Positive Liberty

In a post below I mentioned that The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe is a classic 20th century story, concerned with the classic 20th century themes of civilization and freedom against darkness and totalitarianism. Yesterday, watching the Sci Fi Channel’s Twilight Zone marathon, I was struck by another true masterpiece of 20th century storytelling: Jerome Bixby’s episode “It’s A Good Life.” When literary historians put together the Twentieth Century Reader of great literary encapsulations of 20th century themes, Bixby’s classic story will be among them.

The story, as you’ll probably recall, centers around a 10-year-old “monster”: a child (played masterfully by Bill Mumy) with the ability to do anything he wants with his mind, and, even more chillingly, to read the minds of the few people he allows to live. They must always think “happy thoughts,” and praise him for everything he does, no matter how horrible, because if they don’t, he will turn them into horrible things, or “wish them into the cornfield,” meaning into oblivion. He is the ultimate totalitarian dictator.

What’s unique about Bixby’s story is the psychic element: the boy’s family and neighbors must always think happy thoughts, no matter how awful their predicaments. Even their own minds afford them no privacy from the monster’s reach. And since every desire or taste that diverges from the monster’s whims are prohibited, the psychological strain of constantly lying to themselves drives the people very nearly insane. In one especially effective scene, a neighbor receives a Perry Como record for his birthday—but, of course, the monster doesn’t like Perry Como, and won’t let the neighbor play it. The neighbor begins to drink too much brandy, the depression and frustration overwhelms him, and he ends up begging someone to kill the boy and “end this!” But of course nobody does, and the neighbor is transformed into a jack-in-the-box before his wife’s horrified eyes—and is then sent to the cornfield. But she and the others are forced to say “it’s good that you did that.”

If there is a better literary expression of life in the Stalin-style, Kim Jong Il-style, brutal totalitarian dictatorship, I’ve never seen it.

Update: Totalitarianism, of course, is a twentieth century invention, but the peculiar psychological slavery that it implies is really not entirely new. It’s just that modern technology gave the masters of these dictatorships unprecedented power to oversee and control the populace. Herodotus, however, describes the sort of self-sacrificial subjugation that would become the hallmark of the totalitarian state when he tells the story of the Persian king Astyages killing the son of a political upstart, and then serving the son to him at a banquet:

Then when it seemed that Harpagos was satisfied with food, Astyages asked him whether he had been pleased with the banquet; and when Harpagos said that he had been very greatly pleased, they who had been commanded to do this brought to him the head of his son covered up, together with the hands and the feet; and standing near they bade Harpagos uncover and take of them that which he desired. So when Harpagos obeyed and uncovered, he saw the remains of his son; and seeing them he was not overcome with amazement but contained himself: and Astyages asked him whether he perceived of what animal he had been eating the flesh: and he said that he perceived, and that whatsoever the king might do was well pleasing to him. Thus having made answer and taking up the parts of the flesh which still remained he went to his house; and after that, I suppose, he would gather all the parts together and bury them.

§ 119 (emphasis added).

Update 2: Pharyngula makes an interesting suggestion that the episode is really an indictment of Christianity (or of religion generally). Perhaps! It has always seemed to me that Orwell’s classic schema of dictatorial exploitation is eerily similar to the way organized religion works. Let me explain: in 1984, Big Brother teaches the people that if they don’t give him absolute and total devotion, the evil bogeyman Goldstein will get them. And, in Animal Farm, Napoleon tells the animals that the evil bogeyman Snowball will get them if they don’t subject themselves to his every command. Interesting how this parallels the religious mechanism whereby Satan and his minions will get you if you don’t give unswerving and unquestioning devotion to God and His earthly deputies. As Mencken said, “The whole business of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

In any case, I don’t think Bixby was going for an allegory of either religion or communism. The story is not an allegory—it’s an artistic investigation of the mental existence in the kind of world based on the war against the self. That is the fundamental evil which unites religion and dictatorship—and other things, such as abusive marriages.

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