Razib Khan makes an interesting point while wondering where the popularity of dystopian visions comes from:

I watched Clockwork Orange a few months ago. More recently I've been reading some economic history, as well as the utopian visions of early 19th century reformers. From these two vantage points I've come to the conclusion that the whole genre of "dystopia" is really about lowered expectations. Modern Western man after the Great Divergence actually lives in what would be a utopia to anyone in the 19th century; after all obesity related illnesses are a major problem for the underclasses in Western societies! Future dystopias in reality simply resemble the social structure and quality of life expectations which were the norm throughout human history, and are the norm across broad swaths of the contemporary world.

I think this applies far beyond dystopian fiction - the same thing is true of many visions and predictions of doom, whether fears that the European Union is creating a Brezhnevian (if not Stalinist) authoritarian government, or prophecies of collapse into violent anarchy. A lot of these terrible things being predicted are nothing more than a return to the past. Even environmental devastation is often nothing more than a fear of returning to the dirtier past - Eastern Europe is a hell of a lot cleaner than it used to be several decades ago when we had more progressive governments. Not to sound too much like Gregg Easterbrook, but the West has also largely done away with smog, toxic pollutants, deforestation etc.

There are two possible explanations here - one is that we prophesy a return to an unpleasant past because we're not that good at imagining new and different disasters. I'm not sure about that one, as many prophecies of unfamiliar doom from ozone holes to nuclear war have been very popular. I don't think we fear returning to the specific ways in which the past was crappy, but to the crappiness of the past in a very generic sense.

I think there's reason why we fear it - prior to the Great Divergence we were all living in the Malthusian trap, where any improvement in living conditions was temporary as it would allow population growth which would quickly and inevitably catch up with the improved availability of resources, bringing living conditions back to subsistence levels. When times were good and people well-fed and happy, no matter whether because of improved methods of agriculture or because a large chunk of the previous generation died in a plague, they couldn't remain good for long.

We spent thousands of years evolving in a setting where those good times were temporary and doomed. It makes sense that we evolved the instinct to prepare ourselves and our offspring for the inevitable return to crappiness. It's really only been for few generations, even in the most developed countries, that we've been able to live at above-subsistence levels for a significant amount of time. No wonder that our instincts lead us to expect it cannot last, and why the idea of a doomed future is so emotionally appealing.

Perhaps the most Malthusian prophet of the XX century was Paul Ehrlich; he won many scientific and environmental awards and remains a highly respected individual in spite of his predictions of massive worldwide famines in the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of thousands dead from smog in 1973, plagues of hepatitis and dysentery in 1974, and the end of England by 2000. If someone with such a track record of over-the-top predictions has remained respectable and is taken no less seriously while his arch-enemy Julian Simon is popular only with a few extreme libertarians, Ehrlich's ideas must be appealing to us on a very deep and basic level.

There's nothing wrong with being appealing on a deep level; it's a very good thing if it leads to actions which make the world a better place. I'm not sure if my hypothesis is the correct explanation for the popularity of doomsayers, but either way we seem hardwired to pay attention to grim prophecies. "We're doomed!" sure sounds more interesting than "Things are gonna be pretty nice", doesn't it?