Egghead

From “Egghead,” by Robert Bloch, © 1955


“Well, I suppose I’d better quit school before they call a hearing and throw me out. After that, I guess I’ll have to find a job on my own. My father’ll be pretty sore.”

“What sort of a job?”

I thought about it for a moment. “Factory or manual labor. If I try for anything better, they’ll check up on my record here. But maybe that won’t be too bad. I mean, it’s just five or six hours a day, and I’ll have security.”

“Security.” Surprisingly enough, it was the Junior Prom Queen who spoke. “I thought you were the one who made that remark about not liking French fries with your hamburgers.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Everything. Do you know how the average worker lives?”

“Well – ”

“Take an ordinary job and you’ll be a prisoner for life, in a world of French fries, surrounded by the faceless mob that eats, drinks, dresses, talks and acts on the basis of conditioned reflexes. You’ll live in a prefabricated house with a prefabricated wife and a bunch of prefabricated kids. You were taking a Junior Exec course, weren’t you? Then you must have studied Depth Motivation Technique. What did you think you were learning that stuff for? In order to use in on consumers against consumers; and who are they? Manual workers, factory workers, the army of conformists and conformity-worshippers you’re rebelling against. And now you think you’ll find a solution by joining their ranks? Don’t be ridiculous!”

“Then what should I do?” I asked.

…

“ … We know that the history of this nation is a history of constant rebellion. It was political rebellion which won our freedom, social rebellion which expanded our frontiers, intellectual rebellion which resulted in invention and progress. Only in recent years have we fallen into the error of orientating our philosophy around an expanding economy, dependent upon a constant and complacent consumerdom. Only in recent years has it come to be a shameful thing to be ‘different’ – and individuality is equated with antisocial attitudes.”

…


Hmmmm. The short story describes how a group of “eggheads” is going to infiltrate this über-consumeristic American society of the far-flung future of 1978, as industrialists, senators, bankers, preachers, journalists, etc, with one mission: to bring it down. Kinda like the plot of Atlas Shrugged, if it had been written by Ralph Nader.

Rebel LE like! Practical LE say, Remember Who song!

Meet the new boss … same as the old boss …