{"id":3905,"date":"2012-08-27T12:29:35","date_gmt":"2012-08-27T16:29:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/wpblog\/?p=3905"},"modified":"2012-09-11T14:49:38","modified_gmt":"2012-09-11T18:49:38","slug":"commentary-i-am-not-a-number-i-am-a-free-man-the-prisoner-and-the-illusion-of-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/commentary-i-am-not-a-number-i-am-a-free-man-the-prisoner-and-the-illusion-of-freedom\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I am not a number. I am a free man!\u2019 The Prisoner and the Illusion of Freedom"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared we would become a captive audience. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in\u00a0Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny \u201cfailed to take into account man\u2019s almost infinite appetite for distractions.\u201d In\u00a0Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate would ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.<\/em>\u2014Neil Postman,\u00a0Amusing Ourselves to Death <\/em>(1985)<\/p>\n

Thus goes the strain of thought in two of the great prophetic minds of literature, not so much opposed in their rationale as intertwined like the serpentine strands of DNA. The relevance of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell lies in their fears, which in recent years are being actualized at an accelerated pace.<\/p>\n

Like the automatons of Orwell\u2019s\u00a01984<\/em>, our glazed eyes have melted into the television screen. Recent statistics, for example, indicate that approximately 1 in 7 or 42 million Americans cannot read a newspaper or even the instructions on a pill bottle.<\/p>\n

If people cannot read, or if they simply will not, the safeguard of a democracy\u2014an educated and informed citizenry\u2014is in peril. The importance of an educated citizenry, as envisioned by the architects of the American scheme of government, is that they have the analytical and intellectual wherewithal to recognize and challenge the inevitable corruption of government. Without such an education, inevitably, the people become pawns in the hands of unscrupulous government bureaucrats.<\/p>\n

Have we become pawns manipulated by a government-entertainment complex? This was the question debated in seventeen episodes of\u00a0The Prisoner<\/em>, the British television series that baffled and confused a generation and still intrigues viewers today.<\/p>\n

Regarded by many as the finest dramatic television series ever broadcast,\u00a0The Prisoner<\/em>\u00a0first aired in Great Britain 45 years ago. The subsequent summer of 1968, a summer of dissidence and unrest, sixteen of the seventeen episodes were broadcast in the United States (and reprised in the summer of 1969). The strength of this enigmatic series rode on the heels of Patrick McGoohan, who had built a reputation as the spy John Drake in the\u00a0Secret Agent<\/em>\u00a0television series. After tiring of the Drake role, McGoohan immediately fell headlong into\u00a0The Prisoner<\/em>\u00a0as he wrote, directed and otherwise hovered over the series.<\/p>\n

The themes of\u00a0The Prisoner<\/em>\u00a0are still relevant today\u2014the rise of a police state, the freedom of the individual, the perversion of science and the nature of man\u2014and they in part account for the series\u2019 cult following.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI am not a number. I am a free man,\u201d was the mantra chanted on each episode of\u00a0The Prisoner<\/em>. Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, the story centers around McGoohan, a man who finds himself living in a mysterious, self-contained, cosmopolitan community known as The Village. The Village\u2019s inhabitants are known merely by numbers, and McGoohan is Number 6.<\/p>\n

In the opening episode (\u201cThe Arrival\u201d), Number 6 meets Number 2, who explains to him that he is in The Village because information stored \u201cinside\u201d his head has made him too valuable \u201coutside.\u201d Number 6 chooses not to give in to Village authorities but struggles to maintain his own identity. \u201cI will not make any deals with you,\u201d he pointedly remarks to Number 2. \u201cI\u2019ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.\u201d Thus, Number 6 remains a prisoner, although his captivity is spent in an idyllic setting with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler.<\/p>\n

Number 6 seeks to preserve his individuality as a \u201cfree man\u201d as he tries to escape from The Village or learn the identity of Number 1, the person presumed to run The Village. But Number 6 is watched continually by surveillance cameras and other devices, and his escapes are thwarted by ominous white balloon-like spheres known as \u201crovers.\u201d In the final episode (\u201cFall Out\u201d), Number 6 overcomes his overseers and discovers that he was Number 1 all along.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Although esoteric,\u00a0The Prisoner<\/em>\u00a0was McGoohan\u2019s vehicle for translating some very definite viewpoints to the screen. As he stated in a 1982 interview:<\/p>\n

It was about the most evil human being, human essence, and that is ourselves. It is within each of us. That is the most dangerous thing on the Earth, what is within us. So, therefore, that is what I made Number 1\u2014oneself\u2014an image of oneself which he was trying to beat.<\/em><\/p>\n

The most pernicious element of this evil essence is the domination and annihilation of individuality and freedom, which are essential to human nature. Thus, initially the struggle for freedom is against oneself.<\/p>\n

Fundamentally, however,\u00a0The Prisoner<\/em>\u00a0is an epistemological exercise that focuses on the concept of reality, both in the subjective and objective sense\u2014that is, can we really know anything about anything? Is reality a mere social construct? Since society creates any knowledge that people may possess, does this mean that human beings are simply products of the given social setting from which they are manufactured? As Steven Paul Davies notes in The Prisoner Handbook<\/em> (2002): \u201cThinking for yourself is not necessarily thinking by yourself.\u201d And as Number 2 warns Number 6 in the episode entitled \u201cOnce upon a Time\u201d:<\/p>\n

Society is the place where people exist together. That is civilization. The lone wolf belongs to the wilderness. You must not grow up to be a lone wolf.<\/em><\/p>\n

Therefore, the ultimate goal of those in power is conformity to the constructs of society. This means both figuratively and literally eliminating the lone wolf, the individual. Modern psychiatry defines \u201cnormality\u201d as conformity. This \u201cmeasuring of the human psyche by psychologists,\u201d as Davies puts it, has seriously affected how we live our lives and how we view nonconformists. Media representations of \u201cnormality\u201d have become the criteria that society uses to evaluate its members. The concept of normality has become subjective as our views have changed to meet societal demands. The individual, as the term was once defined, is becoming pass\u00e9. As McGoohan commented in 1968:<\/p>\n

At this moment individuals are being drained of their personalities and being brainwashed into slaves. The inquisition of the mind by psychiatrists is far worse than the assault on the body of torturers.<\/em><\/p>\n

In a media-dominated age in which the lines between entertainment, politics and news reporting are blurred, it is extremely difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. Moreover, the struggle to remain \u201coneself in a society increasingly obsessed with conformity to mass consumerism,\u201d writes Davies, means that superficiality and image trump truth and the individual. The result is the group mind and the tyranny of mob-think.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Huxley clearly saw that people would come to love entertainment and trivia, and that those would destroy their capacity to think and eventually annihilate any freedom we may possess. Humanity\u2019s bent toward distractions\u2014that is, the bread and circuses of entertainment\u2014leads them to sell their collective souls for one more voyeuristic peek into a celebrity\u2019s life. Indeed, our society is one in which people\u2019s love of entertainment and trivia, according to Davies, has \u201cdestroyed their capacity to think and takes away their freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

McGoohan was quoted as saying that \u201cfreedom is a myth.\u201d When we think of freedom, what exactly are we talking about? After all, none of us is free to choose when and where we are born, what sex we are, who our parents are and so on. As we reflect on the question of freedom, we see that there is very little freedom at all. We are so bombarded with images, dictates, rules and punishments and stamped with numbers from the day we are born that it is a wonder we ever ponder a concept such as freedom. \u201cWe\u2019re all pawns,\u201d notes a character in Episode One, in a game that cruelly plays itself out for most of us. In essence, this means that the only hope for true freedom is to break the chains of destiny in an attempt at some momentary individualistic moment, something few ever experience.<\/p>\n

In the end, we are all prisoners of our own mind. In fact, it is in the mind that prisons are created for us. And in the lockdown of political correctness, it becomes extremely difficult to speak or act individually without being ostracized. Thus, so often we are forced to retreat inwardly into our minds, a place without bars from which we cannot escape, and into the world of video games and the Internet. That\u2019s why\u00a0The Prisoner<\/em>\u2019s existential experience of continually questioning everything, including ourselves, is so vital to any concept of individuality. It is only within this existential questioning that there is hope for what we may call freedom.<\/p>\n

The fact that\u00a0The Prisoner\u00a0<\/em>even attempts to raise such questions is astounding. It is against the meltdown of the modern mind that\u00a0The Prisoner<\/em>\u00a0stands, and it is this background that gives it increasing relevance.<\/p>\n

McGoohan\u2019s ambivalence about the concept of freedom is reflected in the surrealism of the final episode. Number 6 emerges from The Village into the center of London. The Village, then, is the present reality. In an earlier episode (\u201cThe Chimes of Big Ben\u201d), when Number 6 believes he has escaped to a Secret Service office in London, he asks his superior: \u201cI risked my life \u2026 to come back here, home, because I thought it was different \u2026 it is, isn\u2019t it? Isn\u2019t it different?\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute and editor of GadflyOnline.com. His new book The Freedom Wars (TRI Press) is available at Amazon<\/a>. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":3906,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,214,212],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3905"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3905"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4031,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3905\/revisions\/4031"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}