In the 1981 movie “Dinner with Andre” two men are conversing at a table about the nature of human beings. In no way was this satire however it became one of the most sardonic and accurate descriptions of the plight of modern man.
One of the men began speaking “we’re all bored now but has it ever occurred to you that the process that creates this boredom and that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money and that all of this is much more dangerous and it’s not just a question of individual service. I mean just a few days ago I met this man and I greatly admire him he is a Swedish physicist Gustav …. and he told me that he no longer watches television he doesn’t read newspapers and he doesn’t read magazines he’s completely cut them out of his life because he really does feel that we’re living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now and that everything that you’re doing here now contributes to turning you into a robot.
When I was at [back home] I met this extraordinary English tree expert who devoted his life to saving trees he had just got back from Washington … lobbying to save the redwoods. 84 years old he always travels with a backpack as he never knows where he’s gonna be tomorrow and when I met him he said to me “where are you from?”
“and I said New York”
He said New York? Yes that’s a very interesting place you know a lot of New Yorkers keep talking about the fact that they want to leave and never do.
And I said ohh yes and he said
“why do you think they don’t leave?” I gave them different panel theories he said
“ohh I don’t think it’s that way at all” he said “I think New York is the new model for the new concentration camp where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves and the inmates are the guards and they have this ride in this thing they built they put their prison and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners and as a result they no longer have having been lobotomized the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or to even see it as a prison” and then he went into his pocket and he took out a seat for a tree and he said this is a pine tree put it in my hand and he said “escape before it’s too late.”
“see actually for two or three years now Chiquita (the name of the other man) and I have had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out and we really feel like Jews in Germany in the late 30s get out of here of course the problem is where to go because it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction see I think it’s quite possible that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before it was extinguished and that this is the beginning of the rest of the future now that from now on they’ll simply be all these robots walking around feeling nothing thinking nothing and they’ll be nobody left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being with feelings and thoughts and that history and memory are right now being erased and soon nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet.”
Posted by Gavin Mounsey on YouTube