Life is filled with interesting
coincidences. Two of those occurred in
the week leading up to Independence Day this year. I was catching up on some classic American
cinema I had never gotten around to seeing, and as I was watching the little
gem called Network from 1976, I
discovered a speech that showed me that, 40 years before we elected a reality
television star to the executive office of the President, we had already been
told the truth about that deceptive medium, a truth even more true, in some
ways, of our postmodern, post-truth, wired-up world than it was of the
television-dominated world of 1976.
In that film, the following speech
is delivered on air by newscaster Howard Beale, the tragic hero of the
film. The quote below is complete, minus
a few of the less relevant passages, and a few unnecessarily profane adjectives
(and practically the whole thing is shouted passionately, not just the few
sentences with exclamation points):
“[Who controls the
television matters] Because you people, and 62 million other
Americans are listening
to me right now. Because less than 3% of
you people
read books! Because less than 15% of you read newspapers![1] Because the only
truth you know is what
you get over this tube! Right now, there
is a whole—an
entire—generation that
never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube!
This tube is the Gospel,
the Ultimate Revelation. This tube can
make or break
presidents, popes, prime
ministers. This tube is the most awesome…force
in the
whole godless world, and
woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong
people…[because] when
the 12th-largest company in the world controls the most
awesome…propaganda force
in the whole godless world, who knows what shit
will be peddled for
truth on this network! So you listen to
me. Listen to me!
Television is not the
truth! Television is a[n]…amusement park! Television is a
circus, a carnival, a
traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers,
jugglers, side show
freaks, lion tamers and football players.
We’re in the
boredom-killing
business. So if you want the truth, go
to God. Go to your gurus.
Go to yourselves. Because that’s the only place you’re ever
going to find any real
truth! But man, you’re never going to get any truth
from us. We’ll tell you
anything you want to
hear. We lie like Hell…we deal in
illusions, man! None of
it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night
after night—all ages,
colors, creeds—we’re all
you know. You’re beginning to believe
the illusions
we’re spinning
here. You’re beginning to think that the
tube is reality, and that
your own lives are
unreal. You do whatever the tube tells
you. You dress like the
tube, you eat like the
tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think
like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people
are the real thing. We are the illusion! So turn off your television sets, turn them
off
now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them
off right in the middle
of the sentence I’m speaking to you now.
Turn them off!”[2]
I had no idea Hollywood had ever been so
honest about the power of media and its total lack of orientation towards
truth. It is enough to make one wonder
what happened after the 1970’s, that such truth-telling satire has since
completely vanished from our screens.
As
if it were not enough to find in this film such an open indictment of the carnivalesque
nature of the news media and the media in general, later in the same film came
another speech filled with similar insight, this time about the way free
enterprise capitalism has become a sort of global corporatism—an insight far
more true today than it was in 1976 (all you have to do is substitute the names
of modern juggernauts like Google and
Amazon for some of the companies
mentioned in the speech, and its fitness to the current moment is
terrifying). In this speech, Norman
Beale has sought to oppose—and to get his audience to oppose—a bid to purchase
his network by a group from Saudi Arabia.
And the head of the company, Arthur Jensen (played wonderfully by Ned
Beatty), decides to explain to Norman just exactly how the world really works. Standing
at the head of a long conference table, and staring down its length between two
rows of lamps which provide practically the only illumination in the room, he
says:
You
have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale! And I
won’t
have it! Is that clear? Do you think you merely stopped a business
deal?
That
is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out
of this country,
and
now they must put it back! It is ebb and
flow—tidal gravity. It is ecological
balance!
You are an old man who
thinks in terms of nations, and peoples.
There are no
nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs.
There are no third
world. There is no West! There is only one holistic system of
systems. One vast and immane, interwoven, interacting,
multivariate,
multinational dominion
of dollars. Petrodollars,
electrodollars, multidollars;
reichmarks, riyals,
rubles, pounds and shekels. It is the
international system of
currency which
determines the totality of life on this planet.
That is the natural
order of things
today. That is the atomic, and subatomic, and galactic structure of
things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces
of nature! And you
will atone!
Am I getting through to
you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your
little 21-inch
screen, and howl about
America, and democracy. There is no
America. There is
no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T;
DuPont, Dow, Union
Carbide, and Exxon. Those are
the nations of the world today…We no longer
live in a world of
nations and ideologies Mr. Beale. The
world is a college of
corporations, inexorably
determined by the immutable bylaws of business.
The
world is a business, Mr.
Beale…and our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see
that—perfect world in
which there’s no war, or famine, oppression, or brutality;
one vast and ecumenical
holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a
common profit, in which
all men will hold a share of stock; all necessities
provided, all anxieties
tranquilized, all boredom amused.[3]
There
it is, our world in a nutshell, nearly 45 years ago. And things have only gotten worse since.
But then, came the second
coincidence. After watching Network,
I saw the Charlie Chaplin film The
Great Dictator. I thought, why not
watch a film (from 1940, no less) that makes Adolf Hitler look like the “ruddy
little ignoramus” (J.R.R. Tolkien’s descriptive phrase) that he really was? What I did not expect was that Chaplin,
playing both the Hitler character and a Jewish barber look-alike who gets
mistaken for him, would end the film with a rousing, sanity-inducing speech,
delivered by the barber to the gathered forces of the “Phooey” (their
parodistic form of der Fuhrer) when
he is mistaken for the tyrant. It is one
of the most beautiful speeches I have ever heard on film, and one everyone
ought to hear. Chaplin begins the speech
just after he has been introduced as the emperor:
I’m sorry. I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want
to rule or conquer
anyone. I should like to help everyone,
if possible—Jew,
Gentile, black man,
white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are
like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness,
not by each other’s misery.
We don’t want to hate
and despise one another. In this world
there’s room for
everyone, and the good
Earth is rich, and can provide for everyone.
The way of
life can be free and
beautiful. But we have lost the
way. Greed has poisoned
men’s souls, has
barricaded the world with hate, has goosestepped us into misery
and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut
ourselves in.
Machinery that gives
abundance has left us in want. Our
knowledge has made us
cynical, our cleverness
hard and unkind. We think too much and
feel too little.
More than machinery, we
need humanity. More than cleverness, we
need
kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities life will be violent,
and all will
be lost.
The airplane and the
radio have brought us closer together.
The very nature of
these inventions cries
out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal
brotherhood, for the
unity of us all. Even now my voice is
reaching millions
throughout the world,
millions of despairing men, women, and little children,
victims of a system that
makes men torture, and imprison innocent people. To
those who can hear me, I
say, do not despair. The misery that is
now upon us is
but the passing of
greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human
progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators
die. And the power they took
from the people will return
to the people. And so long as men die,
liberty will
never perish.
Soldiers, don’t give
yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you,
who regiment your lives,
tell you want to do, what to think, or what to feel; who
drill you, doubt you,
treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give
yourselves to these
unnatural men—machine men, with machine minds, and
machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!
You
have a love of humanity
in your hearts. You don’t hate. Only the unloved hate—
the unloved and the
unnatural. Soldiers, don’t fight for
slavery. Fight for liberty.
In the seventeenth
chapter of St. Luke it is written: the Kingdom of God is within
man; not one man nor a group
of men, but in all men. In you, you the
people that
have the power—the power
to create machines, the power to create happiness.
You the people have the
power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this
life a wonderful
adventure. Then in the name of
democracy, let us use that power.
Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world
that will give man a
chance to work, that
will give you the future, and old age a security. By the
promise of these things,
brutes have risen to power. But they
lie. They do not
fulfill that
promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves, but they enslave
the people! Now, let us fight to fulfill that
promise. Let us fight to free the world,
to do away with national
barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and
intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world
where science and
progress will lead to
all men’s happiness. Soldiers, in the
name of democracy, let
us all unite![4]
If
only they had listened…
If nothing else, a film like this
makes you reflect on how no war—not even the Second World War—is
inevitable. In fact, I can think of a
few different books that argue that there were ways the war could have been avoided. But Chaplin’s speech makes me think of more immediately
relevant things, too. Right now, as we
face continuing financial troubles, exacerbated by global pandemic, and
increasing reminders of income inequality, troubled race relations, and other
forms of polarization, we need very much to hear the Little Tramp’s calm
reassurance that “We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that.” I choose to believe that deep down, it is
true that “We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s
misery. We don’t want to hate and
despise one another.” Really, it is fear
that makes us do so; fear that the good times are over, that there isn’t enough
to go around. It was such fear—in
part—which motivated Hitler and the Nazis to push for more Lebensraum (room to live), and such fears are part of the
motivation behind modern resurgences of white supremacy but Chaplin reminds us that “In this world
there’s room for everyone, and the good Earth is rich, and can provide for
everyone.”
I was also reminded of this recently
while reading Robert Zubrin’s newest book, the
Case for Space, a book which I can and do recommend highly to all. He points out that Germany today is both
richer and more populous than it was in the 1930’s, that, contra men like
Thomas Malthus and Adolf Hitler, rising populations often coincide with a rise
in living standards. This is true because,
as Chaplin tells the troops, “You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!”
And men are inventors and discoverers.
Zubrin reminds us that what counts as a resource depends on our
ingenuity, and what is seen as a pollutant is usually a resource in the wrong
place, failing to be properly used (for example, high concentrations of carbon
dioxide in the air means more carbon
dioxide dissolved in the ocean, making it more acidic, but add the right
micronutrients to the water, and the same gas is consumed by massive blooms of
plankton, which then feed fish in large numbers—from noxious gas to fish
dinner, with just a little proper management).
So, as Zubrin emphasizes, there really was no reason to wage war in the
1930’s, and fighting over resources in general is foolish; working together to
better find and utilize resources—that is the way to make life free and
beautiful.
Today, it is as Chaplin said:
“Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want.” Why?
Because it has contributed to the enrichment of the “nations” of this
world, the corporations and their stockholders, while it has enabled the disemployment,
misemployment, unemployment, and underemployment of so many—the phenomenon of
the “jobless recovery.” Consider the
words of history professor Victor Davis Hanson in a speech he gave at Hillsdale
College in 2019: “If you drive through Palo Alto [California, in Silicon
Valley], you’ll see people living in RVs because they can’t afford to buy or
rent a home—and these are people working for Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Oracle,
and Apple, with a total market capitalization of nearly $4 trillion.”
If I may speak as a sci-fi geek for
just a moment: What the frack?
So, what do we do about the
situation? What do we do when “Greed has
poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate”? Chaplin tells us, “More than machinery, we
need humanity. More than cleverness, we
need kindness and gentleness. Without
these qualities life will be violent, and all will be lost.” So very true.
Sometimes it takes something like a
pandemic to shock us out of all the ways we have “shut ourselves in” and made
ourselves “cynical…hard and unkind.” In
some places, and in some ways, at least, our common suffering of late has
brought out the better angels of our nature, from the 2 months of free internet
we were offered so we could finish the school year online, to the checks the
government promised to send out—even if many of us are still waiting for ours.
As we all struggle together to move
forward in this dark and difficult time, let us not forget the vision suggested
at the end of this speech, “a new world, a decent world that will give man a
chance to work, that will give you the future, and old age a security.” Increasingly, all three of these seem
threatened, as people struggle to find decent jobs, hope for a future, and
security as they age. What is the
solution? While I may not be an
economist, I do read them, and my reading suggests that the simplest solution
to our situation can be spelled with three simple letters: GMI. A Guaranteed Minimum Income is a simple
concept: America has an enormous economic productivity; a GMI would insure each
member of the community, each citizen, received a portion of that. Some of the wealth of the wealthiest (this
would probably mean the corporations and their owners) would be extracted
through taxation each year, and distributed evenly, with each person receiving
the same amount. This amount would be
enough to keep a person from homelessness and starvation, and so could serve as
a safety net against unemployment, underemployment, etc. Such a system could replace the eclectic,
complicated, inefficient, and expensive bureaucracies of our current welfare
state with a simple system of—yes, I’ll say it—wealth redistribution (or
perhaps it should just read: distribution).
It is an eminently logical solution.
And one of the biggest names in
capitalist economics thought so too.
There are those who would have us believe that there are but two options
when it comes to the structure of an economy: unfettered competition and
conflict of a practically Darwinian bloodiness, or the microscopic
mismanagement of the economy by a centralized state such as we saw in the
Soviet Union. There are in fact multiple
options—one of which, distributism, has to my knowledge, never been tried (just
like Christianity[5])—and
those who wish to remain in the realm of the free market need not take Charles
Darwin as their intellectual father altogether.
F.A. Hayek, for example, in his book The Road to Serfdom, acknowledged that, in a free market system,
while it was impossible to guarantee that a person in specific job would
continue to be employed or paid a specific wage, it was indeed both possible and
desirable, without disturbing the free market, to provide the sort of social
safety net that would guarantee a certain minimal income, and so a limited sort
of financial security, to all.
The ninth chapter of this, Hayek’s
most well-known work (well-known, but apparently often unread, like so many
classics) bears the title “Security and Freedom.” The second paragraph of that chapter begins
to explain two types of economic security, one both attainable and desirable,
one unattainable in a free market system:
It will be well to
contrast at the outset the two kinds of [financial] security: the
limited one, which can be achieved for all, and which is
therefore no privilege but
a
legitimate object of desire; and absolute security, which in a
free society cannot
be achieved for all and
which ought not to be given as a privilege—except in a
few special instances,
such as that of the judges, where complete independence is
of paramount importance. These two kinds of security are, first, security against
severe
physical privation, the certainty of a given minimum of sustenance for all;
and second, the security
of a given standard of life, or of the relative position
which one person or
group enjoys compared with others; or, as
we may put it
briefly,
the security of a minimum income and the security of
the particular
income the person is
thought to deserve. We shall presently
see that this
distinction largely
coincides with the distinction between the
security which can
be
provided for all outside of and supplementary to the market system
and the
security which can be
provided only for some and only by controlling or
abolishing the market
[emphases added].
There
you have it. From the pen of one of the
giants of capitalism: “the security of a
minimum income,” in a book written in 1944 (just four years after The Great Dictator). I also hear that capitalist granddaddy Adam
Smith considered joint stock companies—and so, corporations—immoral ways to
misuse other people’s money, and so prone to inevitable corruption.
It is amazing what one learns by
actually reading the classics, instead of just watching television, isn’t
it? Ironically, I only discovered this
passage in Hayek while tracking down what turned out to by the opening line of
Hayek’s third paragraph in the same chapter, after I found it quoted in Martin Ford’s
book Rise of the Robots: “There is no
reason why[,] in a society which has reached the general level of wealth which
ours has attained[,] the first kind of security [the aforementioned minimum
income] should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom.”
And there you have it: guaranteed
minimum income (GMI. Q.E.D.). As Ford notes elsewhere in Rise of the Robots, “[A] basic [minimum]
income...is fundamentally a market oriented approach to providing a minimal
safety net, and its implementation would make other less efficient mechanisms
unnecessary…the motivation to work certainly matters, but in a country as wealthy
as the United States, perhaps that incentive does not need to be so extreme as
to elicit the specters of homelessness and destitution.” (259-60; 279).
Amen.
All this thinking about money and
incomes puts me in mind of something I read recently in a book boldly titled The Socialist Manifesto. While the book itself was largely a disappointment,
I did manage to salvage two rather visionary passages from it. One notes the crucial role the climate crisis
plays in our particular historical moment: “The intensification of the climate
crisis will be the test by which future generations judge us, much as we look
back to the action (or lack thereof) taken against fascism in the 1920’s and
‘30’s”(240). But the moment in the book
that most struck me, Christian, Catholic, and general Roddenberrian that I am,
was this:
“At
its core, to be a socialist is to assert the moral worth of every person, no
matter who they are, where they’re from, or what they did. With any luck, future generations will look
back at the time when life outcomes were accidents of birth with shock and
disgust, the same way we look back on more extreme forms of exploitation and
oppression—slavery, feudalism, and so on—that have already been done away with”
(26). What a lovely thought.
How do we achieve such a world? How do we make this a world where, to
paraphrase the scriptures of the Church, “greed, which is idolatry,”[6]
and “the love of money[, which] is the root of all evils”[7]
are both considered vices to be avoided, rather than the very driving force of
our economic system; a world where, to quote one of the scriptures of
Roddenberrianism, “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in
our lives. [Instead] We work to better
ourselves and the rest of humanity”?
Well, we might start by following the advice of our economic
forefathers, like Smith and Hayek. If we
want life to be “free and beautiful,” perhaps we should try to establish the
mixture of “security and freedom” of which Hayek writes, a free market system
which nevertheless—outside the market, but not contrary to it—provides each
citizen enough to stay alive and stable with trying to participate in that
market, despite its ups and downs.
Perhaps—though, today it would appear the more radical of these two
ideas, and by far the more impossible—we should revisit what Smith says about
joint-stock companies. If the founding
document of modern capitalism saw such entities as evil, perhaps we should
listen again to Arthur Jensen’s speech, and consider how we got here, and
whether that is where we really want to be.
[1]
And you thought computers caused this…
[2]
This speech begins just before the 64-minute mark.
[3]
You will find this speech 93 minutes in.
[4]
This speech starts just six minutes from the end of the film.
[5]
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who, like his friend Hillaire Belloc, is closely
associated with the idea of distributism, once remarked, “Christianity has not
been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.”
[6]
Colossians 3.5
[7]
I Timothy 6.10. “All evils” is closer to
the sense of the original Greek.
