Originally posted by Extant Taxon
The following video is from a superb film called My Dinner With Andre. I think the clip is especially prescient and poignant as regards the direction the world is taking. Consider the following scene itself, read the quoted excerpt for reference, discuss:

YouTube Link

"But has it ever occured to you Wally that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may be a self perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money? And that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks? And it's not just a question of individual survival Wally, but that someone who is bored is asleep, and somebody who is asleep will not say no? See, I keep meeting these people. Just a few days ago I met this man I greatly admire, a Swedish physicist, Gustav Jondstreim. And he told me that he no longer watches television, he no longer reads newspapers, and he doesn't read magazines. He's completely cut them out of his life, because he really does feel that we're living in some sort of Orwellian nightmare now, and that everything that you hear now contributes into turning you into a robot. And when I was at Findhorn, I met this extraordinary English tree expert who devoted his life to saving trees. Just got back from Washington lobbying to save the Redwoods, he's eighty-four years old and always travels with a backpack becuase he never knows where he's going to be tomorrow.
When I met him at Findhorn he said, 'Where are you from?'

I said, 'New York'.

'Ah yes, New York. That's a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers that say that they want to leave but never do?'

I said, 'Oh yes'.

'Why do you think they don't leave?'

I gave him different banal theories.

He said: 'Oh, I don't think it's that way at all.' He said, 'I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards and they have this pride in this thing they built, they've built their own prison, and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners and as a result they no longer have, having been lobotomized, the capacity to leave the prison they've made or even see it as a prison.'

And then he went into his pocket and took out a seed for a tree and said, 'This is a pine tree.' He put it in my hand and said, 'Escape. Before it's too late.'