Tuesday, December 29, 2009

The Obsolete Man

A student recommended this old half hour Twilight Zone episode as having a certain relevance to events we see unfolding today. It's pretty good.

To those who think it a bit far-fetched to suggest that we are threatened with the sort of Orwellian world depicted in this episode in which religion and books have been abolished needs, well, to read Orwell. Or a history of the twentieth century.

The totalitarian temptation is evidently fixed in the human genome, and there will always be men who seek to exert power and control over others, to strip away their freedom, and to rob them of that which is most precious to them. Such men, when they acquire the power, cannot forbear that others have the freedom to think in ways contrary to how they themselves think. They cannot tolerate any opposition to their vision of how society should be ordered. For such men those who defy their dreams must be crushed, and contrary ideas must be eliminated. Total uniformity must be imposed. This is and has been the goal of the left for 150 years, and, as the Chancellor says in the episode, the error of men like Stalin, Hitler, and Mao wasn't that they went too far but that they didn't go far enough. They failed to purge their societies of all of the undesirables and to rid themselves of the "obsolete men."

Thanks to Ashley for the link.

RLC