I have a new podcast to share, a conversation with David Polansky: Soylent Green, now on its 50th an., the second most famous Charlton Heston movie, or at least movie line, after Planet of the Apes. Soylent Green is a dystopian story of a peculiar sort. Heston plays a detective in a future world devastated by climate change brought on by industrial pollution. Mankind is dying of poverty, hunger, & sickness, in the ruins of technological civilization; the rich & poor live in different worlds, despotism is visible everywhere. We see this miserable spectacle in New York, where Heston investigates the murder of a wealthy industrialist, who turns out to be involved in the efforts of the Soylent corporation (soy, lentils) to make food, the only hope to save people from starving. The result of Heston’s investigation is a revelation that leads to final despair, no doubt as a warning against hubris: There is nothing left for mankind to eat but each other; industrial oligarchs have secretly organized cannibalism by feeding to the poor the despairing suicides (or you can think of it as the state punishing the despairing with a death sentence). Hence the famous line: Soylent Green is people! This is the end of life, since not just the earth is exhausted, but the oceans, too, or they are poisoned, so there is not even plankton growing to feed people. The vision of Darwinian evolution, the exorbitant development of life leading to ever more sophisticated organisms, climaxing with man, is replaced by the horror of extinction. Progress reveals itself as nihilism. David & I discussed the relationship between politics & environmentalism starting from this movie, spurred on by a rather good, yet very strange observation David makes in the essay he wrote on Soylent Green for a fine journal, The New Atlantis: The Progressive propaganda of our times requires applause for everything deplored in Soylent Green: Eating the bugs, living in the pod, & choosing suicide. This is sometimes called “fully-automated luxury communism,” but sometimes called “you will own nothing & love it!”
You can also find our conversation on Apple Podcasts:
Or Spotify: