Thought For The Day

   “Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Villagers, students, this is the Professor speaking. I have an urgent message for you. You are being tricked! Speedlearn is an abomination! It is slavery! If you wish to be free, there is only one way, destroy the General! Learn this and learn it well, the General must be destroyed!”

    So the Professor wasn’t at all happy with the type of teaching technique he was forced to employ in the Village, and we clearly know what he thought about Speedlearn. It’s all very well sending a message out to the citizens of the Village to destroy the General, but the Villagers do not know where the General is, or for that matter that the General is a machine, the General could be a person. And in any case it seems highly unlikely that they would have got anywhere near the General’s office in the Town Hall to carry out any kind of sabotage. But then I’m forgetting No.12 of Administration, he could have by-passed the security check-points, leading the citizens straight to the Generals office!

   Clearly the idea behind transmitting that Professor’s message via the Sublimator device was to implant the Professor’s message into the minds of the students and Villagers, but what might have happened then? Would the students and Villagers have been turned into an angry mob which would have gone rampaging through the Village until they found the General, with the aid of No.12 to guide them. We have seen what “mob rule” can do in the Village, had the baying, screaming mob in ‘Dance of the Dead’ laid their hands on the Prisoner No.6, who had been sentenced to death, they’d have probably torn him limb from limb with their bare hands! The mob who turned on the Unmutual No.6 in ‘A Change of Mind,’ attacking him with umbrellas, manhandling him, and dragging him to the hospital in order to have a leucotomy, the isolation of the aggressive frontal lobes, a once terrible and barbaric operation which the doctor-No.86 has now almost civilised. Then there’s the lynch mob who hanged Johnson in Harmony. So imagine a maddened mob rampaging through the Village, at the head of them No.12. Imagine them rampaging through the Town Hall, breaking down the door of the General’s office, brushing the Professor aside as they turned their anger onto the General……smashing the machine as the Luddites smashed the looms and machines during the early 1800's.

I’ll be seeing you