Month: November 2025

The Man Who Wouldn’t Sign Up, compared with modern observers of dystopian tendencies

The story “The Man Who Wouldn’t Join” (at the article link click) in consideration of Gabriel Marcel’s “Man Against Mass Society”, René Girard’s notion of “the scapegoat mechanism” (violent mass psychology), Jacques Ellul’s “Propaganda” (siloing of ideologies), and Edward Bernays’ “Propaganda” (manipulative mass techniques). The Man Who Wouldn’t Join is about a rebellious individualist who attains security from invasive collective-movement recruitment demands by finding a similar, rebellious individualist woman who also “won’t join” with whom he can ally in a marriage. Our very belief in our individual political points of view is merely grist for the mill of oligarchic control,.