“The Tall Man” is a movie that was released in
2012. It’s a crime drama that introduces a deep question in a way that anyone
can understand: Is forcible utilitarianism right or wrong?
This article will contain
a spoiler, because I am going to discuss the theme of “The Tall Man”, and I
can’t do it without revealing the plot. If you are a movie-goer, watch the
movie without reading reviews and reading this article. It’s a good,
suspenseful and twisty movie.You will probably be caught up in it.
The story takes place in
a really poor mining town in British Columbia that has lost the mine as a
going concern. A complete summary
is here. Children are being kidnapped. The people think
that a mysterious figure that they call “The Tall Man” is responsible. Some
have glimpsed him. Here’s the SPOILER. What’s actually going on is that a
doctor and his nurse wife are stealing the children and placing them with
wealthier families in a prosperous city. They are utilitarians who believe it
is right to use force to produce a greater good for a greater number. The
parents are heartbroken to lose their children, but the kidnappers think that
weighs lighter than the better homes in which they are placing the children.
At the end, a question is
raised and repeated three times by one of these children in her new environs.
She wonders if she is better off. Here is what the wiki summary says
about the ending:.
“Jenny lives in a beautiful home, where her art is encouraged and she has
the best of everything. She has begun to talk and seems well-adjusted and
happy. As she walks to an art class, she gives a voice-over expressing love
and gratitude toward her three mothers: her birth mother, whom she misses;
Julia, who gave her a chance at a new life; and her new mother, who is
providing her with everything she could ever want. As she crosses a park, she
sees David with his new family, which he now accepts as his own. (Jenny
thinks he and the other younger ones have forgotten and do not recognize her,
but the visual cues leave it decidedly open-ended.) Despite getting her wish
of a better life, she sometimes wishes to return. Jenny’s closing thoughts
question society’s implication that her new life is better.”
The summary is accurate. Jenny, who has been kidnapped and has material
opportunities that she couldn’t have in the mining town, “sometimes wishes to
return”.
Whoever wrote these words puts the question to “society”, not just to the
doctor and his wife who engineered the plot. This is as it should be. The
drama is not simply a personal drama. It does raise the deeper question about
“society”, because the beliefs of the doctor and his wife mirror the “social
welfare” activities going on in all the major Western societies. What these
kidnappers did is a specific instance of what societies and specifically
their states are doing every day and have been doing for a long, long time,
even before any of us were born. The term usually but loosely used to designate
these welfare state activities is “socialism”. This I stress involves social
manipulation that goes way beyond any traditional notion of providing justice
in cases of criminal behavior and torts.
Is it right that children be forcibly taken away from their poor parents
in a poor environment so that they can have better lives? No one asked the
children or their parents. In the same way, no one asks the individual
persons today who are subjected to society’s rules through the state. To vote
is not to be asked. It is not to have a genuine choice. Socialism imposes on
a person without asking his permission. If you believe that people belong to
themselves and that this is right and just, then you will reject the
kidnapping as wrong. You will then have to reject socialism as wrong too.
Frank van Dun distinguishes
real freedom from effective freedom. A person’s real freedom, associated
with free will, cannot be removed from a person. However, the state can
restrict your opportunity to exercise your real freedom (or free will)
without interfering with your free will’s existence. Your abilities to
exercise your free will are your effective freedom.
The state routinely reduces your effective freedom. Its rules reduce your
freedom of action. To be made to obey by the state is to lose one’s
effective freedom. As Frank van Dun puts it:
“Obviously, however, none of these legislated regulations change the
nature of natural persons. They leave the real freedom of natural persons
intact but provide legal pretexts for impeding and restricting their
effective freedom by authoritarian acts.”
The doctor and his wife as kidnappers stand in for the state’s and
society’s forcible utilitarianism. They think they are superior beings. They
think they have a justification, which is that they are improving lives on
net, that is, aggregated over those they’ve hurt and those they’ve harmed.
They think that this gives them a warrant to steal children and place them
somewhere else.
In accepting forcible utilitarianism as their guide, they and society
necessarily are rejecting various natural law propositions. They are treating
people as if they did not belong to themselves but to others. In practice,
the state is even worse than these kidnappers, who at least are dealing with
individuals, because it groups people into classes and pays only bureaucratic
and legal attention to their individuality, which is to say no attention at
all. The state de-humanizes people, and this has to follow from its enforcing
the utilitarian idea of a society-wide greatest good for the greatest number.
With its restrictions and manipulative rules, that is, the rules that go far
beyond any notion of dealing in justice with criminal behaviors and torts,
the state takes innocent people, who by their innocence should rightfully
have effective freedom, and treats them as objects. It treats them as if they
are guilty and can therefore be made to obey its rules. In doing so, the
state inverts the natural order of law. When innocent people fail to follow
the state’s arbitrary social rules, the state declares them guilty and
subject to punishment.
Utilitarianism has been the trend in Western societies for over 200 years.
As society and the state have risen, the person and his effective freedom
have declined. And so it is refreshing to see a movie raise a fundamental
question. This one raises it artistically and in the mode of a captivating
mystery-thriller.
It’s one of the ultimates and basics of a utilitarian-paternalistic-statist
society, a cradle to grave welfare society, that a child belongs to society
and the state, and not to its parents. This is taken for granted in
legislation, even if it is not exposed openly as a belief. It’s usually
hidden under the old myths that the people are “free” and that the society is
a “freedom-loving” society. The more socialistic that the society becomes,
the more that it becomes necessary to spread the myth that the legalities
being imposed are not restricting freedom, but raising it. Much of society is
already operating on the premise that children and adults belong to society,
not to themselves.
This movie questions the utilitarian-socialist premise through the back
door, by showing a couple, a doctor and his nurse wife, who take it upon
themselves to steal poor children and remove them to better environments. Do
they have that right? Of course not, by any natural law that recognizes that
young children belong to themselves and to their parents, as long as they are
not being abused.
If people are to be free, one must accept differences in endowments and
circumstances of each natural person in this world, to be altered by
voluntary means only. There can be no human authorities that have any rights
to intervene forcibly in order to make “something” better, be it social
welfare or their idea of a better world. All such authorities reduce
effective freedom; they deny the person the use of his free will. This denies
a person his humanity. The utilitarian will quip that it means little to have
a right to a park bench or poverty. Let that utilitarian combine with others
voluntarily to ameliorate the evils they see, for it means even less if
people are turned into penned up cattle to be ruled by a handful of beings
who regard themselves as superior know-it-alls. Where does that lead except
to totalitarianism? Forcible utilitarianism goes and leads invariably in a
totalitarian direction.
In this movie, the doctor and wife have decided that they will create this
better world by kidnapping children. They have an elaborate ruse to do so.
The doctor has “disappeared”, but really hasn’t. He’s the tall man who
transports the children to their better city homes and away from the poor
mining community. His wife has stayed behind to keep the children for awhile
and prepare them. Their plan goes haywire when one of the parents of a
kidnapped child becomes suspicious of the nurse and sees her with her son.
In our world, our government superiors decide daily that they will create
this better world. Their latest effort domestically is the abomination known
as Obamacare. Their better world includes a mountain of debt and taxes. Their
foreign efforts recently have included invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Before
that, they managed to bring attackers and terrorists to these shores. The
better world includes abuses occurring daily at every airport in the nation,
a monstrous spying apparatus and new and horrible incidents of police
violence every day.
The sorry record of government attempts to create a better world, based
squarely on forcible utilitarianism, is so extensive that this is a
philosophy that is eventually going to be rejected as a huge false turn
leading to a dead end for human beings. The entire world is going to see this
and shift toward greater effective freedom, as that is the only alternative.
The struggle between these two philosophies, utilitarianism and natural law,
has made utilitarianism the victor for now. But that is only for now and that
victory is only apparent. Real freedom in the form of free will still exists.
Its day lies ahead. The struggle for effective freedom is gathering strength
beneath the surface. It will need that strength and it will need a clear
vision and confidence in its purpose. One cannot be complacent about the
eventual victory of individual persons over the state’s formidable forces
arrayed against them. This is a struggle of wills and ideas, of belief and
fortitude, of right and wrong. This is a struggle of more significance than
any war that the world has ever seen, and it will be won by the forces of
real freedom.
