Critics

No story is without its share of critics - and rightly so, for no product created from the mind of man should exist with the label of "quality" if it does not first sustain the barage of contrary opinion.

There are and will continue to exist rational arguments against the lessons that "The Obsolete Man" teaches and those arguments need to be treated with the utmost of care, consideration, and respect while they are weighed and measured against the standards of truth that we deem to be absolute - logic and the scientific method - with its absolute requirement of "observation" intact.

A giant of Mathematical Reasoning, Blaise Pascal (see the illustration) wrote in his trestise, "Pensees" that,

When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to see all sides. Now, no one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true.

No man or woman is the repository of all knowledge and all experience, so we should consider, with great humility, the contrary opinions of others as we weigh the evidences presented herein.

With that, consider the opinion of the writer who wrote THIS about "The Obsolete Man"...

"The Obsolete Man" was an odd episode...and an odd choice for the final broadcast of "The Twilight Zone"'s most dynamic season, especially given the story's austerity and notwithstanding that both of the focal characters perish. It is hard to envision such a futuristic society as The State, as well as its litigation for the breezy extermination of undesirables and unproductives. The courtroom, or more appropriately, the 'judgement room' was an impressive set, but the presentation as a whole is difficult to take seriously.

I think that the difficulty that some experience in taking such a thing seriously can only be understood by considering that in their experience, such a thing has never been witnessed.

There exists the temptation for all of us to believe that in all times and in all places, things are the same everywhere. Such a belief is not borne out by history as I will shortly demonstrate.

Although I am not one (Thank God!) who has experienced first-hand the lamentable life of one under the yoke of a totalitarian dictatorship (Alexander Solshenitzin comes to mind) I have made the effort to read the works of those who have, and to watch contemporary videos of the times and places in which they were "living" in in order to form an opinion that I think is more experienced than that of the critics of "The Obsolete Man".

I have, for example, watched actual video of a man standing trial before a Nazi Judge while World War II raged around them. In this trial, the man was accused of speaking against the state when he said what the SS and the Brownshirts were doing to Jews was "murder" - his exact word.

Upon hearing this, you can hear the blood-curdling cry of the Judge as he yells out, "M-U-R-D-E-R?" intoning a sickeningly sarcastic expression that condemns the man currently on trial.

Anyone, and I mean anyone who had the misfortune of seeing the tyranny of this so-called "Court of Justice" would come away with the feeling that nothing in Mr. Serling's short story was "difficult to take seriously".

We see the same problem throughout society as one who has been raised in an environment wholly different than others whom they are passing judgement on. There are people in this world, for but one example, who are busy living their lives, planting food crops, delivering mail, and so forth while they carry fully-automatic weapons about with them.

While inconvenient and certainly strange looking to those of us who live in the pampered West, they are doing what for them is a wise thing owing to the fact that they live where criminal snipers and bomb-bearing suicidal maniacs are not a rare thing to be found. In such places, to be armed is to have a better chance of survival than to not be armed.

It is easy for those of us who live as I say in "the pampered West" to find such a thing to be difficult to take seriously, and even to pass a self-righteous judgement on them for such behavior - a judgement without cooresponding consequences in our peaceful corner of the world - but for them, this is a daily reality and they have the human right to do what is necessary to survive.