Think This Can't Happen Here? Think Again.

Big Brother was the good guy; Winston and Julia were villains?

With so much to do to get ready for Christmas, I have not had time to prepare and write the next installment of The Distributed Nation. I will get back to it as soon as I am able. In the meantime, everyone seems to love our #FreedomShorts series, so let’s do one.

Here is the logline of The Edited, by Adam Choit:

In a dystopian world, a misfit girl enters a new high school where they teach that Big Brother was actually the hero of George Orwell's 1984 novel. Will she fight for truth or fall victim to this cult-like environment?

I won’t spoil the ending by answering that question. But I will say this: If this film seems hyperbolic, then I encourage you to think about history.

Let’s start with comparatively recent history. As I wrote back in May,

“Remember Jerry Falwell back in the 80s? We had such a good time making fun of all his wacky predictions about the slippery slope our culture was on. Well, now we have drag queens insisting that it is a human right to be able to twerk in front of your toddler, and schools letting them do just that.”

Things now are actually weirder than Falwell ever likely imagined. Indeed, if you had told even the most ‘paranoid’ social conservative that school officials would one day be encouraging girls to chop of their breasts without their parents’ knowledge, would they have believed you? The slope has turned out to be slipperier than anyone expected.

Or how about some older history? Much of this short film centers on revision of history to serve a collectivist-statist narrative. It sounds ridiculous, unless you know the story of countries like the USSR, which did exactly that—changing records in order to erase people not only physically, but from history itself.

Now you see him…

Now you don’t.

How about the school system itself depicted in The Edited? Does its creepy conformist ethos seem exaggerated and overwrought?

It in’t. As I wrote in a chapter 1 installment of The Distributed Nation, creating that level of conformity is, in fact, the goal of the public school systems of America and elsewhere.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Horace Mann cast his gaze admiringly upon the Prussian school system and began the process of emulating it here.¹ Unfortunately, the Prussian school system was not designed to nurture independent, critical thinkers exploring their own potential. It was designed to manufacture obedient workers and future soldiers for the Second Reich.

If you’ve gone to public school in America, you’ve seen for yourself how successfully that emulation has been. No doubt other countries have similar experiences.

Mann was at it a century and a half ago. Has anyone managed to put that toothpaste back in the tube? How’s that democracy working out for you? Some of the early presidents were still alive at that time—how’s that for the “good old days”?

Enter John Dewey and the progressive left who, a few decades later, doubled down and finished Mann’s (and Otto von Bismarck’s) project. Their goal was not the boilerplate pablum we hear in defense of public school today. Their goal was to use the education system to remake America in the statist/socialist/leftist/collectivist blueprint. Full stop.

America was just a few decades old when they began forcing this upon us. Has any amount of voting done anything to stop this train? Or has it been a one-way trip from there to drag queens twerking in front of your toddler?

Don’t like the word force? Perhaps you think that because we were able to vote on this, we “consented” to it. But did we? Did you? Can you escape it? Has anything improved? Do you see it going away any time soon?

Put it all together…

• A slope that can easily be slipperier than anyone imagines,

• The reality that history does get rewritten for statist-collectivist aims,

• The fact that schools are designed to squelch individualism and create conformity,

and what you’ve got is an entirely plausible vision of a near-future dystopia: