I am watching a bunch of paranoiac dystopian films from the 1970’s. The Criterion Channel opened up a nice collection of films in that vein today.
We were once terrified that the individual’s needs would be crushed under the heel of an unfeeling, pluralistic autocracy—that individualism would die, and we’d all be oppressed beneath a giant dun-colored boot of monoculture.
Instead, in our equally sad—but actual—future, the masses suffer and starve and toil and lose their teeth while seven hereditary barons clutch all the wealth.
That has always been the order of human oppression, by the way. All of history is a story of feudalism, with a few brief forays into humanism sprinkled in for color.
We let our Cold-War paranoia skew our eyesight in the 1970’s. We were afraid of things that don’t even make sense.
