To Serve Man
[Author's Note: I wrote the following musing almost two years ago, and I think it is worth revisiting today. Below is the original with an added footnote.]
Opening narration
"Respectfully submitted for your perusal — a Kanamit. Height: a little over nine feet. Weight: in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds. Origin: unknown. Motives? Therein hangs the tale, for in just a moment, we're going to ask you to shake hands, figuratively, with a Christopher Columbus from another galaxy and another time. This is the Twilight Zone."
The above lines are from a 1962 episode of the Twilight Zone entitled "To Serve Man." The story revolves around the Kanamits, a race of aliens that land on Earth during a time of international crisis. As the United Nations announces the landing at a news conference, one of the aliens addresses the delegates and journalists using telepathy. He claims they came to provide humanitarian aid by sharing their advanced technology that can easily and inexpensively solve all energy and food shortages and prevent international warfare.
The alien then departs without comment, accidentally leaving behind a book in his language; a cryptographer named Chambers is pressed into service to decipher it. Patty, a member of Chambers' staff, translates the book's title into the words, "To Serve Man."
The Kanamits deliver on their promise to turn the world into a utopia, transforming barren deserts into cropland, and each nation is given an impenetrable force field that leads to the disbandment of all militaries. Humans soon begin volunteering to travel to the Kanamits' home planet, which is described as a paradise, while the Kanamits set up embassies in every country on Earth and weigh all passengers boarding their ships. Meanwhile, Patty continues to decipher the book.
Later, as Chambers is boarding a ship for his own voyage to the Kanamits' world, Patty pushes through the waiting line and shouts to him: "Don't go – it's a cookbook!" Chambers tries to flee, but a guard forces him onto the ship and closes the hatch so it can lift off.
In the present, Chambers angrily throws another meal across the room when it is offered to him. A Kanamit picks up the food and encourages him to eat so that he will not lose weight. Chambers reluctantly gives in. Then, thinking out loud, addressing the audience directly, he asks whether they have left Earth yet, while hopelessly remarking that the aliens will eventually cook and eat all of humanity.
Closing narration
"The recollections of one Michael Chambers, with appropriate flashbacks and soliloquy. Or, more simply stated, the evolution of man. The cycle of going from dust to dessert. The metamorphosis from being the ruler of a planet to an ingredient in someone's soup. It's tonight's bill of fare from the Twilight Zone."
This episode of The Twilight Zone comes to mind when I see the eerie similarities between this story and what an alien cabal of elitists from around the globe is trying to con humankind into believing today. I use the term alien because it is foreign and destructive to everything rational and moral that humanity has managed to accomplish in the long history of our civilization.
The idea that everyone and everything can be reduced to "bits and bytes" in a world run by artificial intelligence is not only insane — it could lead to the extinction of humanity. Yet these "experts" want to control and manage our lives as if we were nothing but cattle to provide fodder for their grandiose schemes. Well, I have news for those would-be overlords – we are not cattle to consume; we are not sheep to shear; nor are we robots to serve our masters. We are unique individuals with minds, bodies, and souls endowed with God-given rights — "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." — we will prevail!
Footnote to the original musing: At the end of To Serve Man, Chambers looks into the camera and asks whether humanity has already boarded the ship. It's a fair question for our own time.
Are we trading responsibility for comfort? Are we surrendering liberty for safety? Are we allowing foreign ideologies to redefine what it means to be human? Are we letting experts, algorithms, or elites do our thinking for us? Or will we remember who we are? A people endowed with minds, bodies, and souls. A people who govern themselves. A people who do not exist to be managed, consumed, or engineered. A people who still believe in the blessings of liberty — for ourselves and our posterity.
We are not cattle. We are not data points. We are not ingredients in someone else's utopian recipe. We have our own cookbook — The Holy Bible — and it is full of recipes for all of mankind. We are Americans — conceived in liberty — and we will prevail!
