"You’ve had ten years in this game, Jonathon. So this will be your special program. The people at Energy feel that this should be to announce your retirement.

“You know the game serves a definite social purpose. Nations are bankrupt, corporate wars are a thing of the past. Now we are making decisions on a global basis. Corporate society takes care of everything. All it asks of anyone, all it has EVER asked of anyone, EVER, is not to interfere with management decisions. You must know, Jonathon, all decisions concerning you are for your own good.”

Jonathon frowns.

“You just got through a game, Jonathon. You’re tired. Think about it, and understand it…DO understand it,”

This scene, from the movie “Rollerball”, says in chilling terms what it is like to live in a “global” society. The conversation is between Jonathon E, the Rollerball champion, and Mr. Bartholomew, the head man at Energy.

Since there are no more wars, disputes between nations are played out in various cities in stadiums around the world on huge circular tracks. The athletes are on roller skates and motorcycles; delivering plenty of action, and lots of blood-letting violence that the crowds experience vicariously.

It sounds like a big improvement over what we have today, doesn’t it? But there is a terrifying catch to it. Energy, the corporate “big brother”, makes every decision, controls everything, and woe be to the individual who does not follow the party line and tries to think for himself.

Jonathon E does still not understand why he is being forced out of the games, and Bartholomew continues: “I don’t understand your resistance, Jonathon. You know I’ve always considered your situation, and your needs. Now let’s consider mine. No player is greater than the game itself.  The velocity of the ball, the awful physics of the track, and men playing by an odd set of rules. It’s not a game a man is supposed to grow strong in. You appreciate that, don’t you?”

Jonathon E doesn’t see it that way. He insists on going to Tokyo with his team to play the next game. Bartholomew explains why this is not possible.

“You’re bargaining for the right to stay in a horrible social spectacle. It has its purposes, and you’ve served those purposes brilliantly. Why argue when you can quit? You say you want to know how decisions are made. You don’t NEED to know! Why argue about decisions you’re not powerful enough to make for yourself? Energy will treat you well, you know that.”

“I’m playing with my team.”

“Too late. The rule change is announced. There’s no going back!”

“Then I’ll see you in Tokyo.”

Bartholomew is livid. “You can be MADE to quit!”

“Don’t tell me what I can do!” Jonathon leaves, and of course, shows his independence and becomes sole survivor in the final game.

But hey, that’s a movie. The real world is much different.

Or is it?

The conversation, even taken out of context, and even in just a movie, vividly describes the stifling restrictions and imminent danger to individual freedom that waits for us in a “global” world.

Several things here should be recorded in your mind.. First, the subtlety and deception of the “corporate” approach---“for your own good.” Second, the anger that arises from the “corporation” when its decisions are questioned. Third, the undisguised threat when its warning is totally ignored.

Many Americans, if they saw Rollerball at all, will either have forgotten the movie by now, swept from their mind by the idea that something as ridiculous as this could be anything but fiction; or gotten the message but never connected it to a Big Brother scenario. They were too used to thinking of tyranny only in terms of Orwell’s brutal and chilling 1984. 

But tyranny is not always so obvious. More often it comes in the guise of “sensible” acts hidden in innocuous forms, such as a restriction here, a new regulation there, a warning somewhere else, until freedoms, independent thinking, and personal decision-making is finally wiped out for good, and the global society, once a thing of disbelief or derision, is now your master.

With all the news you read, with all the high-level decisions being made, with all the promises you get, and with each step taken toward a New World Order, think for a minute about the message in Rollerball, then ask yourself if you want to live in that kind of world.

But then, it’s only a game, isn’t it?

James T. Moore
http://jamestmoore.us/