Updated slightly in the era of Occupy
V for Vendetta Thought Experiments in handout/flier format
1. A sustainable society only has to be built once. What unsustainable methods would you support in such an endeavor?
2. How much of a fascist will you become in service to the revolution?
3. Name the 3 worst things our current administration has done. Imagine that somehow these were part of a long term, insanely subversive plot to do good… How good would the good have to be to justify the wrong?
4. What things distinguish the criminal from the civilian from the citizen?
5. Do Hollywood movies ever serve anything like a true revolution?
6. Which of your most sacred, life-affirming beliefs, could be based on complete fiction and still be as powerful?
7. Can people transcend their class, their zeitgeist, their circumstance, without literally torturous levels of brainwashing?
8. Does calling it “counter conditioning” actually alter the coercive, fascist act of imprisonment and forced psychological manipulation?
9. Given sufficient design and brilliance, could a bombing campaign alone, ever be more than a destabilizing influence? With Unified-Field-levels of knowledge, could bombs be sufficient to move society in a productive direction? 10. Would it actually be possible to build a redeemed society in the aftermath of a successful genocide? After how many generations? 11. Compare V’s London, before and after the failure of the senses, to the Matrix’s Zion, before and after the arrival of the One.
12. How responsible are you for your neighbors’ miseries? For their oppression?
13. What do you know about the Thatcherian England that “inspired” the comic? How does it compare to the Reaganite America that inspired Max Headroom, RoboCop, Escape from New York…
14. Without V’s intervention, how would the portrayed London end up?
15. 1984. Brave New World. Erewhon, Logan’s Run, and Code 46 if you like: What aspects of each dystopia are most livable?
16. What series of political events could move us from our still somewhat liberally free society to that of V’s London?
17. Which of your friends and acquaintances would gladly go along with a new fascist regime? Who would be killed in the first wave?
18. If you decided tonight to throw yourself as fully against society as V has, what could you accomplish? What do you know how to do? How to break?
19. What is the moral difference between committing violence with your own hands, and allowing it to be committed by turning a blind eye?
20. What music speaks most directly to your personal political philosophy?
21. If V for Vendetta is a primer on Anarchism, what’s the underlying philosophy of Watchmen?
22. Does this movie rate with Blade Runner, as a thought provoking dystopian vision? Matrix 1? Matrix 3? Demolition Man? Or your actual favorite, _______?
23. Of the liberties and freedoms you enjoy, which are preserved through your own vigilance? Which are preserved & protected by forces outside yourself? Where, in the overlap, is your personal small, last, fragile, but very own inch?
