I was wondering through a second hand book shop one day and found a book called 'Logan's Search'. I picked it up and discovered that it was the third book in the Logan trilogy, which made me realise that that really awesome movie that was made in 1975 was actually a book, and in fact the first in a trilogy. So began my quest to find a copy of the original book (as well as part two, which was easier than finding the first book, which I did eventually accomplish, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this commentary). Anyway, I found it, and I read it, and I must say, I so much preferred the movie, which is generally odd because it is that the book is supposed to be better.

Now, I could give you a run down of the plot to this book, but I won't waste my time. Rather I will direct you to the IMDB page relating to the movie which was made of the book, and if you want to read my review of the film you can do so here. So, rather than go over old ground, I think I will simply jump straight to what this book is about and the themes which arise from it. In a way this book (I keep on wanting to write movie because, as I have said, the movie is substantially better than the book) is very much like 1984, though unlike that novel this book has a happy ending because the blinkers are taken off of the eyes of the people and they are freed from their dystopian world to be able to think for themselves.

This book (or movie) is about freedom and how, in many ways, what we think is freedom may actually enslave us. In this dystopian world people live a hedonistic life. While there are basic laws (I suspect murder is still illegal) there is no barrier to any hedonistic desire. There is no marriage, no commitment, and no property. Everybody has everything they want and they can take anything they want. However, there is still some barriers, because it appears that people have a right to say no (as Jessica does to Logan's advances). However, there is a catch: they must die at the age of 30 (21 on the book).

I suspect the age of 21 is more relevant, and by raising it to 30 in the movie undermines this somewhat. Basically what is happening is knowledge is being destroyed. The only knowledge that is stored and allowed to be stored, is by the computer (while there appears to be no government, there is a government and it is a dictatorship of the machine). Simply put, by preventing people from growing old, and in fact by preventing multiple generations from being alive concurrently, the machine is able to control knowledge. Nobody is able to pass knowledge down from one generation to another, and thus people live in blissful ignorance.

Society, in Logan's Run, is stagnant. It simply does not move. There is no incentive to learn, and in fact it is quite clear that one of the major crimes is to think. Further, by destroying marital relationships the machine is further able to control society. There is no bonding, no friendship, and thus no ability to rebel. Further, there is no family unit, which is another means of control and another means of destroying knowledge. Without a family unit, there is no respect, and no older person from which one can learn, and as such the computer once again controls the people.

I have seen that this is the case in this world. In one way the sexual revolution in the sixties freed us from the tyranny of the religious right only to enslave us in the tyranny of the hedonistic world. Fifty years on we can see that the tyranny of hedonism has become almost complete. We are bombarded with advertisements telling us that what is important is to feel good. While we have legalised abortion and prostitution, which in one sense frees us from one form of tyranny, it also enslaves us in another form. I am not one to seek to overturn those laws, I believe those laws are necessary, but what we need to do is to realise that our desire for pleasure is what enslaves us, and this is a tyranny of the mind, a tyranny that convinces us that we do not need to think, that we do not need to open our minds, and that we only need to live for the now and for what makes us feel good.

The second tyranny is the tyranny of the generation, and that is where we are denied the wisdom of the older generation and only able listen to those of our peers. Let us consider the first chapter of the first book of kings. The son of king Solomon, is faced with a choice. The people approach him and ask him to release them from their burdens and the older generation tell him that it is wise to do that because if he does that the people will respect him as a king. However, the younger generation tell him that if he were to release them of their burdens then they will be uncontrollable, and the fact that they are free to grumble about their predicament indicates that they are a danger and therefore they need to be oppressed more. The choice the king has is whether to listen to the wisdom of his elders of the wisdom of his peers. He chooses to listen to the wisdom of his peers, which results in a disaster for him.

I see this problem in some churches that I have attended. The generations are separated, and are led by their peers rather than their elders. As such, the young Christians are deprived of a vital source of wisdom and their minds are clouded by the ignorance of their peers. I suspected that this was a problem and noted that none of my peers would listen to me, coming up with half-cocked excuses as to why it could not work. So, I decided to test the theory out myself, and found a church of elders rather than peers, and have since discovered that I have learned more in eleven weeks amongst my Christian elders than I did over eleven years amongst by Christian peers.

In a way, many religious people actually fear knowledge because knowledge causes us to think, and then to question. Thus to prevent us from thinking and from questioning, they starve us of a vital source of knowledge, and that is the wisdom of our elders. Consider this picture (which many of us have probably seen already, but I think that it illustrates my point quite clearly):

Granted, it deals with the Taliban and the education of women, but I believe that it extends quite further beyond that. In fact it extends even into Christianity, and not necessarily the Religious Right. A church that I have been too would regularly encourage us to read the Bible, but only prescribed texts relating to the Bible. Further, they would tell us before the sermon that we should look in the Bible so that 'we should see that what they were saying was true'. One thing they did not have at the end of the sermon, though, was a question time. This was something that I pushed for because I believe that being able to ask the pastor a question in front of the congregation is a means of holding him accountable. However, the catch was that when they did open the floor to questions they would be filtered through a mobile phone. Further, only the experienced pastors would field the questions because they could be assured to be able to follow the party line. When I asked why one of the junior pastors did not field questions I was simply told that it was because he would find answering questions a little too difficult.

I want to finish this off with the question of abortion. You may ask what this has to do with knowledge, and I will simply say it has more to do what what they don't say than what they do say. Now, before I continue, I will say that I do and always will support the voice of those who do not have a voice. That includes the unborn, however, the pro-life movement cares less for the rights of the unborn than they do for the oppression of the rights of women. Consider this, would a ban on abortion turn an unwanted pregnancy into a wanted pregnancy? Highly unlikely. Either it will force the woman to have an unsafe abortion, or force a child into a horrible existence. In fact, by banning abortion, it is more likely that poverty will increase, as a single mother looking after a child will be unable to work therefore leaving both of them in poverty.

Now, you notice how I said single mother? Guess what, a woman seeking an abortion is much more likely to be single than to be in a relationship. The reason I say this is because pregnancy punishes the woman more than it does the man. So, why should a woman be punished more for engaging in fornication than the man? Does that seem just? To me it is not, because the man can simply disappear leaving the woman carrying the burden of his lust. Sure, the man will no doubt face judgement come judgement day, but the woman is left in a situation that in reality is untenable. This is what I mean about the denial of knowledge and the denial of the ability to be able to think. Thus, while they scream and cry about the rights of the unborn, they distract us from the fact that what they are really doing is oppressing women. What needs to be done is to make birth control more readily available, and moreso, a change in thinking about the pleasures and the desires of sex. What we really need to do is to turn away from our hedonistic thinking and actually open our eyes up to the world around us. We need to stop living for the now, and actually start living for the future.

I sometimes wonder whether a sequel is written because the author has decided to make the first book a chapter in a larger story, but only holds back to see whether the first book is a success, or whether it is something that the author decides to do to cash in on the popularity of an earlier book. In all truth it sometimes is very easy to tell, but in other times it is not. However, one of the good things about some sequels is that it does tend to dispel the myth of everybody living happily ever after. Take John McClain from the Die Hard series, he just does not seem to be able to actually live happily ever after (and I believe they are up to movie number 5 now).

Well, when it comes to Logan's World, there was always room for a sequel, namely because there could not really be a happily ever after since the world of Logan's Run was brought to an end and the population of Earth had to begin to fight for themselves after the computer practically blew up and their lives where everything was provided for them was suddenly brought to an end. Indeed, in Logan's World we enter into the aftermath of this revolution and it is simply not pretty. Society has collapsed and it shows it, big time.

It sort of makes me wonder whether it is possible for us to survive if our society where all of our needs are met, especially if we have money to meet those needs, were to suddenly come to an end. Numerous authors have written on the topic that our economic system is so delicate and intermixed that if it were to come to a grinding halt then we would be in serious strife. Our system works on the fact that many of us have developed specialised skills to be able to allow the greater society to revolve, however if left to fend for ourselves were would be in a lot of trouble. Ask yourself this question, if all of the shops suddenly closed their doors tomorrow would you be able to feed yourself?

We take it foregranted that we can simply walk down to the local supermarket, load ourselves up with groceries, and put them in the fridge to take them out when necessary. In fact many of us do not even know how to cook a meal. Instead we rely on other people to cook those meals for us. In fact, many of us do not even want to stoop to the level of heating up frozen meals and chose to eat out at fast food restaurants every night. That can be a really expensive habit.

This is pretty much what has happened in Logan's World. In a nut shell, humanity has reverted to its base characteristics and only those who have managed to adapt to the new environment have survives. In fact, I suspect that if that were to happen to our society many of us would die of starvation, if we were not killed first in the resulting free for all as we tear into shops and warehouses to try to scavenge what food was left. Then there is electricity - we won't have any, unless of course we are able to work out how to produce our own.

That is the serious flaw in such a specialised society. In fact many of us who work in offices all day, whether we are a clerk taping away at a computer, or a CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation, will pretty much be in the same boat. If the economy collapses, the CEO may be hurt even worse because they have everything done for them as opposed to being able to do it for themselves. In a world were money is worthless, it suddenly becomes impossible to actually use it as leverage to protect your interests and your health. No wonder the American Government was ready to pour trillions of dollars into the failed banking system to keep it afloat while the billions of people that could have used it are left in their suffering.

So the question that I and many others are probably asking is why did Nolan actually write this book. Based on the quick blurb that I read this book is basically a rehash of the first. It seems that all of the sudden there are parallel Earths and all of a sudden Logan is sent to another Earth where he has to start all over again. I guess that the difference here should be that Logan has the benefit of hindsight, but despite the fact that he is aware that when he destroyed the last civilisation it resulted in humanity's return to the stone age, he goes ahead and does it again.

What I want to talk about is the idea of the control of the afterlife. To be able to control people's belief of the afterlife is a rather powerful weapon, and it has been one that has been used, and is still used, by religions throughout history. The one great unknown is death, and by making a claim that one knows what happens beyond death, and what one must do to to make it the best afterlife possible, can bring many people flocking into your arms. People, in the guise of prophets, have used this power to subjugate the masses. The truth is though that we, as humans, have no idea what lies behind death, but we, as humans, have one desire: to pass through to a good, as opposed to a bad, afterlife.

What one considers to be a good or bad afterlife differs, and in many ways the comfortable one seems to be what some term as annihilation: we cease to exist. To cease to exist is a unfathomable concept because many of us have no idea what it is like not to exist. As Descate said, 'I think therefore I am,' and because we are always thinking it is almost impossible to know what it is like not to think. Okay, there is sleep, but the thing with sleep is that it is almost instantaneous for us, so when we sleep it can feel like eight hours takes only a matter of seconds for us. No wonder when we awaken we can be disorientated.

Now, one may wonder why I am attacking religion's use of the afterlife when I myself am a Christian. It is because I believe that Jesus came back from the dead, which qualifies him to speak about the afterlife. This wasn't some near-death experience (remember, near-death suggests that you don't actually die) because he was in the ground for three days. Now, the big thing that Jesus said was that to have a good afterlife was not a matter of being good. In fact nobody could actually be that good to be able to earn their way into a good afterlife. In many ways the Egyptians were right when judgement involved weighing your evil deeds against that of a feather (noting that your good deeds did not actually cancel out your evil deeds - in fact they did not do anything for you).

Christ's point was always about having a relationship with God. Now, that does not mean that we live selfish and disrespectful lives because the whole idea is that by being one of Christ's followers we would like to imitate him. Think of when we were children: we would want to be like our heroes to a point that we would imitate them. For instance, in my life I really liked Popeye and would like to be like Popeye to the point that I wanted to eat spinach because it would make me strong like Popeye. That is the same thing, namely we see what Jesus did and how he treated people, and how he stood up for the weak against those who, in worldly terms, were strong. Thus those who truly love him would want to do the same. Remember, God is no fool, and simply going to church, singing the songs, and even leading Bible studies does not actually count as fire insurance.