When Beauty Became a Crime - a dystopian novel

Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

2075: When Beauty Became a Crime is a dystopian novel set in the near future, when a government hell-bent on imposing equality decrees that young women who are too beautiful (=Privileged Beauties, PB) must undergo surgery to diminish their beauty, and there are radicals who want to go further and sterilize all PBs so that there will be fewer PBs in future generations.

This is the first fictional work by Rainer Zitelmann, who has thirty-two nonfiction books and three documentary films. Though this book differs much from his other works, because it is a different genre, yet his love of free market capitalism, present in his other works, is everywhere in 2075. The villains want to use big government to force others to obey them; the heroes are a wealthy businessman, a professor, the beautiful woman whom they both love, and a journalist; and the hope for the future is the new civilization on Mars, where people live in a libertarian paradise similar to Gault’s Gulch. The two cities on Mars are Hayek City and Mises City. Though Ayn Rand is nowhere mentioned in this new book, it seems inspired by Atlas Shrugged, and most people who like Atlas Shrugged would like this new book.

The premise of 2075 is that if inequality is unjust, then it must be unjust for some people to be much more beautiful than others. Men and women are not essentially different in this way, but the egalitarians choose to begin their crusade against PBs by attacking women because beauty gains more for women than it does for men. In the world of 2075, as in our world, ugly men often marry PBs because other qualities, such as wealth or intelligence, compensate for their appearance. The inverse is rare. High taxes confiscating above-average incomes would tend to equalize men, but not women. It is ironic that equalizers attack women, since equalizers and feminists tend to be on the same side. On this issue, however, they are not. It might seem strange, but it is plausible that ugly women would hate beautiful women. Solzhenitsyn wrote of a Soviet prison camp in which the women beat and disfigured one of the female prisoners because her beauty gained her special treatment from the guards. Their vile spirit of envy was so strong that it made the women hate one of their own rather than join with her in solidarity against the Communists who had destroyed all of their lives.

Thomas Aquinas wrote that beauty is that which pleases when seen. According to that definition, beautiful people improve our lives by living amongst us. I would prefer to be ugly surrounded by beautiful people, rather than beautiful surrounded by ugly people. I do not see myself, so my own beauty gives me no pleasure. I see other people, so their beauty gives me pleasure. Thomas Aquinas taught that evil destroys itself. According to him, those who are truly good love themselves. One of the themes of Atlas Shrugged, which is present in 2075, is that bad people are so full of hate that they want to destroy the good, even if it means their own destruction. The most fervent believers in equality would make the world in which they live less pleasant. Their hatred is greater than their love of themselves.

This is a good book that I enjoyed reading, but it is not entirely original. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a short story, Harrison Bergeron, about a society that tries to equalize people in every way. High I.Q. individuals must wear something in their ear that makes noise to distract them so that thinking is difficult; strong men must wear clothing with weights so that their strength is used just moving around and they have no energy left to do what weaker people cannot do; etc. Vonnegut wrote that story in 1961. A few months earlier, in November 1960, The Twilight Zone showed an episode titled “Eye of the Beholder.” The episode is about a beautiful woman who undergoes surgery to make her ugly like the people around her. This story differs from 2075 because she and everyone else believe that she is ugly and wants to change her appearance. We, the audience, can see that she is better-looking than those around her, but nobody in the show knows that.

In 2075, some members of the Justice Party who support mutilating PBs repeat the slogan “beauty is ugly.” In the beginning, they could not possibly believe that, because it is obviously false, but given enough time they might convince themselves that it is true. For some people, politics is a religion. Such people have faith in their beliefs, even when evidence indicates that they are wrong. Only a small minority of the members of any religion are saints; likewise only a small minority of any political party believes in it so strongly that they close their eyes to contrary evidence. Small minorities can rule only as long as the majority allows them to. When the majority cares enough to stop them, radical minorities lose, so there is hope in the end, even without recourse to heroic libertarians on Mars.

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