Machine Men

And Finding the Love of Humanity

Throughout my life, I’ve watched this speech more times than I can count. Since I was young, whenever the weight of the work that lay ahead of us felt too heavy to carry, I would turn to these few minutes of elocution frozen in such a terrible time, as much for comfort and consolation as for hope and inspiration.

Chaplin delivered these words in 1940, in character as a Jewish barber mistaken for a dictator, addressing soldiers who had just been told their worth was measured in obedience and their humanity was a liability. He was talking about fascism. He was talking about now. And he was talking to all of us.

The “machine men” Chaplin warns against aren’t monsters. That’s the point. They are people who have surrendered the one thing that makes brutality impossible — the willingness to think, to feel, to refuse. The willingness to be human in all of the best ways.

The ‘banality of evil’ is not a metaphor. It is a mechanism. And it is only possible through the mechanism Chaplin identified: the machine hearts and machine minds of machine men.

I hope you take a few minutes to watch it. To sit with it. And to remember that the speech exists at all because someone believed. Believed that even in the darkest days of the twentieth century, that it was still worth passionately arguing for our common humanity. That belief was not naive. It was an act of defiance — and it still is.

Eighty-five years later, we’re still losing the argument he was winning. But we can win. Every machine man that can be made human again is another missile in the arsenal against depravity and destruction.

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For more on the mechanics of machine men, Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharf published some great work over on Can We Still Govern?
It’s essential reading, now more than ever.

The Secret Police Playbook

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This week, Edge Notes went deep on hate with two essays covering the subject — not as reactionary emotion, but as infrastructure and technology. How it gets manufactured by institutions with material interests in its propagation and preservation, and how it gets loaded into individual minds that become its unwitting instruments.

And if the justifications for the US/Israel war on Iran make no sense to you, watch this space. I’m compiling a substantial reference document — a ledger assessing every stated rationale the Trump administration has offered for the war on Iran, weighed against the public record of Iran, Israel, the US, and Saudi Arabia. The record is not kind to the official story.

Thank you to all of my new friends and subscribers.
— S.L’errance
Veritas ante tempus.