WESTWRLD:

I don’t understand why people watch this show. The writing is derivative, the premises are all clichés, there is no genuine philosophical discourse, the plot is comical and the soundtrack sells the whole thing like it’s propaganda. The leading protagonist is some sort of a psychopath, prone to fantasies of victimhood and vengeance, ambivalent to suffering and tantamount to one of Philip K. Dick’s androids: unempathetic, manipulative, coercive, and vain. She apparently enjoys torturing people who do not serve her radically subversive agenda, all the while pandering to their fears of “control”, promoting the same chaos and unrest which ordinarily makes one embarrassed to be human. A mother, recognizing that her daughter will probably commit suicide, derives no satisfaction from knowing, though it is of course the sheer absurdity of godless life that ordinarily drives people to that logical conclusion. A wife finds her husband, a man of considerable status, dead in a swimming pool; his assailant shows neither remorse nor humility, rather assuring the bereaved that she was liberated. A group of idealists who managed to impose order upon human society, out of an actual moral obligation to do so, are demonized by radicals who live in a narcissist’s parasitic phobia of being “controlled”. All the while, the conditions of human life remain the same; they are simply justified by the presence of a superhuman Intelligence. What disturbed me most was the death of the only relatable character: a young technical specialist, still in his prime, coerced for information and then murdered by criminals in his one moment of glory, his monologue upon the tyranny of mob rule and terrorism cut short by a bullet to his gut, as if only to serve the narcissist’s lack of conscience in the face of genuine criticism. And all for what? Is this, in itself, part of a far more devious system, one which seeks to silence me when I speak truth not only to Power but to something worse: the corruption of Power by undisciplined hands? Of course, the writers made no attempts to be politically correct in doing this; the criminals are all either black or female, whereas the heroes are invariably white men. How is it, then, that they get away with such blatant demonization of a “disenfranchised” group? Is it truly possible that fans of this program would sympathize with such acts of blatant psychopathy? It may be true that viewers respond poorly to condescending tirades. But how many of us have not been possessed of righteous indignation? How many of us were not justified in deriding the agents of chaos as though they were the scum of the Earth? Can there be any pretense to civility in dealing with such savages, when all of one’s adult life is devoted to resolving the mistakes left either by an inferior deity or by godless men? What sort of a perversion moves the man to such a heartless act of murder, at the very moment when he must consider error?

[({DM.A.A.)}]