paul mccord writes here

Part four in a series of monologues and short dialogues from Richard Linklater's film Waking Life. This one is the shortest so far, and speaks of chaos and the silent majority.

Self-destructive man feels completely alienated, utterly alone. He's an outsider to the human community. He thinks to himself, "I must be insane." What he fails to realize is that society has, just as he does, a vested interest in considerable losses, in catastrophes. These wars, famines, floods, and quakes meet well defined needs. Man wants chaos. In fact, he's got to have it: depressions, strife, riots, murder, all this dread. We're irresistibly drawn to that almost orgiastic state created out of death and destruction. It's in all of us. We revel in it.

Sure, the media tries to put a sad face on these things, painting them up as great human tragedies, but we all know the function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world. No! Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them. The powers that be want us to be passive observers. And they haven't given us any other options outside the occasional, purely symbolic, participatory act of voting. You want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left?

I feel the time has come to project my own inadequacies and dissatisfactions into the socio-political and scientific schemes. Let my own lack of a voice be heard. *sets himself on fire*

President Richard Nixon in 1969 used the term "silent majority" to refer to a specific percentage of a given population that does not publicly express their opinions. From WikiPedia: "Specifically, when Nixon used it for the first time, it referred to those Americans who did not join in the large demonstrations against the [establishment], who did not engage in riots, who did not join in the Counterculture, and who did not loudly thrust their opinions on others through public discourse or the media..."

The above monologue is more of a direct tribute to the Counterculture, the collective whose values and norms are widely at odds with the socio-political mainstream, as well as an attempt to justify chaos and civil disobedience in the face of a mainstream culture that is at odds with how one believes the world really should be.

My only concerns with this little speech is a glaring oversight: there is only one culture in the world of any significant size that can even remotely be considered "conservative", and it isn't really -- it's a conservative-liberal hybrid that is merely doing everything it can to resist the fall into a socialist-communist hybrid like every other nation in the world. Maybe socialism or communism is the best political system for most of the world's nations, but to remove the last standing test of that theory would be a grave mistake, and the incessant attempts to make this country more like the others is just as idiotic -- because how can we really compare the difference in systems and really know what's best for anyone if we only allow ourselves one of them?

I say there are only two reasons why American "conservatism" doesn't seem to work: (1) it is constantly bastardized by American liberals who sabotage any public policy or act that seems conservative in nature; (2) conservatism in America is too closely tied to a particular brand of religious morality that it attempts to apply to everyone. Fix these two problems, and conservatism is essentially a more pragmatic (less idealistic) version of American liberalism.