The Mad Mooney - Part 3
And finally, from the film "Network" again, the final monologues of Howard Beal:
Last night, I got up here and asked you people to stand up and fight for your heritage, and you did and it was beautiful. Six million telegrams were received at the White House.
The Arab takeover of C.C. and A. has been stopped. The people spoke, the people won. It was a radiant eruption of democracy.
But I think that was it, fellers. That sort of thing isn't likely to happen again.
Because, in the bottom of all our terrified souls, we all know that democracy is a dying giant, a sick, sick dying, decaying political concept, writhing in its final pain. I don't mean the United States is finished as a world power. The United States is the most powerful, the richest, the most advanced country in the world, light-years ahead of any other country.
And I don't mean the Communists are going to take over the world. The Communists are deader than we are.
What's finished is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It's the individual that's finished. It's the single, solitary human being who's finished. It's every single one of you out there who's finished.
Because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. This is a nation of two hundred odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter- than-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings and as replaceable as piston rods --
Well, the time has come to say: is dehumanization such a bad word?
Because good or bad, that's what's so. The whole world is becoming humanoid, creatures that look human but aren't. The whole world, not just us. We're just the most advanced country, so we're getting there first -- the whole world's people are becoming mass-produced, programmed, wired, insensate things useful only to produce and consume other mass-produced things, all of them as unnecessary and useless as we are.
That's the simple truth you have to grasp, that human existence is an utterly futile and purposeless thing -- because once you've grasped that, then the whole universe becomes orderly and comprehensible.
We are right now living in what has to be called a corporate society, a corporate world, a corporate universe. This world quite simply is a vast cosmology of small corporations orbiting around larger corporations who, in turn, revolve around giant corporations -- and this whole, endless, ultimate cosmology is expressly designed for the production and consumption of useless things --