The modern eloi - "We always have flowers"

Recently a man was seen sitting with his very young son while a reporter was prodding the boy with a microphone. 

The boy kept saying things like: "They want to kill us", "they will kill us", "they have guns"

The father kept saying things like: "but we don't have to worry, because, look around, we have flowers. Look at all these flowers and candles."

Obviously the argument the father was putting forward was that love somehow conquers all and even if the enemy of love outguns, outnumbers, and out maneuvers love, it will somehow survive...even if there is no one left on its side.  Of course, once the enemies of love defeat it, there is nothing left to defeat so most likely they would become the thing they hate... welcome to nature.

I digress.

As all of you know, I boil everything down to philosophy. If the argument the father is putting forward is Hegelian in nature and thus, follows upward politically to Engels view on social interaction and if, this social view of reality is the prevalent view imposed on mankind, then he is right. I personally abhor this view, but if the idea is that there are no such things as individuals, living lives based on their own self-ownership and thus developing themselves as unique individual entities, but are instead simply cells in a collective body, then the father is right. He is right by that view, because the enemy of the collective is small, it feeds on the outer edges and it can never do any real harm to the collective. It could take his son and the collective would go on, growing more flowers (having more babies).  

Before I go on: realize that I specifically say "the enemy of the collective" on purpose, for it is possible that another collective could swallow up the first collective, but this is a not paradigm shift, it's simply changing your opinion on which team is now the home team. 

When I watched this little kid talk about his worries and watched him reason out his opinion I had two immediate thoughts:

Eloi - In HG Well's the Time Machine, the Time Traveler meets mankind in the year 802,701 only to find that they have become docile and simple, they are called the Eloi. So simple in fact that when one of them falls into a shallow pool of water the rest, like cattle, stand around and watch. They have no desire to save her, no understanding of her. They have philosophically become a single unit and from their perspective, if one of the outer fringes falls off and disappears it is inconsequential. They would let her drown not because they consciously would allow her dying as some method to save the collective, but because they have lost the notion of individualism. They no longer possess the ability to see each of themselves as individuals. 

This is the biggest threat we face, because everywhere I turn people are wise enough to believe themselves 'free' but asked what that means and they weigh the word on the boundary created by government or parents or society at large. In other words, their measure the ratio of freedom based not on self determination, but the will of the collective.

This is epitomized in the boy and his father. The boy is still an individual, still willing to express views outside the power of the collective. From the boy's point of view he is saying, "Sure, right, we have flowers, I get it. We have this grand emotional state of pure Love that is supposed to be all powerful and strong enough to defeat the enemies of love...but what if they kill you, dad? I mean... you specifically. What happens to me then? What happens to my love? What happens to your love? Am I supposed to be okay with that? Am I supposed to just give up your life and plant flowers on your grave, plant flowers in the womb of someone that I love? Should we not define our own lives?"  But of course the boy doesn't know how to make that argument, he can't see it, because the structure of the concepts that will allow him to see it are not yet in place. All he has is the obvious failure in the flower logic, but no tools to argue against it. He sees his father smile and he believes that is enough. Which brings me to my second point:

Parent v. Stranger

Now imagine if the father hadn't said anything. Instead imagine if the boy was sitting there contemplating the events, trying to find structured concepts that could make sense to him, but as I've said, since he's not yet been exposed to them he sits there and struggles sure that he can tie all these random thoughts together only he hasn't been exposed to knot tying. And instead of his father offering advice, some random stranger standing near to him says exactly the same things as his father would say. I don't know about you, but random strangers offering weird advice that doesn't quite fit the direction of my thoughts (no matter how vague) do not make a very serious impression on the direction the thought will go. From the boy's mouth he was talking about tangible reality: death, guns. From the other side was an intangible emotionalism: peace and love disguised by the concept of a metaphor: flowers and delivered with a friendly smile. A random stranger would have been looked at like a madman if he had said that to the boy...but look at the face of the child as his father says those things. In the end his mind simply says, "Well it is your father and he's, you know, god, so... you should totally trust him and all that stuff you're thinking is your own fear. Your own mistake. You must be wrong."

The video ends with the reporter asking if the boy 'feels' better (that's what the translation says, I don't speak French) as if feeling is a functional truth that can stop bullets. They can't. neither can flowers. 

So if the philosophy one lives by requires that the individual give up his self identity, then the father would have to be correct and the boy should stop thinking and just start feeling.  He should direct himself in such a way as to work at only feeling good things, because the bad feelings will be delivered by the cancers and invading diseases that attempt to destroy the collective.  They will fail of course, even if they kill the boy and his father, because the collective can always create more babies - can always plant more flowers.

Either individualism with its scary reality or collectivism and the life of the Eloi.

Oh, did I forget to mention, the eloi were the food of the Morlocks?  Yeah, there's that.  In the end the time traveler loses this lovely young woman that he saved from drowning, she dies in a fire while trying to get his time machine back from the morlocks.  When he finally gets back to his own time he finds that the Eloi woman had left him a gift of flowers....