we; but it is time to move on.
Unlike Caribbean nations, that in a typical Christian fashion, shame the Anglosphere for their ‘colonial sins’ and demand ‘reparations’; demands that the pathetic modern Anglos bring on themselves due to their misplaced guilt and constant indulgence of those who hate them, the Japanese ‘earned’ the respect of the West. In the West’s heyday, Whites were just as racist towards the Japanese as they were towards all other non-Whites, but when it came to the Japanese, the racism directed towards them was character building. They modernised their country, advanced technologically, and won wars against White nations. The Japanese are not a people that are besieged by slave morality; that they are seen as equals by Westerners was not something that was given to them; it was something that they earned.
Japan’s rise to superpower status likely in the world of Blade Runner was due to having at least replacement-level birthrates, and not being forced to sign the ‘unequal treaty’ of the Plaza Accord, which was correct from an American-interest standpoint, but unfortunate, as civilised Japan’s rise was squandered and American soft power became corrupted by Wokeism. Other changes like not going into endless debt in the 1990s to protect against job losses may also have helped avoid Japanese decline.
So if the West learns from Japanese virtues, of civilizational pride and honour, then a world where Japan outmatches the West is a vastly superior one than Pax Americana. The Pax-Americana we got was not Reaganite ‘Morning in America’, but the promotion of vice as virtue and virtue as vice, the corrosive spectre of the rainbow flag.
High Birthrates Fuelling Expansion
Far from our own timeline, when there is an aging population sapping the world of its vitality and drive for expansion, the world of Blade Runner assumes that the high Asian birthrates of that time would just continue. This would be a better outcome than today, as the Chinese are a relatively high IQ group, and as stated previously, tend to be law-abiding and successful in the West.
It is difficult to comprehend why people were so concerned about a booming population in the late 20th century, when compared to a shrinking population, a growing population incentivises expansion. Space colonisation would have been a much more practical policy solution to solving overpopulation. However, underpopulation poses a very different set of challenges; the drive towards expansion dissipates, and a declinist mindset takes over the entire society, with elderly voters wanting nations to turn into retirement homes and sapping all productivity. Covid lockdowns were a case of the young being sacrificed to protect the interests of the old, many of whom would have died anyway in a few years and therefore lockdowns only served to thwart the life chances and spirit out of the young.
Sure, not all high birthrates are created equal. High birthrates in Africa are a problem, as these are low-IQ, tribalistic populations that have high crime rates. But in the world of Blade Runner, it is East and South East Asians that have fuelled a global population boom, which is a positive for humanity.
Vitalism and Eudaimonia
The ATL Los Angeles of Blade Runner has a Vitalist spirit. People aren’t stuck at home on social media, they are out clubbing and drinking in bars. There is a danger, excitement, and vibrancy to the world that is so lacking today in our sterile, bland, ultra-feminised OTL. A world where young people are out drinking and having endless sex is far superior to the one we actually have, where there is total freedom in the online world, for children to become addicted to porn and brainwashed into pathologies like transgenderism, but no freedom to actually socialise with peers in the real world, and experience the thrill of danger in a healthy, life-affirming fashion. In some ways, all of the worst ways, the ‘Moral Majority’ was not a complete failure: they ensured that young people were forced to live vastly more restrictive lives, with draconian American laws like a 21 year drinking age imposed federally.
Blade Runner is a world very comfortable with heterosexuality, i.e., healthy sexuality, far more than we are today. Scantily-clad women are able to be featured in adverts, prostitution is wildly available, and strip clubs and brothels are plentiful with no concern for ‘unequal power dynamics’. It is also very heteronormative. ‘Are you asking whether I’m a replicant, or a lesbian, Mr. Deckard?’ indicates that in this alternate 2019, homosexuality is rightfully not seen as ‘equal’, and is taboo and on society’s margins. There is absolutely no pretext of ‘equality’ between heterosexuality and homosexuality, and society is completely uninterested in there being so. I’m sure there are utterly hedonistic gay bars in ATL Los Angeles, but it is correctly outside of the ‘public space’.
The separation between the public and private space is a general positive feature of the world of Blade Runner. None of this ‘bringing your whole self to work’ which has erased public standards of behaviour. In the ‘public spaces’ of Blade Runner, we see people well-dressed, well-mannered, polite, and civilised. In ‘private spaces’, the seedy underworld of ATL Los Angeles, there is far more decadence and degeneracy, but the key word here is ‘private space’. The public and private spaces benefit from being separated, not sapping the vitality away from each other. The private is far less ‘naughty’ and ‘exciting’ in a world where obese women at the Student Union emphasise the harms of ‘kink-shaming’, kids are present at gay pride parades with nudity and fetish gear, and Dave Rubin and his ‘husband’ claim that children they trafficked are their ‘children’.
The world of Blade Runner is one mass entrepreneurship, with numerous small traders. This suggests that, contrary to presentation, the society isn’t just a corporatocracy, but where it is possible for people of numerous backgrounds to thrive without restrictive licencing requirements.
Another key point is the presence of smoking. I hold the anti-smoking lobby in contempt, arguably paving the way for the odious infringement on personal liberty in the name of ‘health and safety’ we see in our modern age. There was a coolness and vitality to smoking, that radiated a sense of a ‘free people’, who were living in the moment and not bogged down by endless scolding about lung cancer, because they correctly argued that we all die in the end, a sentiment sorely lacking during the Covid pandemic.
Wikipedia and establishment media would not have you believe it, but the power of the ‘Tobacco Lobby’ is virtually non-existent, as Rishi Sunak’s complete ban on smoking, phased-in for people born after a certain point, shows you. The power has entirely belonged to moralistic, puritanical anti-smoking activists, not content to let people face consequences for their own actions, for instance through paying for smoking-related healthcare/higher insurance premiums, but wanting a tyrannical ‘nanny state’. It is the same sentiment behind ‘sugar taxes’ in Britain, the same Longhouse activists putting ‘health and safety’ above people’s freedom.
The world of Blade Runner looks like a far more ‘free’ society than ours today. There are no endless regulations and procedure. Small traders can set up shop without draconian licencing requirements, men have easy access to prostitution, people seem able to have the right to bear arms (as Rachel shooting Leo seems to show) and the right to self-defence is far more emphasised than in modern Britain, or even even modern California. They are free from moral scolding from the left, and perfectly represent the spaces outside of strict social oversight that Bronze Age Mindset (1) emphasises are so essential for one’s sense of personal liberty.
The Postliberal critiques of our modern age seem suited to the world of Blade Runner, but they are certainly not the same society that we live in today.
Law and Order alongside Limited Government
It is easy to see the ATL Los Angeles as a lawless society, with decadent behaviour in the underworld. But is that actually true? Has law and order really completely broken down? Or is it instead simply a libertarian society, where the state only creates laws it is prepared to enforce, and the laws that do exist are enforced rigorously? I feel that’s the kind of space that exist in ATL Los Angeles, akin to the below BAP quote:
Just a few weeks ago I was outside night club in city that is still untouched by first-world regimented hygiene: well-lighted, clean streets made safe for women come at a high price for the mood of a city. In this place the government and bureaucracy couldn’t extend its rules and cleanup efforts even if it wanted. There are then many nooks and hidden corners that are under no one’s control. In this no-man’s land there is mafia, so many perverts, there is some crime, but it’s kept at mostly very low or nonviolent level because place is full of off-duty cops on the make and no doubt spooks foreign and domestic, and who knows what else. (Bronze Age Mindset, pp. 14)
As said previously, Asians commit crimes at a lower rate on average than Whites, so the large Asian population in ATL Los Angeles would probably not be responsible for a rise in crime rates, like a large Black or Muslim population inevitably would be.
In addition, the fact that Rick Deckard has orders to ‘kill on site’ any replicant he finds, suggests that the world of Blade Runner is not one that is lawless. When there are serious threats to the public order, it uses lethal force, and does not bother with the endless ‘human rights appeals process’. This inhumanity is indeed part of the story, and is almost certainly unfair in regards to the replicants that are ‘more human than human’, but stepping back from the narrative of Blade Runner and focusing entirely on the setting, whilst the Chinese stalls and markets might give it a third world appearance, there is very little evidence to suggest that crime is actually rampant.
There is more suggestion that it is a Nayyib Burkele-type ‘law and order libertarian’ society. There are very few regulations, you do not need excessive licencing to operate businesses and all drugs are legal, with no sales taxes (I am against sales taxes because they incentivise black market activity, and prefer flat income taxes and LVT instead). The lack of sales taxes makes activities that would be considered ‘black market’ in OTL actually perfectly within the confines of the law in ATL Los Angeles. A society is not ‘lawless’, if there is not mass law breaking. ATL Los Angeles is probably a libertarian paradise, with the right to self defence, concealed carry and stand your ground laws, right to use drugs, prostitution, all fully and completely legal (though with zero capitulation to the identity politics left with its concern about ‘equality’ and non-heteronormative expression), and no tax payer money used to promote Woke filth. However, it rigorously enforces the laws it does have.
Old-School Fordist Capitalism
The Tyrell Corporation operates as an old-school corporate enterprise. There is a clear leader, Dr. Eldon Tyrell, and he owns his company, which is named after him. It is not like ‘stakeholder capitalism’ where these corporations are at the mercy of ‘asset-management firms’ like Blackrock, that downgrade their ESG score for not having sufficient ‘women and minority board representation’. Tyrell is a Henry Ford, or to give a contemporary example: Elon Musk, type-figure. This type of capitalist is inherently a better influence on society than the nameless, bureaucratic monstrosities of modern corporations, that are not truly independent but at the mercy of their feminized HR departments, middle-men(middle-persons in Newspeak), and the general managerial class. The ATL Los Angeles does not seem like a place with draconian regulations on businesses or that is much interested in the deceitful ‘business case for diversity’, the statistics coming from the activist NGOs themselves.
Eldon Tyrell did not deserve his gruesome end. He was better than OTL billionaires like Bob Iger or Bill Gates; he was Elon Musk with more style, as even Musk, the best of modern OTL capitalists, dresses casually and without any sense of class. Tyrell in contrast looks straight out of the 1920s, with all its glamour and sophistication.
He is allowed to be a man of genius without nagging feminist activist employees telling him he needs to commit more to ‘female representation in the tech industry’. What is so utterly uplifting about the world of Blade Runner is how such worthless, parasitic ‘scum’ are totally outside of the power structure. They get no seat at the table. They are not indulged. Businesses do not even pretend to care about their pathetic, narcissistic, little activist causes, because they don’t have to, because they have no power. I would hope any employee that tried to start an ‘LGBT club’, ‘anti-racist club’ or a ‘feminist club’ in the Tyrell Corporation would be immediately fired without severance pay, with no legal protections whatsoever.
When it is traditional, masculine union-men at stake, I do not usually care for such brutal workplace environments. But due to the tyranny that white-collar graduate employees always inflict on the moderate, apolitical majority if they are given any concessions, any indication that their spoiled insolence has paid off, I am comforted at a world where they are as shunned, ostracised, and powerless as they delight in making ‘bigots’.
I imagine Tyrell has an in-house training programme for his staff, not needing to rely on the accreditation cartel that is the university system, easily able to be infiltrated by Woke activists.
In the alternate 2019, the 1960s counterculture was decisively crushed, with all of its moral virtue-signalling and cries for ‘equality’ and ‘universal rights’ confined to the dustbin of history. What emerges is a synthesis between the pre-1960s West, and the brief renaissance it had in the 1980s and 1990s. The aesthetics and culture are great in this regard; you get the best of both worlds, the pre-1960s sophistication and class of the Western world without any of its superstitious Christian moralism, and the freer, more individualistic vibe of the 1980s without any sense that it would inevitably devolve into Wokeism. It’s almost certain that in the world of Blade Runner, Title II and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act were repealed, and that is a very good thing.
Conclusion
Blade Runner is a beautifully made film. The aesthetics look incredible, the acting and story are both fantastic, and it is a staple of science fiction films. It created the modern cyberpunk genre, and alongside it many other subgenres of past-themed futurism, like Atompunk and Decopunk, which Blade Runner also utilised. The Vaporwave aesthetic is very much harkening back to the science fiction of the 1980s with films like Blade Runner.
In some ways, chiefly on the question of the environment, the setting of the film does not look like a nice place to live. However, if we were to take the setting of the film, what limited information we are given about it, away from the central narrative, there are also positives about this society, which are deliberately brushed under because of the (great from an aesthetic point of view) only showing scenes with limited daylight.
However, when you compare it to the real 2019 we got, where children are abducted from their parents for refusing to consent to them being mutilated (due to a superstitious magical belief in ‘gender identity’), the fact that people were locked in their homes for two years on and off on the basis of a virus that was harmless to the vast majority, the fact that young people’s lives are ultra-controlled, the fact that technological progress has stagnated outside of computing, the fact that the pioneering capitalism that Tyrell represented has, with the exception of Elon Musk, been replaced with ‘stakeholderism’, DEI workshops, and bureaucracy, the fact that ‘safety’ is the supreme value that is held, with almost all areas of life tightly regulated, the world of Blade Runner does have some positives. Even when dystopian, the setting has utopian elements, the fact that humanity has reclaimed its frontier spirit is something to be admired, as it is the total antithesis to the Woke ideology that taunts us today.
What one might consider a dystopia another person might consider a utopia. The world of Blade Runner is obviously the nightmare of an intersectional Woke leftist, but as I, as a Dissident Rightist, despise their values, their image of ‘dystopia’ would naturally include some things I like.
It is funny how I both admire the settings of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ (1948) and ‘Blade Runner’ despite in many ways being opposites. But both settings emphasise masculine agency and individualism, and favour the biologically correct over the deviant as the public norm, which separate both from Wokeism. A techno-commercialist future would have been better than what we got.
Bibliography
Bronze Age Pervert. Bronze Age Mindset. 2018.
Excellent piece. I've had a Classics professor show this fim in a mythology class as an example of the influence of Oedipus Rex. I can see now that the revelation of a tragic circumstance is not limited to the characters in the film.
> Prostitution and drug use are seen throughout the film. This was the primary issue the religious right had: the very individualistic, pleasure-focused culture that facilitated family breakdown that took off during the 1960s. Such trends have actually very much declined since then, being replaced with a far more sanctimonious, equality-focused, and reality-denying form of cultural leftism.
Depends on whether you count the internet porn industry.