Ask yourself this: Have you meddled with the primal forces of the universe lately?

Network is an amazing script and an amazing movie. Reading this article at Daily Kos (Daily Kos: "Network" and Our Current Epistemic Crisis) reminded me of my favourite moment in a film filled with great speeches, great silences, and amazing performances.

Fair warning: this is a massive spoiler - not in terms of plot but in terms of the film's emotional flow.

Newscaster Howard Beale has been giving a series of riveting, rabble-rousing speeches on his TV show. Ratings are soaring.

During one speech, he rips into a take-over deal where a Saudi Arabian conglomerate will buy out the TV network he works for. The chair of the company that owns the network, Arthur Jensen, asks Howard to meet him and discuss Howard's latest speech.

http://youtu.be/7sySuIXG_IM

Watch the video. It's about 5 minutes long. Here's the transcript:

---

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back!

It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples.

There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy.

There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business.

The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.

And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.