All language subtitles for My Dinner With André 1981 (People have become robots)

What can I do?

Okay. Yes. We're bored.

We're all bored now.

But has it ever occurred to you, Wally,
that the process...

that creates this boredom
that we see in the world now...

may very well be a self-perpetuating,
unconscious form of brainwashing...

created by a world totalitarian government
based on money...

and that all of this is much more dangerous
than one thinks...

and it's not just a question
of individual survival, Wally...

but that somebody who's bored
is asleep...

and somebody who's asleep
will not say no?

See, I keep meeting these people -
I mean, uh, just a few days ago...

I met this man whom I greatly admire.

He's a Swedish physicist.
Gustav Björnstrand.

And he told me that he
no longer watches television...

he doesn't read newspapers,
and he doesn't read magazines.

He's completely
cut them out of his life...

because he really does feel that we're living
in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now...

and that everything that you hear now
contributes to turning you into a robot.

And when I was at Findhorn, I met
this extraordinary English tree expert...

who had devoted his life
to saving trees.

Just got back from Washington,
lobbying to save the redwoods.

He's 84 years old, and he always
travels with a backpack...

'cause he never knows
where he's gonna be tomorrow.

And when I met him at Findhorn,
he said to me, “Where are you from?”

I said, “New York.” He said, “Ah, New York.
Yes, that's a very interesting place.

Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about
the fact that they want to leave, but never do?”

And I said, “Oh, yes.” And he said,
“Why do you think they don't leave?”

I gave him different banal theories. He said,
“Oh, I don't think it's that way at all.”

He said, “I think that New York is the new
model for the new concentration camp...

“where the camp has been built
by the inmates themselves...

“and the inmates are the guards, and they
have this pride in this thing they've built.

“They've built their own prison.

“And so they exist
in a state of schizophrenia...

“where they are both guards
and prisoners.

“And as a result, they no longer have
- having been lobotomized -

“the capacity to leave
the prison they've made...

or to even see it as a prison.”

And then he went into his pocket,
and he took out a seed for a tree...

and he said, “This is a pine tree.”

He put it in my hand and he said,
“Escape before it's too late.”

See, actually,
for two or three years now...

Chiquita and I have had this very unpleasant
feeling that we really should get out.

We really feel like Jews in Germany
in the late '30s.

Get out of here.

Of course, the problem is
where to go.

'Cause it seems quite obvious that the
whole world is going in the same direction.

See, I think it's quite possible
that the 1960s...

represented the last burst of the human
being before he was extinguished...

and that this is the beginning
of the rest of the future, now...

and that from now on there'll simply be
all these robots walking around...

feeling nothing, thinking nothing.

And there'll be nobody left almost
to remind them...

that there once was a species
called a human being...

with feelings and thoughts...

and that history and memory
are right now being erased...

and soon nobody
will really remember...

that life existed on the planet.