28 Days Later: How Real Fear Shaped a Modern Horror Classic

It’s not a zombie film, but it redefined the genre. With 28 Years Later on the horizon, we’re looking back at the one that started it all: 28 Days Later. Why does it still feel so hauntingly relevant? And what real-world fears, from post-9/11 panic to foot-and-mouth disease, helped shape this modern horror classic?

Next week, we continue the story with 28 Weeks Later.

This is what happens when you forget what matters

Homepage: www.rasl.ca

The collapse everyone was talking about has finally arrived. Actually it arrived a while ago, but not that long ago. It is the most expected and well predicted collapse of society in history so no one should be surprised. Please let me analyze this.

I remember Vimy Ridge. I remember walking through the trenches and the tunnels, walking through an oak forest, seeing the memorial. It’s an experience that has really changed my life, and changed me, and my understanding of where we are in history. I can now see the path humanity is on.

One of the things I did was to go to a large museum in Ypres. Remember, Ypres was the centre of three major battles. Ypres was a town that made fabrics, and still is. The spinning and weaving machines were fuelled from coal in the area.

The town defended itself against the first wave of attacks by the Germans in the First World War. And the British and French with their allies and empires came to the aid of the Belgians in Ypres. They were horrific battles. Close to a million people died. It was the site of the first gas attack, which involved Canadian troops, and which resulted in Canada refusing to fight under British command. Canadian then fought under their own command after the Second Battle of Ypres.

The Factory State: How We Got Here

I think this is important, because our loss today—our wandering into darkness—began with something that actually caused the First World War, and set us all on the path of decadence.

One of the displays in that museum said that, as a result of the Industrial Revolution, people were engaged in wage labour and the population had become dependent upon the state in order to survive. It did not matter which state: England, Germany, France, Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire; it made no difference. Each human being now relied upon the state.

At that point, I realized humanity had placed itself into a different enslavement.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the people of the Earth were either free or engaged in serfdom or outright slavery. And now, people were enslaved through wage labour.

Before the Industrial Revolution, during the Napoleonic War, war was fought with conscripted farm labour. Then there was about a 50-year period of change with revolutions and the beginnings of modern states and countries. Germany became a country. Italy became a country.

With European colonization and the preparation of a certain type of archaic corporate entity, everyone now worked in a factory in Europe. And at this moment, each national state, usually ruled by a monarch at the time, had unprecedented power over the people: the power of life and death.

This power was used to build up armaments and prepare for war, and to continue foreign policies based on an economic system of pillage, which was the economic system of colonialism. This led to the First World War.

The Wage-Based Economy: A New Form of Slavery

This represents a huge change in humanity’s way of life, a fundamental global difference in the lives of all of humanity.

That difference is: people are now cogs in a wheel, both rich and poor. They are not a natural part of the Earth or the ecosystem. They are divorced from it. And this is where the Marxist critique of capital makes some extremely good points.

The labourer (both management and labour) does not own, or have anything to do with, the product that is being produced along the factory line. It may be the manufacturing of only one part to a much larger machine, for example. And the labourer does not own that machine, or even that part. The labourer is therefore divorced from the property of their labour. They become a cog in a wheel. They follow instruction. They are to be as mindless as possible. Their lives take on irrelevance and require the factor job (i.e. the manifestation of the state), to have significance. This is true for all political systems reliant on wage labour, including communism and socialism.

And this is where the Canadian Corps, during the First World War, in refusing to fight under British command and choosing to fight only under their own command, created such consternation among the British command in the First World War.

The Addiction to Control

Moving along we can see that the state becomes addicted to the control of people. It is not so much that an individual state, a capitalist state, a communist state, or even an olive garden, makes any difference. The state is captive to the addictive power of a wage-based economy.

This economic system is directed toward having factories. However, you may have an economy that does not need factories. It may not even need wage labour in the traditional sense, with people going to work or trying to find a job. But it makes no difference. The state will demand that its people, its populace, work 9 to 5 and be engaged in a factory-oriented type of toil.

The Dumbing Down

This also includes education. It also includes vacation time and free time. It includes our leisure. The most important thing is that the individual becomes a non-thinking cognitive wheel that is obedient to trying to obtain a wage.

There was a time when people were very proud of what they made. For example, they were making an automobile, and they were very proud of the automobile that they made. They were a part of that. We had people who worked a life-long career for a corporation, and they were a lifetime supporter of that corporation which they believed in.

But those days are gone. Nobody works for a lifetime for any corporation, or even any particular type of work. The days of lifelong careers are over. To be fair, it is extremely rare for anyone to be engaged as a “corporate man” with the exception of the farming community. Our present economic situation simply won’t allow such an economic life-long commitment because of its structure and downward-looking attitude towards labour. People wander through life from job to job, requiring a job in order to survive.

In the very heart of this scenario is the dumbing-em-down movement that dominated the desire of the state. And there is a huge problem for the state with dumbing down.

Please let me explain how this whole thing started and where we have ended up. There was a time during the late 1950s and 1960s when there were some very skilful people, people who were, what I would call, thinkers, with creative ways of solving significant social problems and all sorts of other problems.

The state, and by the “state” I’m talking about a global state, a world state, which engages, let us say, countries as agencies in continuing a wage-based economy; this state began the dumbing down process in the 1970s. It is an age which I call the “glue generation.” It was a time when educators and politicians rebelled against the teaching of mathematics in an understandable way and demanded it be replaced by students using calculators. In the 70s schools actually banned the teaching of the times tables. The humanities were taught by rote learning. Eventually chalk boards and whiteboards were replaced with smart boards, windows were discouraged and books were discarded.

The problem with the dumbing down process is that the rich believe their children will not be affected, or that politicians believe their children will not be affected: that there will always be some intelligent people. However, generation after generation, the teachers will have been taught by people who have been dumbed down.

There is no way that some extremely intelligent person from Yale or Harvard or Princeton, for example, would end up being a high school teacher. Teachers go through teachers’ college, which is mostly a method of training, actually indoctrination.

Teachers are dumbed down. And teachers have been taught by people who were dumbed down. Teaching is not a professional career any more; teaching is a blue-collar job these days.

So the rich end up with dumbed-down teachers, who also continue to be dumbed down by teachers who were dumbed down, until the entire planet has been dumbed down. And those who were intelligent before, who ran things and knew what they were doing, have passed on.

And nobody in the world ends up knowing what to do.

In other words, there are no experts anymore. And nobody knows what they’re doing.

The Collapse of Expertise

To concentrate on the major problem with all of this: the state is, in reality, at war with the individual people who are members of the state.

Quite often, a corporation may face some major problem, and its production management is incapable of solving it because, as people say, they “think inside the box,” and so forth. So if this problem is to be solved, usually it’s the people on the ground, on the factory floor, who are quite able to solve problems on their own.

If we scale up to a larger situation, a country, politicians (leaders) have to think along certain lines. What happens is, their reason for existence becomes staying in power. But this staying in power blinds them to actually figuring out how to solve certain social problems. And then the entire country suffers.

You need enough people. You need enough people with some sort of intelligence and ability to think, so that you may find a few of them who actually know what they’re doing, or how to solve certain problems, or even how to work together to get a problem solved.

If you have prevented a vast majority of the population from having access to information and from being able to think independently, or to simply try things out, then you have ended up restricting the leadership of a population down to a very small select group of people. And you’ve reduced any possibility of there being any intelligence within that small group, because that small group is an elitist, privileged group, which has gotten to their position of privilege through a series of tests designed to see whether or not they fall in line with the status quo. And you are now relying on these people to try and lead humanity on a global scale.

And this little group of people just wants to make sure that they are not threatened, and that they maintain their privilege.

This is the situation of the world. It is filled with corruption. It is filled with incompetence.

The answer to all of this lies within the empowerment of the individual. And the empowerment of the individual lies in personal and individual integrity.

Therefore, mathematically speaking, the conclusion is that the only real power in the world is individual and personal integrity.

If individual and personal integrity ceases to exist, it means there is no power in the world—and we are all disempowered.

Spiritual Collapse

I’m going to change gears here.

I was at the post office today, and a fellow old white guy began a conversation by complaining about the type of service we get at the post office.

I'm in Canada, I'm in Alberta. I said, “Well, at least we’re not down in the States with all the problems the States is going through.”

The chap I was talking to said, “Yeah, but at least it would be cheaper.”

I replied, “Man, we do not want to go through what the States is going through.”

I added, “We’ve known what is going to be happening in the States for a long time. We knew, for decades and decades, this is just exactly what we thought would happen. We knew this was going to happen. This is the obvious endpoint for America.”

This is when the chap said, “Yeah, because they have not followed God. Because they have turned away from God.”

I responded, “You betcha. That’s exactly it. It doesn’t matter what religion you’re talking about, you have to turn to God. Every nation has to turn to God. Doesn’t matter if you're Islamic, or if you happen to be Hindu, or what you are, the people have to turn to God. The people have to know the difference between right and wrong. The people have to turn to goodness first.

“If they deny goodness, if they deny that which is right, just, good, and true, then the entire country will collapse.

“And that is what we mean by turning to God.”

We parted company agreeing with each other.

The Core Solution: Personal Integrity

The danger, apart from restricting the chance at finding intelligence, is that the state insists that all problems must be solved by the state. The people are highly discouraged from solving their own problems or the problems of society. Social responsibility is simply outside of the common vernacular. And remember, in any society, the organization has no power. Power resides with the individual. A corporation is a set of shareholder documents and agreements lying in a safe somewhere. A corporation cannot actually do anything. It is the people, the hired labour or any other individual, who can actually do anything. The same is true of a country's government. The government cannot do anything; only people can do anything.

I'm going to take more time on this. I'll lead up to it. The state did not insist that no one should have social responsibility. Many statesmen have called on the populace to arise and do their civic duty. John F Kennedy was and expert at this: Do not ask what America can do for you; ask rather, what can you do for America. Amazing oratory.

The apathy, and demand for apathy, comes from the people themselves. We pay our taxes; we expect the state to solve our problems for us. But our taxes aren't there to solve our problems; they're to keeps streetlights on, to collect garbage, to hire teachers to teach kids. We have lost the knowledge that we are all in this together. The collapse of society was not caused by the machinations of some oligarchic clump of twits; it was caused by people turning from goodness, because goodness no longer exists or why bother? We brought this upon ourselves. We turned away from God. And, Bruce, what the hell does that mean? What does integrity mean?

The state, or government, is not there to ensure you have cheap housing. It is not there to make sure you are able to find employment. It is not there to ensure you have a university education or provide cultural activities to solve your loneliness. The state is not there for you to find a mate or success in life. And what in the world is meant by success? The state’s primary function is to protect the country in case of a military invasion. And, you are the one who will place himself or herself in danger to protect the state. There are dynamics to this and the military purpose of the state has a lot of layers. But the state is there to stop a military invasion by a foreign power. And you are the one to be sacrificed if there is an invasion.

We are adults. We take care of ourselves. If we want to have housing, we have to work for it. If we want education for our children, we have to build it. If you want cultural dynamics and a worthwhile society to live in then you have to create it. No one is going to do that for you. And to do that, you must have the strength and power of personal and individual integrity. Otherwise, you are just giving your power away.