New Year..felt like posting a few chosen Rod Serling quotes:

[NowsTheTime]

https://www.azquotes.com/author/13331-Rod_Serling

This is not a new world - it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements...technological advances...and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like everyone of the super-states that preceded it - it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace.

For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.

The Chancellor, the late Chancellor, was only partly correct, he was obsolete. But so was the State, the entity he worshipped. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under 'M' for mankind... in the Twilight Zone.

The ultimate obscenity is not caring, not doing something about what you feel, not feeling! Just drawing back and drawing in; becoming narcissistic.

(Dated but pertinent) I'd love to be able to write an in-depth piece of what causes men like [Richard] Nixon and [H.R.]Haldeman and [John] Ehrlichman and all the rest of them not only to run, but what causes us to vote for them.

[Hekate]

1. Rod Serling was a wise man. As to your comment at the end...

Oppression will do it, sometimes. But even more — chaos (or the illusion of chaos created by opportunists) will cause a lot of people to cry out for “order” and seize on any strongman or despot who promises such.

Did you know lab rats can be driven crazy by creating an unstable environment where they can’t predict what comes next? They can also be driven crazy by overcrowding.

What people want more than anything in a time of chaos is stability, knowing what to expect from one day to the next. They’ll give up a lot for certainty — not everything, and not forever, but for long enough for a lot of damage to be done.

I’m a lifelong believer in freedom of thought and freedom of conscience. I had to get pretty old (I’m in my late 70s now) to start looking at my fellow Americans and other humans like this. It was during Trump’s first term, actually, when I saw not only that he was taking us off a cliff to fascism, but that there was a worldwide trend to the right and to authoritarianism. So much manipulation. So much.

[NowsTheTime]

2. I made no comment...I just bolded a part of Rod Serlings quote...and I appreciate your response.

Full disclosure....we're pretty much the same age. LOL

[sarisataka]

3. I have been watching a Twilight Zone marathon

One of the quotes that always stuck with me (like the Obsolete Man you included) is from Death's Head Revisited

There is an answer to the doctor's question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes; all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth.