The less you say

The less you say the more people remember. Know one understood that more than Charlie Chaplin.
His final speech at the end of ‘The Great Dictator’ is aptly referred to on YouTube as ‘the greatest speech of all time’:

Agent Smith is a character with few lines in the Matrix trilogy, yet he makes one of the most memorable speeches in the first film:

Yoda – another film character who chooses his words wisely:

Although this next video disrupts the analogy of ‘the less that you say the more people remember’, I can’t leave out  Dr. Martin Luther King in this process of integrating great speeches:

There is of course another deeper theme running throughout these four great verses and their orators. The idea of a ‘common good’ – Chaplin was rallying against mans greed, Agent Smith underlying mans unsustainble lifestyle, Yodo fighting against the dictatorship of the Dark Side and King’s call for equality among man. Excluding Star Wars for now – purely on the basis that its not actually real (despite how many folk subscribe to the official Jedi religion) – the worrying fact remains that these are issues expressed as far back as 1940 – yet very little seems to have changed. I particularly like Agent Smiths idea of human civilization as a cancer – you can easily visual his comparison of  grey, concrete splotches, like a virus – spreading across the greenery of the land.

I think Yoda gets the final say in terms of steering the planet and its peoples intentions in the right direction: “What has been learned must be unlearned”. Sustainablity will come at a cost, a revaluation of our lifestyles and the definition of success, personal and economic – less fuel consumption and less material goods (possibly less time spent at work as well, so not all bad). There is no other option really, very much a case of “Do or Do not” . . .

(I’m touching upon an Utopian ideal here, collectively know as ‘Alternative Hedonism’. This piece in the Guardian by Jackie Ashley is a good starting point if interested).