Blade Runner
November 2019.
Blade Runner (1982) has a distinctive aesthetic: a dark labyrinth in a nightmare technocracy.
"Early in the 21st Century, THE TYRELL CORPORATION advanced robot evolution into the NEXUS phase - a being virtually identical to a human - known as a Replicant. The NEXUS 6 Replicants were superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them. Replicants were used Off-World as slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and colonization of other planets. After a bloody mutiny by a NEXUS 6 combat team in an Off-World colony, Replicants were declared illegal on earth - under penalty of death. Special police squads - BLADE RUNNER UNITS - had orders to shoot to kill, upon detection, any trespassing Replicant. This was not called execution. It was called retirement."It is dramatic and compelling. We are drawn to ask what the film’s dramatisation of artificial consciousness is telling us: it is not just cyborg computation and task completion, but all our self-conscious human experiences of memory, emotion and meaning. As such, Blade Runner is often understood as an exploration of what ‘humanity’ is, and what being human means. However, this is to miss its role in bringing about what exists now.
Spoilers from now on. Turn back if you doubt yourself.
Set in a fictional Los Angeles, in 2019, the film has an explicit debt to Metropolis and Neo-Toyko. It is a vista of skyscrapers, millions of lit windows and huge lighted advertisements. The threatening yellow fog, split by gas flares, lightening and thunder, suggests a ruined ecosphere, but the cityscape has a detached sort of beauty, from a distance. The restrained, melancholy score suggests numbness, and turning away the mind from the painful details of the world.
At street level, however, there is no avoiding those details. It is an post-industrial social environment. The cityscape is crowded neo-Dickensian streets of steam, darkness, poverty, distrust and squalor. The rain does not stop. There is a punishing inescapable barrage of sounds and light, of vehicles, sirens, industrial machines, commercial signage and surveillance technology. Public services not so much amenities as industrial supply facilities. There is no green space. There are no animals.
This is the dystopian setting for a pulpy, tech-noir chase-thriller. Deckard, the blade runner, must find four replicants, Leon, Pris, Zhora and Roy, and kill them.
Bryant: There was an escape from the off-world colonies two weeks ago. Six replicants, three male, three female. They slaughtered twenty-three people and jumped a shuttle. An aerial patrol spotted the ship off the coast. No crew, no sight of them. Three nights ago they tried to break into Tyrell Corporation. One of them got fried running through an electrical field.It's easy to get swept up in the chase, the atmosphere, the violence, the characters. That being so, it's easy to not notice why Deckard is pursuing them, or what he is protecting. The rogue replicants are a threat to life and property, but they are not a threat to some democratic freedom. It is a serf population of worker-drones, the dispossessed and the undocumented. They only appear transiently, as street crowds and mass consumers. Living space, like Deckard's apartment, is in countless thousands of skyscraper living units - tiny, dark, cramped, with no privacy from the outside world. These are not so much homes as industrial storage.
They are a mass coerced by the authorities. The police are not there to protect them, but to contain them. Even Deckard, a Blade Runner, has no status or standing outside of enforcing the regime:
Bryant: C'mon, don't be an asshole, Deckard - you wouldn't have come if I'd just asked you to...
Deckard: I don't work here anymore. Give it to Holden, he's good.
Bryant: I did. He can breathe okay as long as nobody unplugs him... I need you, Deck. This is a bad one, the worst yet. I need the old Blade Runner, I need your magic.
Deckard: I was quit when I come in here, Bryant, I'm twice as quit now.
Bryant: Stop right where you are! You know the score, pal. If you're not cop, you're little people.
Deckard: No choice, huh?
Bryant: No choice, pal.Cop: This sector's closed to ground traffic. What are you doing here?
Deckard: I'm working. What are you doing?
Cop: Arresting you. That's what I'm doing.
Deckard: I'm Deckard. Blade Runner. Two sixty-three fifty-four. I'm filed and monitored.
Cop: Hold on. Checking. -- Okay, checked and cleared. Have a better one.Automated public announcements offer "A new life Off-World - a golden land of opportunity and adventure!" but no heroic life is possible. They are as disposable as replicants, a third-world population in the ruins of a functional society. They are like battery animals, profitable as long as conditions are cheap. They may be individuals, but they have no agency or social bonds. There is no community or civil society whose ethos can give heroic meaning to their actions. This is the order that Deckard is protecting, however reluctantly, by destroying the replicants.
TYRELL, LEON, PRIS
If they were simply evil, or amorally violent, the replicants could be eliminated without further drama. But it is a more complex picture. They are virtually identical to a human. They are superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them. As such, to function, they rely on their emotions just as humans do. Like anyone else, they use objects, such as photographs, as reservoirs of memory and meaning...
Roy [to Leon, sarcastically] : Did you get your precious photographs?..only those memories are not real:
Deckard: She's a replicant, isn't she?
Tyrell: I'm impressed. How many questions does it usually take to spot them?
Deckard: I don't get it, Tyrell.
Tyrell: How many questions?
Deckard: Twenty, thirty, cross-referenced.
Tyrell: It took more than a hundred for Rachael, didn't it?
Deckard: She doesn't know?!
Tyrell: She's beginning to suspect, I think.
Deckard: Suspect? How can it not know what it is?
Tyrell: Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell. More human than human is our motto. Rachael is an experiment, nothing more. We began to recognize in them ...strange obsessions. After all, they are emotionally inexperienced, with only a few years in which to store up the experiences which you and I take for granted. We gift them the past. We create a cushion, a pillow for their emotions, and we consequently we can control them better.
Deckard: Memories. You're talking about memories.It becomes clear that these fake memories do not save the replicants from feeling and knowing their lack of human upbringing and development:
Sebastian:... Where are your folks?
Pris: I'm sort of an orphan.Holden: They're just questions, Leon... It's a test, designed to provoke an emotional response. Shall we continue? Describe, in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about... your mother..
Leon: My mother?
Holden: Yeah.
Leon: Let me tell you about my mother...
[Leon erupts in rage, shoots Holden]They were created for slave labour: they might have been made without the consciousness to resent their conditions. Had they been built with enough resilience, their hardships would not have bothered them. That's what, in Brave New World, the alcohol in the blood-surrogate of Gamma and Delta embryos was for. However, although replicants might not be human, they have enough consciousness to appreciate their circumstances:
[Leon stops Deckard in the street]
Deckard: Leon!
Leon: How old am I?
Deckard: I don't know!
[Leon throws Deckard against the wall]
Leon: My birthday is April 10, 2017. How long do I live?
Deckard: Four years...
Leon: More than you. Painful to live in fear, isn't it? Nothing is worse than having an itch you can never scratch...Wake up! Time to die!RACHAEL
Rachael is an advanced replicant who works as the assistant to Eldon Tyrell. When first seen, she appears poised and confident. She looks about twenty two. She experiences the same circumstances in a different way.
Deckard: She doesn't know?!
Tyrell: She's beginning to suspect, I think.
Deckard: Suspect? How can it not know what it is?If Rachael does not know she is a replicant, it is because she was made that way...
Tyrell: Rachael is an experiment, nothing more. ...but her suspicions are enough to precipitate a crisis:
Bryant: That-- That skin job that you V-K'ed at the Tyrell Corporation, Rachael. Disappeared. Vanished. Didn't even know she was a replicant. Something to do with a brain implant says Tyrell. Come on, Gaff. Drink some for me, pal.She reaches out to Deckert for information and reassurance, which leads to the film’s most touching moment:
Rachael: You think I'm a replicant, don't you?
Deckard: Huh.
Rachael: [Shows photograph] Look. It's me with my mother.
Deckard: Yeah. -- Remember when you were six? You and your brother snuck into an empty building through a basement window. You were gonna play doctor. He showed you his, but when it got to be your turn you chickened and ran. Remember that? You ever tell anybody that? Your mother, Tyrell, anybody? Huh? You remember the spider that lived in a bush outside your window? Orange body, green legs. Watched her build a web all summer. Then one day there was a big egg in it. The egg hatched--
Rachael: The egg hatched...
Deckard: And?
Rachael: And a hundred baby spiders came out. And they ate her.
Deckard: Implants! Those aren't your memories. They're somebody else's. They're Tyrell's niece's. The ground of her identity is gone. What seemed like self and maturity is taken away; she has no meaning, only existence. She has no parents and nowhere to go:
Rachael: What if I go north - disappear - would you come after me? She is a lost child, pleading for help from anyone who approaches.
They are profoundly damaged. Like industrial animals, they are denied the opportunity to mature normally, to have a life. They do not even have the opportunity to find replacements for the experiences that Tyrell knows are necessary. If they were brute automatons, that would be one thing. But they are at least equal in intelligence to the genetic engineers who created them, created with enough consciousness to appreciate their conditions. They lack the normal bonds and memories that they need to function and survive. Instead, they have an atomised, deracinated existence and deliberate brutalisation. You don't have to be much of a psychologist to wonder how that will go. They are lost, violent souls lashing out at an unmoored existence.
Roy: Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.Roy
Roy, the leader, is the most intense. From the outside, he appears psychotic:
[Roy and Leon enter Chew's laboratory. Chew is working in sub-zero temperatures]
Roy: Fiery the angels fell. Deep thunder rolled around their shores, burning with the fires of Orc.
Chew: You not come here. Illegal -- Hey. Hey. Cold! Those are my eyes! Freezing!
Roy: Yes, questions.
[Leon removes Chew's jacket.]
Chew: (screams)
Roy: Morphology, longevity, incept dates.
Chew: Don't know -- I, I don't know such stuff. I just do eyes. Just eyes -- Just genetic design -- just eyes. You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.
Roy: Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes. 
Forced to witness horrors, Roy has no choice but to be changed by them. He is not very far from Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now:
KURTZ: "I've seen horrors...horrors... It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face...And you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies, to be feared. "From the inside, Roy's story is Elizabethan tragedy, Greek tragedy. Up against the clock of existence, he is driven to murder with his hands his only father; the parent who condemned him to a pitiless life of servitude, without relief or consolation.
Sebastian: Mr. Tyrell. I-- I brought a friend.
[Roy appears]
Tyrell: I'm surprised you didn't come here sooner.
Roy: It's not an easy thing to meet your maker....Tyrell: What-- What seems to be the problem?
Roy: Death.
Tyrell: Death. Well, I'm afraid that's a little out of my jurisdiction, you--
Roy: I want more life...father....
Tyrell: But, uh, this-- all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.
Roy: But not to last.
Tyrell: The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long. And you have burned so very very brightly, Roy. Look at you. You're the prodigal son. You're quite a prize!
Roy: I've done...questionable things.
Tyrell: Also extraordinary things. Revel in your time.
Roy: Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.
[Tyrell screams as Roy gouges his out eyes.]Well, in Roy's position...what would you do?
UNDESIRABLES
As dramatic as all this is, it has a real-world counterpart in the strategy of creating crippled people as soldiers.
Roy: Fiery the angels fell. Deep thunder rolled around their shores, burning with the fires of Orc.This is a reference to William Blake's America: A Prophecy. Orc symbolises Luciferian rebellion against Urizen, the embodiment of the oppressive ancien régime.
Then Albion's Angel wrathful burnt beside the Stone of Night; and, like the Eternal Lion's howl in famine and war, reply'd: `Art thou not Orc, who serpent−form'd stands at the gate of Enitharmon to devour her children? Blasphemous Demon, Antichrist, hater of Dignities, Lover of wild rebellion, and transgressor of God's Law, Why dost thou come to Angel's eyes in this terrific form?'
The Terror answer'd: `I am Orc, wreath'd round the accursèd tree: The times are ended; shadows pass, the morning 'gins to break; The fiery joy that Urizen perverted to ten commands, what night he led the starry hosts thro' the wide wilderness, that stony Law I stamp to dust; and scatter Religion abroad to the four winds as a torn book, and none shall gather the leaves.."The replicants are here to stamp to dust the stony law of Eldon Tyrell and his Urizenic corporation, and scatter to the wind the pages of their book. Lost and unhappy, those ready to break things are easy puppets. In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer outlined the usefulness of undesirables to political entrepreneurs:
"The reason that the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that they are wholly without reverence toward the present. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both: hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy. They also crave to dissolve their spoiled, meaningless selves in some soul-stirring, spectacular communal undertaking — hence their proclivity for united action. Thus they are among the early recruits of revolutions, mass migrations and of religious, racial and chauvinist movements, and they imprint their mark upon these upheavals and movements which shape a nation’s character and history......Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause, but also nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunity for both." There is nothing rare about undermining a functional society with undesirables. History is full of it- the French Revolution, Russia, China, Weimar Germany....Nor is it new: it was a fully documented strategy in 500 B.C.
"Spread disunity and dispute among the citizens. Turn the young against the old. Cover with ridicule all of the valid traditions in your opponent's country. Disrupt the work of their government by every means: implicate their leaders in criminal affairs and turn them over to the scorn of their populace at the right time. Be generous with promises and rewards to collaborators and accomplices. Do not shun the aid of the lowest and most despicable individuals of your enemy's country." These "undesirables" are useful in subverting what Antonio Gramsci would call Cultural Hegemony. Gramsci could see that Marxian conditions can only be established by destroying the family, institutions and everything else that sustains ordinary people in lives independent of the state. Only by destroying them will the “oppressed” be “liberated” from them. And, as Yuri Besmanov expressed it in the 1980's, you don't have to go searching for useful fodder. In practice, an inexhaustible supply of the low and undesirable is easily created:
"Marxist-Leninist ideology coated in various indigenous "social theories" have greatly contributed to the process of American family break-up. The trend recently is changing in the opposite direction, but many generations of Americans, brought up in broken families, are already adults lacking one of the most vital qualities for the survival of a nation —-loyalty. A child who has not learned to be loyal to his family will hardly make a loyal citizen. Such child may grow into adult who is loyal to the State though. The USSR example is rather revealing in this case. In the struggle for the 'final victory of Communism', the goal of the subverter is to substitute, as slowly and painlessly as possible, the concept of loyalty for nation with loyalty to the "Big Brother" welfare state, who gives everything and is able to take everything, including personal freedom — from every citizen. If that objective is successfully achieved, the subverter does not need any nuclear warheads and tanks and may not even need the physical military invasion. All that will be needed is to 'elect' a 'progressive thinking' president who will be voted to power by Americans, who have been addicted to welfare and 'security' as defined by Soviet subverters."The success of this strategy is seen, for example, in the controlled destruction of the black family in the United States. The Communist goals read into the US congressional record in 1963 are explicit:
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.Strong black families used to be the norm in the US. From 1890 to 1950, black women had a higher marriage rate than white women; in 1950, 91% of US black children had a father in the home, and in 1960, marriage rates of US black and white families were much the same. Black fatherlessness increased dramatically in the mid-1980s, and by the 2010s, only 44% of US black children had a father in the home. Whatever their rhetoric, Luciferian radicals like Saul Alinsky were not concerned to improve the lot of low-income Americans. They wanted to undermine the family, through dependence on state welfare, and anything else that would create a reservoir of easily weaponised discontents who thought they had no stake in society as it was.
History is full of soldiers like Roy. A fairly recent example was Nicolae Ceaușescu, dictator of Romania (1967-89). He chose child soldiers from orphanages: they were expendable. They had no family, no belonging, no patron but him. Ceaușescu was himself a brutalised undesirable; when his alcoholic parents registered his birth, they forgot that they already had a son called Nicolae. In prison, he became a political enforcer. He was handed the presidency with disastrous consequences, not least for thousands of abandoned orphan children. This is not misguidedness or incompetence. This was as intended.
When it was released in 1982, Blade Runner did not seem like a possible social future:
"It depicts a very strange San Francisco Tenderloin.. a lopsided maze of a city... Except for Deckard and stray Hari Krishna-ites and porcupine-headed punks, there are few Caucasians, and not many blacks, either. The population seems to be almost entirely ethnic — poor, hustling Asians and assorted foreigners, who are made to seem not quite degenerate, perhaps, but oddly subhuman. They’re all selling, dealing, struggling to get along; they never look up — they’re intent on what they’re involved in, like slot-machine zealots in Vegas...The picture treats this grimy, retrograde future as a given — a foregone conclusion which we’re not meant to question; its post-human feeling keeps you persuaded that something bad is about to happen...
Here we are — only forty years from now — in a horrible electronic slum, and “Blade Runner” never asks, “How did this happen?” " (1)So what has happened since? Today, the earth is not yet a dark and polluted dystopia, no-one is living in outer space colonies, and there are no replicants or flying cars; universal smoking has gone, and 2019's look was not shoulder pads and trench coats. Nevertheless, many aspects of the film’s society are very recognisable. It is a society mediated by technology. There are no super-efficient hairdryers, and we have digital photos not polaroids. However, smart buildings, video calls, keycards and voice recognition are all routine. It is a declining society: pollution, overcrowding, globalization, multiculturalism, it is joyless and without trust. It is a society dominated by corporations, not democratic or political power. Corporations own the technology. Pan Am and Atari have gone but Coca-Cola and Budweiser have not. and their immersive advertising still dominates the public space. This society is brought about - in part - by the activities radical characters like Roy might undertake. Blade Runner also indicates what those activities are, although one has to look past the film to its sources. These sources also give more detail to the picture of society than is depicted in the film.
The screenplay is loosely adapted from Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? However, the title comes from a 1974 novel by Alan E. Norse, via a screen treatment by William Boroughs. In Norse's The Bladerunner, medicine is weaponised for social engineering. Free, comprehensive medical treatment is available for anyone so long as they qualify for treatment under the Eugenics Laws. Preconditions include sterilization; no legitimate medical care is available for anyone aged five or over who does not qualify, or who refuses sterilization. This creates a market for illegal medical services, with underground practitioners going out at night to see patients and perform surgery. Bladerunners are suppliers of black market medical supplies. The novel's protagonist is Billy Gimp, a man with a club foot who runs "blades" for Doc (Doctor John Long).
Boroughs' piece uses elements from Norse's book to describes a film. It does not have the soft focus created by the melancholy film score. It is rawer, more like J.G. Ballard's urban-breakdown dystopias such as The Atrocity Exhibition. It sketches several loosely overlapping aspects of a collapsing society - some fantastic, some much more recognisable - and feels like scenario-testing for the breakdown of functional societies.
For example, population growth, medical technology and political dysfunction overlap to decrease the safety and psychological safety citizens can expect:
"The film is about the future of medicine and the future of man...In the film a strain of epidemic flash-cancer is stopped by virus B-23, a virus of biologic mutation which restores humanity to pristine health...For the virus makes a hole in time, and Billy steps into the past - which is also the future... The boy who was diagnosed by Doc as scarlet fever collapses with nipples of flesh growing all over him like exotic plants. This is Virus B-23, the virus of biological mutation. No-one can have B-23 and cancer at the same time. This is the vaccine against Accelerated Cancer which must be released on a mass scale. Billy and the other bladerunners will release it. This film is about a second chance for Billy the blade-runner, and for all humanity.""It was a shy, pot-smoking professor of bio-mathematics, Professor Heinz, who pointed out clearly emergent patterns. "The miracles of modern medicine, by interferring with natural immunity, in the long run give rise to more illness than they prevent. Those suffering from hereditary illnesses, which were formerly fatal in childhood or adolescence, can now prolong their life-span indefinitely, propagating any number of defective offspring." He concluded that the planet would be inexorably flooded by the worst specimens of humanity with the worst survival value in long-range biological terms.
Computers checked his predictions: in another hundred years, those suffering from chronic hereditary illnesses and requiring long-term treatment would actually be in the majority. There would not be enough healthy people left to care for them. Epidemics might well eradicate this weakened and degenerate strain.... There was talk in the House of providing incentives to voluntary sterilisation for the unfit.... the unfit were to be denied medical services of any kind unless they agreed to sterilisation.""The Health Act soon poses more problems than it solves. Drugs to halt the aging process have brought life expectancy up to 125 years, thus aggravating the population problem. On the other hand, illnesses which have seemingly been eliminated suddenly erupt in epidemic form, like the deadly adult diptheria which broke out in the late 1980's." The built environment is degrading...
"The helicopter moves south, rubble, ruined buildings, vacant lots. It looks like London after the Blitz. Few signs of reconstruction, except for sporadic patchwork. Many streets are blocked with refuse and are obviously unpassable. Here and there, shabby open-air markets and vegetable gardens in vacant lots. Some are crowded, others virtually deserted. Crowded squares and streets abruptly empty for no apparent reason. There are improvised boats on the rivers, loaded with produce. "...leading to adaptations reminiscent of Michael Moorcock and Ballards' High Rise:
"The upper reaches of derelict skyscrapers, without elevator services since the riots, have been taken over by hang-glider and autogyro gangs, mountaineers and steeplejacks. A sky-boy steps off his penthouse into a parachute on guide wires that drop him onto a street level landing. The parachute is retracted by hand-operated winches and pulleys, or a delco motor. (The sky boys complete with the subs for control of the electricity service in the lower city.) Or the sky boy may use wire slides with a jump seat under the carriage, zig-zagging down from landing platform to landing platform. Or he may skip from roof to roof in his hang glider, or use his auto-gryo parachute. Buildings are joined by suspension bridges, a made of platforms, catwalks, slides, lifts. Inside these buildings, light elevators that can carry several hundred pounds are installed. "Politically, it is reminiscent of the intersectional alliance of Marcuse's One Dimensional Man...
"Postulate a story set in the 1960's, written by an omnicient writer in the 1930's. Writer knows all about World War II, the Atom Bomb, Vietnam, the drug problem, inflation, rock stars, gay lib, women's lib, the Black Panthers..... and the strategy outlined by political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The Cloward-Piven strategy advocates using "militant anti-poverty groups" to facilitate a "political crisis" by overloading the welfare system via an increase in welfare claims, forcing the creation of a system of guaranteed minimum income and "redistributing income through the federal government."
"For starters, it's about the National Health Insurance we don't got. It's about plain middle-class middle-income-bracket Joe, the $15,000-a-year boy, sweating out two jobs, the I.R.S. wringing the moonlight dollars out of him to keep the n*ggers and spics on welfare and medicare to they can keep up their strength to mug his grandmother, rape his sister and bugger his ten-year-old son...Pushers on welfare and medicare lean out of a Mercedes and spit in his face ...IS THIS WHAT I PAY TAXES FOR?... We pay for their stinking dope habits, give them money not to work, and what about us? Can we afford to spend $500 a day on a hospital room?" 'We gotta be careful of ethnic slurs'...Transgressive self-presentation and radical individuality like this is presented as part of liberal freedom, but is actually there to break up civilised social norms:
"Mardi Gras time in Carville. A languid young aristocrat drifts by on a flower float, one leg eaten off at the knee, the stump phospherescent in the gathering dusk... A radioactive strain, my dear, terribly chic. Violet lagoons where fishes of emeralds dive for the moon. And here is a stunning young leper in Cleopatra drag on her barge with a dishy Marc Anthony....""Many youths claimed disability, saying they could not co-exist with disgusting taxpaying slobs." "Is this what I pay taxes for? Queer sex orgies and injections of marijuana?" - "In our splendid facilities - provided by the American government - we do not have to concern ourselves with assholes like you who work for a living. May you prolapse into the privy from which you emerged."In Burroughs' piece, "The Blade Runner" is a piece of transgressive erotica, framed against social breakdown:
"A life-size picture of a naked boy with a hard-on, Mercury wings on his sandals and helmet. The painting is in garish pinks and blues, set in an elaborate guilded frame. The boy is framed against a Borsch background of burning cities."The racial dynamics are explicit…
"Blond Nordic couple bring a sick child to the hospital. A black doctor throws them out onto the street. "Unqualified filth!". He welcomes a Puerto Rican youth who has skinned his knuckles in a brawl. "Come right in my boy. Nurse, quarter grain G.O.M for this gentleman...… and includes people for whom the considerations that make civil society possible simply don't exist:
"Time is practically impossible to understand for IQ sub 80's. They exist only in the present, can barely reflect on the past and can't plan for the future at all. Many people with sub-90 IQ are sociopathic or psychopathic. They don't have the mental computing power to model other people's thoughts and feelings. I've seen it over and over with convicts.
> How do you think that man felt when you beat him?
> Dunno.
> How do you think that boy's mother feels when she heard that her son was dead?
> Dunno.
It comes across as psychopathic, but these people literally don't have the brainpower to build even a crude model of someone else's mind, let alone populate it with events that are in the past.They are not going to be "integrated into society" and that is what makes them so useful.
"You just have to flood a country's public square with enough raw sewage - you just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorising that citizens no longer know what to believe. Once they lose trust in their leaders, mainstream media and political institutions - in the possibility of truth itself - then the Game is won." It's not about bringing people from the margins into the centre of a civilised society. It's about using them to destroy everything that sustains it, and the idea that it might be possible.
"Exasperated citizen packs one suitcase and walks out of his Levittown house. He rakes some leaves, dumps a stack of forms on the top and sets the heap on fire. Old woman across the street rushes to the phone. Squad car arrives and gives him a summons for burning leaves. As the squad car drives away he adds the summons to the pile. He walks away with his suitcase."