THE LOGAN’S RUN ANALOGIES— # 7

LOGAN’S PROOF

The trouble is, when a System has systematically suppressed information, you need to go outside the system if you want proof that you’ve been lied to. Logan had no way to know that he had been lied to, that he was being manipulated. From the day that he was born he was fed the Party Line. Did you notice the look on his face when the System computer told him to go outside the City seal?

“Outside?” he asks in complete surprise— “ Why, there’s nothing outside.”

This tells us that Logan has always completely believed everything he’s been taught. Oddly enough, you would have thought that his natural curiosity would have tempted him to do a little exploration on his own. If you’re reading this last episode, you’re probably very smugly thinking to yourself, “Yeah, that Logan, what a chump! There was a whole other world right over his head and he didn’t know it!”

Well, if you’re reading this ,I’m trying to tell you there’s a whole world right over your head and you don’t know about it either! Why do you think I’m making this analogy?

Remember the two drawings from session five? Remember my mention of James Sire’s book The Universe Next Door? These two little “hints” — the drawings and the book—(and dozens of hints like them) have been lying under the mountain of humanist information which you’ve had at your fingertips all of your life. Why have you never seen them before? Because the System has done it’s best to keep you from finding them— and it’s prepared you to reject them if and when you do.

Think of it from Logan’s perspective. He’s been taught all his life that Carrousel is good, and running is bad. So he’s been programmed to reject anything that questions his belief in the System. He doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. For instance, he mocks anybody trying to make a run for Sanctuary. But he really doesn’t know anything about Sanctuary. Later he discovers that the runners

were right to run— better to run and take your chances with the Sandmen and Box than to submit to Carrousel without a fight!

What about you? Are you a fighter? When I was a teenager we used to laugh and mock “the sheep”— kids who believed everything, who never questioned the system. Ironically, many of those “sheep” grew up to become the successful businessmen and managers and administrators who now run the system. Ask a wealthy stock market analyst what he knows or thinks about Sanctuary— I’m talking here about notions of an afterlife or something resembling the Christian Heaven— and you’ll most likely get a grin and a remark like this one— “Son, money makes the world go round, and you either make it in this life or you flunk out— ‘cause when this life is over, it’s over.”

       Maybe, like me, you never believed the Party Line. Maybe you’ve said the same thing I said when I was a young man, — “There’s GOT to be more to life than money.” What do we mean when we say this? Don’t we mean that life has just GOT to have an ultimate purpose bigger than just collecting toys and then leaving them all to your grandchildren? What if your child or your grandchild said to you, “ Daddy (grandpa) why are we HERE? Where did we come from? Where are we going after we die?” Are you satisfied with passing along the party line, or are you a fighter? (Or should I say, a runner?)

I once heard a great man say, “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.” This holds true for every one of us. We must fight against the global ignorance that is smothering the whole human race in a warm blanket of secular humanism. Why? Because it is as phoney and dangerous a system as Carrousel.

Now maybe you’re able to see it in Logan’s Run, but you still can’t see it in your own life. That’s because the System has so blinded your eyes and stopped your ears, that you don’t even question things any more. You don’t even know which questions to ask. You don’t even know who to ask.

What questions you would ask if you met a fellow like the Old Man, for instance?

I for one would ask him about Sanctuary.

The opportunity arises after Logan and Jessica have met the old man in one of the dilapidated rooms of the Library of Congress. He has told them about his cats, and she’s asked him what colour his hair was when he was younger. At this point the Old Man leaves the room to rummage through some of his mementos (he’s looking for a picture of himself). While he’s out of the room Jessica asks Logan an important question:

“We are going on, aren’t we?

“There’s nothing to go to,” Logan relies.

“There’s Sanctuary! “ insists Jessica, “There is!”

“You want there to be one. But that doesn’t…”

“There has to be! I know it exists!”

“No it doesn’t! Not really. It’s just that so many people want it to exist. Just so many people that don’t want to die— they want it so much, so that a place called Sanctuary becomes real. It doesn’t exist. It never existed. It’s just a hope.”

“You’re wrong! There has to be!

”Oh Jessica!”

“There has to be!”

Just then the old man reappears. We don’t know if he overheard their conversation, but he does say to Jessica, ““Oh my, don’t cry!”

He is carrying a bunch of old pictures in frames and hands one to Jessica.

“Here— look at this…that’ll cheer you up!” He shows an early picture of himself, when he was much younger, before his hair turned white. He nudges Logan and adds, “Leave her alone” and draws Logan aside to look at portraits stacked against the walls.

What follows that evening is the painful revelation that Logan is determined to go back to the Underground City to tell them all what he has found. He has found a way Outside— and he has found the outside world ruined, but not uninhabitable— and he has found out that there is no Sanctuary.

Logan is determined to report what he thinks will liberate his fellow citizens— the knowledge that there is a big bright world Outside, and that there’s an old man who is living proof that it’s safe to live Outside— and that they no longer need to hide underground and submit to Carrousel. They don’t have to die at 30!

That he is going to liberate his whole generation has now become the highlight and the climax of the film. The elation they all feel when they emerge out under the evening sky of Outside is palpable. We as the audience can certainly feel it.

But this is as far as their humanist perspective can take them— and us. Yes, they have found freedom— but not the kind of freedom that would be possible if they were free from their humanist perspective. The film could take them— and us— further, much further, because the plot has prepared us all to look for an even bigger deliverance.

But the film stops here. Why?

Because the writers couldn’t go any further than this. You can only take people as far as you yourself have gone. Remember, they were all raised secular humanists. These were their basic assumptions, their presuppositions, their preconceived notions— call them what you will, these are the precepts that were taught into them before they were old enough to think for themselves. Marilyn vos Savant[1] once said, “We [must] question our [own] assumptions, but, to do that, we first have to recognize our assumptions, and that’s a lot harder. This is arguably the greatest logical weakness of bright people”. She was saying that the brightest people— the ones with the highest IQ— are sometimes fooled because they evaluate the facts only according to their own assumptions.

So when a humanist assumes beforehand (presumes) that there’s no supernatural realm, of course he will overlook and dismiss any facts that point in that direction. Subsequently, he’s trying to understand a problem without considering all the facts. And we’re all prone to do this. We are all blindsided by our own assumptions— that’s why we’ve got to identify our presumptions and factor them into the equation. In the case of world views, we’ve GOT to take into account the view of our opponent.

For instance, if you were raised in the Western education system, because you’ve been taught only the secular humanist perspective, you unconsciously evaluate all available facts from only that perspective. It never occurs to you to evaluate the same facts from the Biblical perspective— because you’ve never been taught the Biblical perspective— and furthermore, you’ve been educated against it— consistently told that the Biblical perspective is superstitious nonsense.

But doesn’t Carrousel sound like superstitious nonsense when we first hear about it here in Logan’s Run? And what about Sanctuary— do you see how crushed Jessica is when Logan says “there is no Sanctuary”? Why is she so shocked? Because something she’s known and cherished all of her life seems to have suddenly disappeared completely. She’s told that Sanctuary has been nothing but superstitious nonsense all along.

For this sort of shock to occur, there has to be a crisis— and for Jessica the crisis is finding Outside but no Sanctuary. Until the crisis, she was completely unaware that she believed a lie.

Notice, Logan and Jessica had to be led outside the system before they could discover the truth— they’d spent all their lives inside the System. It’s not until you break loose of the System that you can actually see the System for what it really is. “It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth,” says Morpheus in the movie, THE MATRIX.

Unfortunately, what Logan considers the truth— that there is no Sanctuary— is a deduction he makes while still under the spell of the System. He is still evaluating the world only from the perspective of what he has been taught from childhood.

And of course, as I have said here several times, the novelists and the filmmakers have also been raised under the influence of the same system— so they make all the same assumption— of course there can’t really be a Sanctuary!  

But what if a screenwriter was to take the script just a little bit further, factoring in the other perspective? What if we added some dialogue between the characters, the sort of dialogue you’d expect between Logan and the old man— and in fact between the Old Man and the thousands of citizen set free at the end of the film?

Could it be that Logan’s “proof” that “there is no sanctuary” would actually be turned into proof that there actually is a Sanctuary?

NEXT: EPISODE EIGHT (Conclusion) :     SANCTUARY FOUND

[1] She was once considered to be the smartest person in the world— she had the highest IQ in the world and stumped the best minds in America— and she discovered the Achilles heel of all smart people. http://marilynvossavant.com/game-show-problem/