Pour encourager les autres.
In Stanley Kubrick's film Paths of Glory, Kirk Douglas plays a World War 1 French Colonel who refuses to obey a suicidal attack order. The Top Brass deal with this by choosing three soldiers at random to be executed. Within the system, the lower orders must obey the orders of their commanders no matter how ludicrous they are. For if the command structure were to falter, who knows what might happen?
Simply put, if command structures do break down then communication will break loose. It is in order to keep the beautiful twin beasts of describing and explaining in their cage that events like those depicted in the film have occured, and continue to occur, throughout history. Describing and explaining are not a danger to us, they are a danger to those in power and those that serve that power, and that is their threat. At the same time, Bela Lugosi must remain buried, his head severed from his neck, to ensure he does not rise and give blood and energy to the living.
Information like that of Paths of Glory helps people to understand how things work, and powerful people don't like it. After its release in 1957, the French Government put pressure on distributors to ensure that it wasn't seen, and was only released in France in 1975.
"People who understand physics understand the way it works. If they want to bother with the details they'll look them up. Pretty much the same is true about understanding the world. Education is a system of imposed ignorance. It is a system of indoctrination. It is a system which drives out of you a lot of the capacity to understand things."
- Noam Chomsky.
Three years after the French people were finally deemed fit by their government to watch Paths of Glory, I was watching my first World Cup. It was a very different time, because not only was Scotland one of the 16 teams competing, their manager had gone on record stating that Scotland could win it.
Naturally enough, I settled down to watch the first game against Peru expecting Scotland to show these primitive people a thing or two. I remember someone mentioning that some of the Peruvian players didn't know how old they were. What kind of place was it were people didn't know how old they were? Surely and steadily, the world cup began to drip interesting and strange information. Especially when this kind of thing started to happen-
Peru, dismissed by many commentators beforehand, turned out to be brilliant. Later, I would wonder about why it meant so much to Austria to beat Germany and about the mysterious way that Peru fell apart to lose 6-0 to Argentina, when the hosts happened to need a 4 goal victory to advance to the final.
Even later, I would realise that throughout the tournament I had not once heard the simple fact that Argentina was a military dictatorship that was actively disappearing people. Why wouldn't people mention this information? Do people suppress information because their culture demands it? Is this how things work?
99 years previously to the Argentina World Cup , another man who didn't know when he was born was meeting his former owner. This man was the freed slave Frederick Douglass.
When Douglass was 12 years old, the wife of his owner began to teach him to read. Her husband was enraged by this act, explaining that, if slaves were to read, they would be dissatisfied and want freedom. In fact, it was illegal to teach slaves how to read. This was how things worked in the U.S. at that time.
People were denied information because it might give them ideas.
Douglass eventually became an important abolitionist and, simply through his power of communication, ensured that otherwise ignorant people could behold an ex-slave who was as intelligent and articulate as any man.
Yet the United States today still has many problems with race relations. The efforts at communication that Frederick Douglass made have consistently been lassoed and hog-tied by the powerful groups who care only for their own profit; who can not recognise the natural and fitting beauty of describing and explaining, who can not understand that Bela Lugosi is not a creature to be feared, but is instead ourselves, our own true selves, and any society that buries and fears its own true self will eventually find out what grows on the grave that we have buried our own souls in.
The Pentagon has twice as many bathrooms as it needs.
Modern U.S. race relations are explored in the brilliant television show The Wire. It should be noted that this drama attempts to describe and explain how things work in a society like the city of Baltimore in which it is set. It is blatantly clear when watching the show that this kind of art on TV has consistently been as rare as a Snow Leopard. And, in a society of commodification, is becoming increasingly rare everywhere.
In interviews, David Simon, the creator of The Wire, has talked about the influence on his show of Paths of Glory.
Information gives ideas.. And logically, better information, for example: better stories, give better ideas. That's how things work.
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