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They Live: Choose Before You Die


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Over at TheTollOnline.com, Doug "Uncola" Lynn posts this article: They Live: Choose Before You Die.

Setting the context for the quote that stood out and captured the essences of the peice:

When considering all that dystopia I am reminded of a line from the 2008 film, “The Day the Earth Stood Still” where an alien spy in a McDonalds restaurant tells the alien destructor (played by Keanu Reeves), the following regarding humanity:

I’m afraid they are not a reasonable race.  I’ve been living amongst them for seventy years now. I know them well. Any attempt to intercede with them would be futile. They are destructive, and they won’t change. The tragedy is, they know what’s going to become of them.

(Bold emphasis added.)

To the author's credit he analyses his own motives for watching Dystopian materials.

In my own case, however, I like to watch these shows to see what is being programmed, speculate as to the reasons “why” and, at the same time, try to learn some new perspectives on human nature operating under duress, and in dire circumstances.  When viewing all the vampire shows over the past several decades, I wonder if these were to prepare the masses for the bloodsucking Fabian Socialists, and financial establishment leeches, draining the life from those working to sustain society; and now that the zombie craze has swept America, it seems as if we are being prepared to war against not only each other, but while destroying the flesh-eating people of Walmart;  the dead men walking in the great and forthcoming culling soon to take place.

(Bold emphasis added.)

The author has a subconscious sense of the altruism Ayn Rand identified throughout most of her life's works without recognizing the alternative that exists:

Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth—or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces.

One more observation from a list of Doug's assessments from the show The 100.

  • Groups with no code, or law, descend into anarchy
  • Coalitions are formed by the like-minded
  • Politics are always at play within any group
  • Politics are always at play in the relations between groups
  • Allegiances change based upon circumstances
  • In matters of survival, expediency reigns supreme
  • Some leaders value the group over the individual
  • Some leaders value individuals over the group
  • Once trust has been established in a group, it becomes that group against all others
  • Groups and individuals who desire similar outcomes will form temporary alliances
  • Leaders emerge, as do traitors
  • By their actions, they are known

(Bold emphasis added.)

While most of these reference the group in some form, the individual is important enough to warrant three mentions here.

In the light of dystopian literature, a distinction comes to the forefront. Atlas Shrugged is often categorized as such, yet does not belong therein, unless Ayn Rand is mistaken in her identification of the siren call Doug "Uncola" Lynn is hearing. She trumpets a decidedly different symphonic potential.

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