Zsenitan wrote:

Stanislaw Lem has a great bit in one of his short story collections about how people have intelligence almost as a consolation prize for not having instinct. Animals have instincts, and they'll do, absolutely unforced, exactly what they need to do to survive. People are stuck with intelligence, the Loser's Instinct, which carries with it freedom, but freedom is also a sucker bet because all it means is that you can do stuff which is non-optimal for survival.

This is all declaimed unto the audience by a brilliant computer. The computer misses the point, of course, just like Tom Chick does; with intelligence and freedom comes agency, consent, and the ability to do things which transcend mere survival - like creating a brilliant computer.

But a lot of people are uncomfortable with freedom.

Like good Protestants they obsess about accidentally wasting their lives or being incorrect about something and they want reassurance, guidance, direction, instruction. They don't like people who are comfortable being free and making choices; those people seem unstable and wasteful, like gypsies or evil scientists. Fortunately people who want reassurance and direction are very useful to organizations of all kinds. We elide seamlessly into Focault's Discipline And Punish and arrive at one of its secondary conclusions as well: that docile bodies are useful to governments. Docile bodies nearly represent the power of governments. And so the docility of qt3 posters reflects Tom Chick's power, and like peasants under a popular king, they are happy to take part in that kind of comfortable, safe, unthinking power relationship.

Tom, in return, promises to his posters that he will always take steps to maintain a homogenously docile environment. Thus: banning "cunt" and Creex.

Anyway, it's certainly the case that docile people are bad at telling jokes. BDR is our point man on this, plunging into the canyon of unfunniness like a hustled buffalo as soon as he was driven from the fruitful plains of Caltrops.