“Rollerball” (1975). Ready For The Big Game?

In the amazing, WAY ahead of its time “Is-it-a-dystopia?” movie “Rollerball”, corporations have supplanted governments as the most powerful organizations on the planet. To distract people from the total control they have implemented, they support a bread and circuses sporting event called “Rollerball” where different corporate cities send their champions against each other in increasingly lethal contests. “Jonathan E.”, the greatest Rollerball champion ever (possibly James Cann’s best performance) slowly comes to realize that he is not free, he is a slave, totally owned by the corporations, and must decide to either accept the wealth and fame…or take a stand for the world. Great movie.

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I think Independence Day asks us to appreciate our freedoms, the cost of winning them, and the value of keeping them. And I thought I should clarify my thinking on something here.

If someone says: “the bigger the government, the better off we are” IMO that’s roughly equivalent to “the smaller the government, the better off we are.” Or “The freer we are (from government interference) the better life is” is equivalent to “the more government controls things, the better life is.”

Both are vector statements, suggesting a correlation between a function (more/less interference) and a state (happiness). It is natural to assume that, absent a specific comment to the contrary, anyone making either statement thinks that the further you go down that road, the happier you will become.