Was looking at
On my way to work this morning I was reading In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land by Thomas Ligotti (from his collection Teatro Grottesco) and in it the narrator says that the unspoken commandment of a northern border town was “Thou shalt not meddle.” It’s a clever way of introducing a sense of horror to the story - in a small town people not meddling in other people’s affairs would be very strange, and immediately the most likely explanation in my mind was that people were generally afraid.
Nature abhors a vacuum, they say. When we have freedom to do and say what we want, inevitably the power of that freedom is going to start consolidating, and power is the power to limit the freedom of others. Meddling in what other people can do and say, creating rules about what is decent and what isn’t, seems like it is an example of how this power consolidation works. If no one is meddling and no one is trying to separate the indecent from the decent then the only reasonable interpretation is that there is no vacuum of power, there isn’t really that much freedom.
So when Serling blames the people who are allowing the censors to do their work, I think that blame seems to fall on what people are rather than the choices that some people make. I’m not surprised I’d come at that through Ligotti since he’s about as misanthropic as one can be.
This all struck me as being like The Market. The market is just another expression of freedom with the ultimate goal of collecting up all the freedom for a small number of players. It’s like small town gossip, assigning value to everything in such a way that it assigns more value to the things that are of interest to the parties collecting power in the market. The sad side effect of freedom is that people use freedom as a weapon against one another, and that is the market at work. Down with Capitalism, comrades.
