We rightfully fear the way that social media can destroy anyone’s lives
We are in the midst of a verifiable horror renaissance, a certifiable modern golden age of terror. A Quiet Place, for example, cost $17,000 and made over $350,000. What explains such startling success and wide acclaim for a movie made on a shoestring budget in a genre largely panned by critics and the cinematic intelligentsia? It and its sequel are great movies, which definitely aids in them being well received, but there is more going on here. Great movies make very little money all the time. If we understand why horror itself resonates so well with people and suss out the message about modern society at the center of the A Quiet Place movies we won’t just understand why the movie was so successful, we will get a deeper glimpse into one of the greatest dangers of the modern Internet Age and how to combat it.
The Meaning of Horror
In a paper titled The Aesthetics and Psychology Behind Horror Films for Long Island University, Michelle Park observed that a major:
allure of horror is relevance. The audience finds some kind of relevance in the film, whether it can be universal like the fear of death, the unknown, or cultural, social, religious relevance. For example, South Korea is a highly competitive country and is the one of the top countries with the highest suicidal deaths. Because of strict studies in middle school and high schools, many students commit suicide by falling off of the rooftop of their school. There are many films with young girls coming back to haunt their enemies with long black hair and pale skin—a highly profitable film genre due to its social relevance.
The Aesthetics and Psychology Behind Horror Films, pg. 10
Horror isn’t all about, or even really about, bloody knives, freakish monsters, or mountains or corpses. A good ghost story doesn’t pick up wide acclaim simply because it tells a good story. It picks up wide acclaim because it addresses relevant problems in society and the fears those problems engender within us. In his book The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, horror historian and American cultural historian David J. Skal talks about how horror films reflect the fears of society in the age in which the work of horror is produced in:
Horror films served as a kind of populist surrealism, rearranging the human body and its processes, blurring the boundaries between Homo sapiens and other species, responding uneasily to new and almost incomprehensible developments in science and the anxious challenges they posed to the familiar structures of society, religion, psychology, and perception.
The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, pg. 114
In other words, horror movies aren’t popular because they’re good (most times they are mediocre at best); they are popular because they allow us to express the things about ourselves and our current society that frighten us. For example, Friday the 13th isn’t popular because people like watching a guy in a hockey mask kill people. It is popular because it reflects our millennia old fears of what lurks just beyond the limits of the campfire, of civilization, that could slay us with ease. A Nightmare on Elm Street isn’t about us being afraid of dream demons. Up until recently going to sleep meant leaving yourself open for very real predators with very real sharp claws coming upon you when your guard was at its lowest and dragging you away to their dark den to feast upon you or your loved ones. Freddy Krueger, with his razor sharp claws and threat to children and teens specifically, demonstrates that those fears haven’t been bred out of us by modernity. Halloween isn’t popular because people like a guy in a mechanic’s suit kill teenagers. It is popular because it reflects our heightening anxieties about living in our modern concrete jungles and never knowing exactly who our neighbors are or what they’re capable of doing. Not even Jeffrey Dahmer’s neighbors thought there was anything wrong with him while he was quietly murdering and eating people for decades. To them he just seemed “friendly” and “kind of a square guy.” Horror stories and horror films reflect our cultural fears, either long lasting ones or those created by modern society. In this way horror stories are biocultural, blending the biological and evolutionary instincts with those created in the context of the culture and time in which we live, and you can see this reflected in every decade of 20th century horror.
We see it perfectly in the A Quiet Place movies.
Silent Terror
(Note that the following commentary on A Quiet Place I and II will include spoilers as I deem necessary. If you’ve seen the movies and don’t need a refresher you can probably skip this section.)
The first movie opens up in what can be kindly described as a post-apocalyptic nightmare. Society collapsed eighty-nine days before and our main characters, the Abbott family (whose names we only learn in the credits), are scrounging in the ruins of an old grocery store. The eldest child, daughter Regan, is totally or nearly totally deaf though it seems as if she may have had partial hearing in the past. As a result the family speaks American Sign Language (ASL) which helps them communicate without speaking. One of my favorite moments in the opening is when the camera pans past the snack aisle and you see no one has touched the chips because their crinkly bags are simply too loud to risk trying to moving or opening. The family leaves the store and quietly begin hiking back to their home only for their youngest son to start playing with a toy that he took without his parents knowing. The sound alerts one of the massive monsters that are responsible for destroying civilization (they’re blind but can hear exceptionally well) and it murders the kid so fast the parents can’t even try and save him. They just have to watch and try to be as silent as possible. After this the credits show and there is a time skip.
We are now 472 days after the monsters appeared and civilization collapsed. The mother, Evelyn, is pregnant and ready to give birth. There are lots of important things that this day sets up, but the most important thing is that the father, Lee, is trying to repair his daughter’s cochlear implant using speaker amplifiers so that she can hear. In a world where the smallest sound can summon a large, vicious, clawed, nearly bulletproof monster (more on that in a minute) her inability to really tell when she is being loud is a danger to her and everyone around her. Being a teenager this is hard for her to accept, especially on day 473 when her father takes her surviving younger brother, Marcus, fishing because it is safer for her to stay at home and help her mother prepare for the imminent arrival of the baby. Everything goes awry when Evelyn’s water breaks. Lee and Marcus are still fishing and unbeknownst to anyone else Regan has gone to spend the say at the site of her youngest brother’s death. As Evelyn rushes down stairs to turn on the signal lights to get her husband’s attention she steps on an upturned nail and reflexively drops the glass frame she had been carrying. This attracts the monsters.
The fallout of all this is that Evelyn gives birth to their new baby while in the middle of hiding for her life and ultimately Lee dies saving his children, but not in vain. The cochlear implant he was working on for Regan doesn’t work, but it does create a pitch so high that it actually causes the monsters physical pain, torturing them enough to expose the vulnerable sections on their head. This in turn allows Evelyn to kill the monsters by shooting them in the head with a shotgun as they are paralyzed from the sound created by her daughter’s implant. This is where the first movie ends.
A Quiet Place II picks up right where the first left off. Due to a fire accidentally started the night before the Abbotts are forced to flee their refuge with the survivors being daughter Regan, younger son Marcus, mother Evelyn, and Baby Abbott. In the opening of the movie we do see a flashback that shows Day 1 with the monsters arriving in what looks like a crashing spaceship or a vast meteorite plummeting to Earth. So we definitely know they’re aliens. In the present the Abbotts silently make their way to another place they know where survivors are holed up on the way the son Marcus has his leg injured severely and they barely escape the monsters. Now hiding in what looks like an old iron works with a sole survivor named Emmett, who used to be a family friend but whom has been broken by the deaths of his family, they need to make a choice. Marcus is injured and there isn’t enough food or water for everyone.
Using headphones, Regan listens to the radio and miraculously finds a single radio station that is broadcasting a song, Bobby Darrin’s rendition of “Beyond The Sea.” Upon finding out that the broadcasting station is on an island Regan concludes it is a message from people and wants to take her implant there. She thinks if she can broadcast the sound of it then it will cripple the monsters enough to make it possible to fight back. So she secretly takes off on her own. Mother Evelyn convinces Emmett to go rescue her, but he ultimately decides to help her on her quest. Back in hiding the mother goes back to the drug store we saw in the first movie to get medication for the injured Marcus, leaving him alone with the baby. Because he is stupid and antsy he goes exploring and causes some noise to attract the monsters. He and Baby Abbott have to hide in a large incinerator which is soundproof but they nearly asphyxiate. Evelyn arrives back in time to save them but they get cornered with the monster trying to get to them.
Meanwhile, after escaping a group of human raiders (who give off a rapist/cannibal vibe) and obtaining a rowboat, Regan and Emmett arrive on the island that is broadcasting the song to discover everyone living semi-normally. Turns out they’ve been safe since the natural armoring on the monsters makes them so heavy they can’t swim and therefore can’t get out to the island. Unfortunately, a boat containing one of the monsters drifts onto the island. With some help from one of the island people they get to the radio station and after nearly dying, they broadcast the high pitched sound of the implant. This cripples the monster on the island, allowing Regan to kill it. At the same time, back in the iron works, Marcus hears the high-pitched sound of his sister’s cochlear implant come over the radio and uses it to drive the attacking monster back. Once he has driven it away from his sister and mother, Marcus kills the monster with a pistol his mother had set on a nearby table by shooting the monster in its now exposed vulnerable spot on its head. The movie ends with the children having saved the day.
Modern Day Monsters
The surface level horror that the A Quiet Place movies appeals to is rather obvious. Humans are largely physically defenseless creatures and for most of our history we were surrounded by creatures that were bigger, faster, and more deadly than us with huge fangs and razor sharp claws and if they decided to eat us there wasn’t a whole lot we could do about it. Imagine trying to fight an angry and aggressive bear with nothing but your fists while in a loincloth and you’ve got the right idea. The A Quiet Place monsters take that and exaggerate it to the nth degree creating monsters that are literally nothing but speed, teeth, and claws. But there is a greater danger here, a greater horror here, than simply the fear of predatory creatures. I am talking about the way these movies use silence and the way that even the quietest, most innocent comment can literally summon hordes of monsters whose only goal is to rip the speaker into shreds regardless of how it destroys the speaker’s family and life. Indeed, that is most often the very goal of the modern monster – to destroy the life of the speaker. I am, of course, talking about social media and cancel culture.
Social media – those collections of internet services that make it possible for people to communicate with hundreds, thousands, even millions of others online in near real time – has put people in closer communication than they ever have been at any time in history. It has also given humans the ability to quickly generate ignorant rage and destroy the lives of people the mobs determine have offended society. The ability and willingness to do this is the essence of cancel culture. The proponents of cancel culture explain it as:
a pretty unremarkable concept, says Nicole Holliday, assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.
“It is used to refer to a cultural boycott,” she said. “We’ve had the term ‘boycott’ forever and ever. It just means, ‘I’m not going to put my attention or money or support behind this person or organization because they’ve done something that I don’t agree with.’ That is not new, that’s very old.”
So in theory this is supposed to be about accountability, but this is false. When there is accountability the ones carrying out the act of justice are accountable for their actions and the only ones subject to the so-called system of justice is the only one held accountable. There is also some pathway to redemption, otherwise you don’t have justice, just vengeance. Whatever utopian ideal of cancel culture its proponents have of it, reality is that it doesn’t work that way. It is not accountable, it targets and destroys the lives of innocent people, and no level of debasement is enough to redeem those convicted by the mob. Jeff Deist gave a perfect description of what cancel culture is really like:
Cancel culture means shutting people out of jobs, opportunities, platforms, & social settings– attempting to impoverish people, financially and otherwise.
To anyone who does any digging this becomes abundantly clear. Take the example of Emmanuel Cafferty a former employee of San Diego Gas & Electric who is 75% Hispanic (he has one Irish grandparent) and was fired after being accused of flashing a white supremacist hand sign at people:
At the end of a long shift mapping underground utility lines, he was on his way home, his left hand casually hanging out the window of the white pickup truck issued to him by the San Diego Gas & Electric company. When he came to a halt at a traffic light, another driver flipped him off.
Then, Cafferty told me a few days ago, the other driver began to act even more strangely. He flashed what looked to Cafferty like an “okay” hand gesture and started cussing him out. When the light turned green, Cafferty drove off, hoping to put an end to the disconcerting encounter.
But when Cafferty reached another red light, the man, now holding a cellphone camera, was there again. “Do it! Do it!” he shouted. Unsure what to do, Cafferty copied the gesture the other driver kept making. The man appeared to take a video, or perhaps a photo.
Two hours later, Cafferty got a call from his supervisor, who told him that somebody had seen Cafferty making a white-supremacist hand gesture, and had posted photographic evidence on Twitter. (Likely unbeknownst to most Americans, the alt-right has appropriated a version of the “okay” symbol for their own purposes because it looks like the initials for “white power”; this is the symbol the man accused Cafferty of making when his hand was dangling out of his truck.) Dozens of people were now calling the company to demand Cafferty’s dismissal.
By the end of the call, Cafferty had been suspended without pay. By the end of the day, his colleagues had come by his house to pick up the company truck. By the following Monday, he was out of a job.
No matter how he protested, no matter how he tried to explain how nonsensical it would be for him to be a white supremacist given his ethnic heritage, despite having exactly no evidence he was racist or had done anything racist, the cancel culture mob came after him and his employers fired him in order to appease the mob. Nothing he could do could satisfy the cancel culture monsters who swooped into his life from no where and destroyed not only him, but the livelihood and life of his entire family because now he couldn’t take care of his wife and children. It made no ones lives better, it didn’t combat racism, it didn’t help society. It only increased the amount of suffering in the world. As Cafferty told an interviewer, “A man can learn from making a mistake. But what am I supposed to learn from this? It’s like I was struck by lightning.” And it didn’t matter how much he apologized either, which is unsurprising given studies have shown that publicly apologizing is more likely to make people hate you more and not less.
And the guy who originally posted the Twitter picture? He later deleted the picture and confessed that he was wrong, but he didn’t lose his home, his family wasn’t made destitute, and he was never held accountable for helping to destroy another person’s life. His actions also bring up the question whether or not some or even many of these people are generating events over which to become upset so they can post it and become internet famous or out of some other perverse desire.
The cases of David Shor and Majdi Wadi are other great examples. Shor’s case (he posted an academic study showing how ineffective violent protest are) shows how even the cancel culture intelligentsia are willing to destroy their own despite a complete lack of any evidence that the person being attacked is actually racist/sexist/transphobic/etc. That last article is interesting as it interviews people who want to remain anonymous because they’re afraid anything even perceived as criticism could get their lives quickly and violently destroyed by the cancel culture monsters. Wadi, a Palestinian immigrant who had built up a local grocery chain called “Holy Land” in Minnesota, didn’t even do anything wrong. His daughter, who had posted a series of racist edgelord tweets when she was in high school, was attacked by the cancel culture monsters over four years after the latest offensive tweet. Wadi fired her but it was too late. Despite abasing himself in front of the community in a modern day auto de fé, carrying out every act of penance he could think of, and even firing his daughter from her role in his local company his company was still “canceled.” The result?
Holy Land was evicted from one location over the posts, where it had a butcher store and deli. It has lost millions of dollars in contracts for its renowned hummus, closed its factory and two other Holy Land locations and laid off at least 46 people, mostly immigrants and people of color, in the face of a boycott campaign.
NPR
In one fell swoop the cancel culture warriors ruined the loves of dozens and dozens of people over the words of a single individual. She spoke (years ago) and when the monsters finally heard they ripped and shredded and destroyed not only her, but the homes, families, and lives of dozens and dozens of innocent men, women, and children (mostly people of color, the very people that the cancel culture monsters supposedly want to help), not including all the other people who worked in supplying Holy Land and selling its products, such as its hummus, to others. Wadi has given over $127,000 dollars in charity to the American Relief Agency for the Horn of Africa, providing scholarships for a total of 60 African refugees to be able to complete school and get a full education that would otherwise be impossible for them to achieve. Do you think that can continue when his businesses are being shutdown as a result of the cancel culture monsters? Not content to ruin the lives of people in America they have to slaughter the chances of poor Africans, stealing from them the opportunity to not only improve their own lives but to use the gifts given to them by Wadi to improve the lives of everyone in their communities. All of this lost because people today can’t deal with some idiotic stuff a teenager said years ago.
This is justice? This is courage? This is righteousness? This is morality? No. This is monstrous. This is exactly what monsters do – they sweep in and bite and slash, rend and tear, wreck and destroy without care or consequence, without it mattering who or what they are destroying. They gobble up men, women, and children with little care and are never filled; they’re always on the hunt for more people to rip apart to satiate their desires.
And this is what A Quiet Place depicts perfectly.
A Modern Horror
One of the most interesting elements of the movies is how the main characters, the Abbott family, all walk around barefoot, as quietly as possible, making as little noise as possible. They slink everywhere they go and generally do everything they can to tip toe through life and not draw attention to themselves. To do otherwise would be to court disaster as even the smallest slip up can draw the attention of the ravening monsters who will not hesitate to rip the person who made the mistake to shreds. To use a metaphor, they’re “walking on eggshells,” because the monsters will kill you no matter who you are, what your age, what your sex, or how you look if their attention is even slightly drawn to you.
Now, read the few examples I gave above and tell me this doesn’t metaphorically describe how the cancel culture monsters operate? Wadi and his family are Palestinian immigrants and Cafferty is a Latino-American, both minority groups that the cancel culture monsters are supposed to be defending. But that is just bluster and false justifications, what they really do is maim and kill and it doesn’t matter who gets in their path. Minority or not they will destroy your life and the lives of all those you love. Perhaps ironically the only person wearing shoes, and therefore not having his ability to move and act without injury, is Emmett, the survivor the Abbott family joins in the second movie. This is ironic in the context of our conversation because he fits the very image of the old white man – gruff, calloused hands, loner, big beard, trucker hat, dirty denim clothes – that the cancel culture monsters love to caricaturize and vilify.
The rest of society though? They are all walking on eggshells, trying to be quiet as possible, refusing to speak even when we are worried something is wrong because we are afraid that even if we are innocent or even if we are right the cancel culture monsters will come for us next. Adding to this feeling that we all have to be silent because anyone could be a target is that in the first movie we never find out the names of the characters. They never refer to each other by name as they are all family and just speak to one another how a family normally would. We only find out their names at the end in the credits. This is a great storytelling tactic because it allows us to project ourselves and our identity upon them, the characters in the movie become representatives of ourselves as a result. And just as they can be hunted down and destroyed by these monsters, so can we.
Take for example the two anonymous Democrats in this article were afraid to comment on how Black Lives Matters is viewed in their communities because they didn’t want to draw the attention of the cancel culture monsters by making any sort of noise. Over 60% of Americans, both political leftists and political rightists, say they have views they’re unwilling to share because they’re afraid of attracting the cancel culture monsters. We recognize that if we make one wrong noise, we are dead. The cancel culture monsters are out there, always listening, always waiting to pounce.
Why do the cancel culture monsters do this? Because the fear that engenders serves their ultimate goals. The cancel culture monsters engage in “the conscious, designed manipulation of language intended to change the way people speak, write, think, feel, and act, in furtherance of an agenda.” (Deist) It doesn’t matter what we say or what we mean (as exemplified by all the previous examples); all that matters is that they hear what they want to hear and how they believe this will justify their rage and their retaliatory destruction. They will twist what you say and what you do until it fits their agenda. The goal is ultimately to establish their positions as the social orthodoxy and to disenfranchise and marginalize any other opinions through the concentrated use of social terror until everyone thinks and acts as the cancel culture monsters want them to think and act.
This means everyone is in danger, but those suffering the most in this nightmare monster world are teens and young adults. Just as in the A Quiet Place movies, our children cannot be protected from these monsters because they and their toxic ideology is everywhere. It is constantly on the prowl for someone to destroy, to rend and rip and consume. And just as in the movies our first reaction is to try and protect them from it by teaching them our fears and indoctrinating them into silence. This we must resist because they are our only hope for good change. Just as it was the daughter and son who saved the people around them in the end of A Quiet Place II it is really our children who we have to train to be brave enough, wise enough, and good enough not to take place in this cancel culture monstrosity and refuse to repeat its toxic behaviors, they have to refuse to become monsters themselves. No matter what you say someone will have a negative response, especially online and, just as the daughter left bloody footprints behind in her quest for the broadcasting station, our children will be hurt. We have to teach them how to do better and be better than the monsters around them, to not allow pain and fear to control them, and to broadcast the better way through their words and deeds.
A Message of Hope
While the A Quiet Place movies provide perfect monstrous metaphors for the cancel culture monsters who terrify us into silence lest we and our families become victim to their gnashing teeth and vicious claws, it also gives us a suggestion for how we can conquer these monsters. In the second movie we are actually shown a community on a small island off the coast of where the Abbott family lives, within a few minutes of the mainland by power boat. Our main characters who arrive there, Regan and Emmett, are shocked to find these people being as loud and carefree as anyone before the monsters came. The people are yelling, having a barbeque, playing sports, and listening to music – all things incomprehensible to those on the mainland. Men, women, and children of different races have come together in a seemingly very traditional community – they all seem to be in heterosexual relationships, listen to records, and the song they broadcast as a message to others is Bobby Darrin’s rendition of Beyond the Sea, first released in 1959. Together they have made a better life for themselves and their children free of the danger of the monsters. How is this possible? The monsters can’t swim. They can’t get out to the island, they can’t effect the people there, and they have no power over them. It is only when Regan and Emmett unknowingly allow a monster along as a stowaway on a boat that it gets loose and begins hurting people. It is killed by Regan at the end when she cripples it by broadcasting the high pitched sound of her cochlear implant to cripple the monster and then bashing its head in with a metal rod.
This suggests numerous ways to us about how we can combat cancel culture.
First, we refuse to pay it mind. We can’t stop these people, but we can separate ourselves from it. We don’t have to take part in it and we don’t have to return their vitriol and hatred with our own. We refuse to give it power in our lives to dictate how we think, act, or live.
Secondly, we don’t live in fear. We continue to live the way we want, enjoy the things we enjoy, and refuse to let their “cancelling” decide for us what we will or will not watch and listen to, who we will or will not employ, those who can or cannot be our friends, or how we will or will not live.
Third, we do not allow ourselves to be afraid to broadcast our own message about who we should be and how we should live. We refuse to be cowed into silence by fear of what the monsters will or will not do to us. We continue telling the truth about what kind of people we should be, what things should or should not be acceptable in society, and how people should or should not live. We refuse to allow them to dominate and manipulate society with their propaganda. Instead we flood society with what we know to be true and right and good.
Fourth, instead of exile we open our arms. People driven from one community will always seek another. If you cancel people for being racist and drive them from your society then you are ultimately only driving them into the arms of that community which will accept them – actual racists. Thus cancel culture only compounds and worsens the real problems it is supposedly trying to solve. The proper response is to open our arms in love to those who are in error and through the depth of our love and light of our examples show them the better way to live and be. If they feel welcomed in the community no matter how dirty and beat down they are in time they will join it and accept its beliefs as their own. Over time they will become naturally what you could never force them to become.
Fifth, there is value to traditional truths and values that we shouldn’t jettison just because it offends the cancel culture monsters. A Quiet Place II does a great job of distinguishing between historical truth and error, the most successful, safe, and peaceful community post-monster appearance being a small community that manages its own affairs without the taint of nationalism or racism and which seems to be clearly organized into traditional families, the basic foundational unit of a healthy society. The silence the cancel culture monsters most desire of us is silence about these traditional truths and values, to stop us from proclaiming how effective and powerful they are in solving the real problems of the world. The cancel culture monsters see themselves as righteous and demand silence from all of us lest we be attacked and destroyed for daring to contradict them. Their errors they proudly label “Progressive,” mistaking change for progress. Well do the words of vaunted poet T.S. Eliot describe these people and the results of their efforts:
But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before:
The Rock, Section VII
though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.
Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god;
and this has never happened before
That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason,
And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic.
The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do
But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards
In an age which advances progressively backwards?
Instead of a society based on the truths of family, community, and faith the cancel culture monsters would see a society that abandons God, obsesses over money and power, and that defines everything in life according to race and the Socialist dialectic. Those who stand by the traditional ideals of God and our duty to serve Him are lambasted as transphobic, gay bashing, poor hating, self-deceiving fools – at best. Their solution to the problems of the world are to jettison God/religion generally as a power in society, empower Government as the primary arbiter of human life, define society according to collectives (such as race, sex, gender, etc.), and forcibly get rid of anything they don’t like while using the violence of law to compel others to rigidly live according to the cultural ideals of the cancel culture monsters.
In this effort traditional classical liberal ideals of limited government, individual action, and universal human identity is a major roadblock. The progress forward of the cancel culture monster is really recession back into the authoritarian/absolutist states of yore that classical liberalism set about dismantling in the name of human liberty. The cancel culture obsession with collectivism and supremacy collective identity (whether that be race, sex/gender, ethnicity, etc.) is a recession to an age of tribalism and ethnocentrism that classical liberalism began demolishing by proclaiming the truths of individualism. The direction cancel culture moves us is, as Eliot eloquently explains it, “progressively backwards,” and if we are going to escape such irrationality and keep the forward momentum of humanity going – moving towards ever shrinking government, ever greater liberty, and ever greater recognition of the individual in society – then we must upon defend, promote, and live these ideals more than ever. Not on some false national or even state (or national and provincial level, etc.) level, those are just other forms of collectivism and are at their core interchangeable.
Instead we have to promote, defend, and live the ideals of true liberalism as they did in A Quiet Place II, in the neighborhoods and communities in which we live. This is where we know individuals not as “that black guy,” or “that white woman,” (i.e. as mere manifestations of collectivist identities) but as individuals, as Tyrone and Linda. It is in our small, immediate communities that we build societies, develop shared ideals, overcome prejudice through experience, and come to understand people as people, as specific individuals. It is in our small local communities that we come to understand what it means to be human and to experience humanity. It is also where we can best embrace consensual government based on true consent and reject the State in all its forms. And while this small community is a bit idealized in the movie – an island off the coast of New England – it can happen anywhere, whether that be your little cul–de–sac, your floor in the apartment building, or your block in the “wrong side of town.”
That is the power of true liberalism (a.k.a. classical liberalism and its ideological descendants such as anarchism, libertarianism, voluntaryism.) Built upon the three pillars of Faith, Liberty, and Natural Law, true liberalism functions everywhere it is employed for everyone who employs it. Just as it was the tool of true progress in the past, breaking down the power and control of the authoritarians of former eras, so it still is the most powerful tool for our liberation from the authoritarian monsters of today. Now is the time to embrace these traditional truths and values more than ever, no matter what the monsters think or do. The alternative, as the A Quiet Place movies illustrate, is a human wasteland filled with suffering and monsters.