I recently stumbled on one of my all-time favorite movies on TV. It was the 1965 film of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie. So, I watched the whole thing for 10th time. One particular scene stands out.
After his service as a doctor in the Russian Army during World War I, Zhivago returns to his family who’d been living with his in-laws, in Moscow. By this time, the Russian Army had disintegrated, the Czar had been overthrown and the Bolsheviks had taken control following the 1917 Revolution. Arriving at the elegant townhome of father-in-law Aleksander Gromeko, a retired professor, Zhivago is confronted by a burly women in military garb, an overbearing communist official who addresses him as “comrade” and announces that the home has been confiscated by the Soviet government in the name of the people. The rooms have been redistributed to other tenants and his family has been assigned to one room on the second floor. Not wanting to incur her wrath, he politely replied, “Of course, comrade, it’s fairer that way.” I can imagine lefty professors and students at the University of Colorado in the Peoples Republic of Boulder cheering at that scene. As one who prefers Ayn Rand to Karl Marx, I found it revolting (pun intended) but profound.
Green on the outside, red on the inside
It also brought to mind a guest column in the Denver Post that I responded to about 20 years ago. It was written by a local environmental lawyer and anti-war activist, one F.R. Pamp. He singled out John Elway’s ex-wife Janet and her 17,000 square-foot house as an example of “wretched excess,” as he put it. He was one of those enviro-scolds outraged that materialistic Americans consume an inequitable share of the world’s resources. He also disapproved of SUVs and second homes. In his parting shot, he dreamed of the day “Thirty years from now, maybe the Elways’ giant house will have been turned into 10 apartments.” Shades of Doctor Zhivago, I thought he and that abrasive communist official would make a great couple.
This mentality comports with the socialist concept of “egalitarianism,” which translates to conformity, collectivism, equal incomes, equal outcomes, and equal rewards for everyone regardless of their talent, effort, and ambition. Equality of outcome is the opposite of equality of opportunity in a free enterprise political economy. Americans consume more than others because they can afford to, having produced so much more of the world’s wealth. It’s a byproduct of freedom. Capitalism is the economic dimension of liberty.
Socialists and radical environmentalists are joined at the hip. They’re like watermelons: green on the outside and red on the inside; coercive utopians who want to control everything about your life.
Environmental control freaks
The ultimate level of this control is an academic paper, “Human Engineering and Climate Change” by S, Matthew Liao, a philosophy professor at New York University, and two colleagues Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roche from Oxford. They argue that market solutions, diplomacy, and ordinary behavioral solutions won’t be enough to make people drive less, recycle more, and adopt greener lifestyles. Instead, they propose biomedical re-engineering of human beings to mitigate climate change. In other words, if people won’t change, let’s change people.
Their changes include adding an “emetic” (a chemical to induce vomiting) to red meat to discourage its consumption or developing a “meat patch’ (like a nicotine patch) that people would wear so that “henceforth eating eco-unfriendly food would induce unpleasant experiences.” They say larger people consume more energy through food consumption, fabric for clothes, lower gas mileage in cars, and wear and tear on shoes, carpets, and furniture. Their remedy is to make people smaller and shorter through genetic engineering.
They’d also “enhance and improve our moral decisions by making us more altruistic and empathetic” by affecting the sensitivity of neural systems. And note that “test subjects given the prosocial hormone oxytocin were more willing to share money with strangers.”
NYC muggers would love that as would politicians who could raise taxes with impunity. But why stop there? Let’s just lobotomize everyone ― except our rulers. Actually, a book (and later a movie) by H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, already envisioned a society of human-engineered Elois controlled by the Morlocks.
I’d rather take my chances with climate change.
Longtime KOA radio talk host and columnist for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News Mike Rosen now writes for CompleteColorado.com.
