One of my heroes was Ben Hecht, a writer who spoke the truth no matter what the cost. Hecht once wrote that humanity’s first fight had been between the human desire for original sin and the expression thereof, and the human desire to get to heaven. That fight lasted more than a millennium and guess what? The clerics lost! Nobody wants to go to heaven anymore. They’ve given up. There’s no such place.

Now the fight is between society and the individual. Society has been, and will continue to repress the individual just as the preachers tried to repress the animal. It’s going to take away his decency. It’s going to take away his ability to speak the truth out of his own feelings and his own responses to life. In this fight, Ben Hecht wrote, the victory is going to the wrong side. Society is going to win. The human being will end up without a truth of his own to speak. He’ll end up as a mouthpiece for the herd and only say those things he’s told to say. He’ll end up playing only the music he’s told to play.

Ultimately, we’re going to see the disappearance of poets, writers, jazz musicians, all people with individualistic expression with the possible exception of toe dancers, who have long been declared as harmless to the state. Artists and individuals will all disappear and there will be no human being left with the capacity, or the will, to speak the truth.

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