Invitations to the Cannibal's Banquet
The first task before accepting is to make sure you aren't on the menu.
There are themes that run through great philosophical works and literature that reveal our future.
I would propose this isn’t because the authors are uniquely positioned to be seers with trusty crystal balls, it is simply because they are astute observers of human nature and the human condition – and we do tend to be repetitive beasts. Much of our actions are as predictable as the great migrations of bison herds of yore, geese honking overhead in the spring and fall or the flights of the hummingbirds. At our most basic, we’re mammal versions of the swallows of Capistrano.
As Kipling wrote in “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”:
“As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man---
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:---
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”
The great novels - like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984 and Rand’s opus, Atlas Shrugged - are all noted by classic liberals as such examples of predictive literature. Cinema has produced visions such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and 1973’s Soylent Green but perhaps the most accurate depiction of our future is found in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. In “The Time Machine”, the people of Earth had been split into two different but related human species, suggested in the book that the separation may have been the result of a widening split between different social classes.
The Morlocks lived underground, tending machinery, and providing food, clothing, and inventory for the Eloi, they have dull grey-to-white skin, chinless faces, large greyish-red eyes with a capacity for reflecting light, and flaxen hair on the head and back.
Wells wrote of the Eloi: “These Eloi were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon – probably saw to the breeding of.”
It’s easy to see the Eloi represented by the majority of Americans who go to work every day, pay their taxes and take care of their families – most with so little interest in, or awareness of, politics and research a new flat screen with more interest than who is in the White House or sits on the Supreme Court.
The contemporary Morlocks (or barbarians, if you prefer) are those single-minded beasts among us who live to control the lives of others through command of the levers of the government Leviathan, the direction of society and culture, and economic life.
A few weeks ago, I took it upon myself to report on the plight of James Cameron and his Avatar franchise. Cameron produced the first Avatar in 2009 to grand acclaim, for several reasons, but one of them was that he put an anti-colonialist, anti-human, anti-capitalist message on screens, an allegory that highlighted the Howard Zinn view of American history. The natives of Pandora were the heroes, fighting off an invasion of the Earther military-industrial complex.
But 2009 was before the Morlocks became woke – but the tide was beginning to rise thanks to every failure and opposition to President Obama being explained as racism.
In 2022, Cameron’s latest Avatar, which shares a plot with the earlier iteration, is now attacked because a white man is responsible for it, attacked for cultural appropriation for “stealing” the ideas for the characters and setting from indigenous people and displaying a “white savior” complex because some of the leaders of the Na’vi, the native Pandorans, were “white” souls transferred into blue Na’vi bodies.
The contemporary Morlocks express a similarity to Wells’ creatures, they are cannibals - metaphorically, of course, because they don’t literally consume human flesh, but they do capture things that make up the life energy of the modern Eloi – tax dollars, cultural heritage, social mores and traditions, productivity – all these are taken.
These are people who live off Eloi - and from time to time are known to eat their own.
Even if you have been a card-carrying member of the Morlock race, if you step out of line with their orthodoxy, and you will be eaten. You will join the ranks of Elon Musk, James Cameron, Glen Greenwald, Dr. Suess, J.K Rowling, Gina Carano, and many others who have suffered through a cannibal’s feast.
Currently Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Schellenberger, no rabid right-wingers but who all are writing about the Twitter files, are the most recent to be invited to the Grand Morlock Banquet.
One thing to remember about our age: when you sit down to dinner with Morlocks, it is best to make sure you aren’t on the menu.
Excellent literary grade metaphor. Mr. Smith, you should write a dystopian novel. I will subscribe to buy the first copy.
I just read the new 2023 laws here in Ca. Looks like the Morlocks wrote them.