![]() ![]() This is precisely what the Ghost Shirt Society sets out to do: “we’ve got to be a little childish,” they insist, “and fighting is necessarily undignified and immature.” Humanity itself, the Ghost Shirt Society writes in its manifesto, is imperfect, frail, inefficient, alternately brilliant and stupid. ![]() In order to counter this rational irrationality it is necessary to adopt a position of irrational rationality. As Marcuse wrote, “The people recognize themselves in their commodities they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.” A government-provided refrigerator, microwave, television, and washing machine are not the equivalent to human freedom. The Ghost Shirt Society, that group of radicals formed to counter the status quo, advocates that “men and women be returned to work as controllers of machines, and that the control of people by machines be curtailed.” They understand that the “freedom” provided by machines is a simulated freedom that produces only false-needs. Vonnegut attempts to re-inject humanity, that great incomprehensible variable, into the equation of history. Machines don’t even have much need for humanity. Its history is predetermined by the needs of industrialism, not the choices of actual human beings. Player Piano contains an automated society, so it makes sense that its history is totally automated as well. This view of history is essentially a clockwork history. ![]()
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