Bounded Rationality In 'The Snow Piercer' By George Orwell
The term ‘dystopia’ is originated from the word ‘Utopia’, which was originally coined by Thomas More in his book. The word ‘utopia’ derives from two Greek words, and, meaning respectively ‘good place’ and ‘no place’. Hence, ‘the primary characteristic of the utopia is its non-existence combined with a topos – a location in time and space’. So, instead of frustrating ourselves by imagining a utopia which never comes, our humanities have been writing dystopian fictions since the ancient times. One of them is Nineteen-eighty-four written by George Orwell. This work has been the main inspiration for most of contemporary dystopian fictions or novels. Also, the second one, ‘the Snow Piercer’ directed by Bong Jun Ho is the seminal dystopian film
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After understanding and considering the every previous historical incidents and causation in the past, could we justify the behavior and doctrine of O’Brien and Wilford? I would not answer this question in obvious ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Yet, we can apply the term ‘Bounded Rationality’ here. We can at least apply this term into the plot of both two works. In the view of bounded rationality, decision-makers act as satisfiers who can only seek a satisfactory solution, lacking the ability and resources to arrive at the optimal one. The optimal goal of Wilford is to balancing out the train population and assign everyone in the right position that he thinks. To O’Brien, this optimal goal was to injecting every belief into the person and finally make him or her love and repent for Big Brother. I don’t know if I can put the word ‘rational’ to these two characters (at least bounded-rationality?) For these two characters, the cognitive limitations of actual humans and the structures of the environment illustrating how minds compensate for limited resources by exploiting known structural regularity in the environment. There are tons of historical events that totalitarianism actually worked. And those were not that different from that of 1984. We have to be very cautious about judging those events as totally wrong structure or bounded rationality. I thought I have to strengthen my ability to think and contemplate in order to have my own strong viewpoint toward the
After understanding and considering the every previous historical incidents and causation in the past, could we justify the behavior and doctrine of O’Brien and Wilford? I would not answer this question in obvious ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Yet, we can apply the term ‘Bounded Rationality’ here. We can at least apply this term into the plot of both two works. In the view of bounded rationality, decision-makers act as satisfiers who can only seek a satisfactory solution, lacking the ability and resources to arrive at the optimal one. The optimal goal of Wilford is to balancing out the train population and assign everyone in the right position that he thinks. To O’Brien, this optimal goal was to injecting every belief into the person and finally make him or her love and repent for Big Brother. I don’t know if I can put the word ‘rational’ to these two characters (at least bounded-rationality?) For these two characters, the cognitive limitations of actual humans and the structures of the environment illustrating how minds compensate for limited resources by exploiting known structural regularity in the environment. There are tons of historical events that totalitarianism actually worked. And those were not that different from that of 1984. We have to be very cautious about judging those events as totally wrong structure or bounded rationality. I thought I have to strengthen my ability to think and contemplate in order to have my own strong viewpoint toward the