Midterm

Jacob Bains Honors 3391R The Prisoner Saturday, March 15, 2008

The episodes The General and The Schizoid Man are excellent examples for “The Village”

as a metaphor for the university system and for the systematic dissemination and acquisition of

information. Although there are numerous examples throughout the entire series of the

extended metaphor of The Village (governance) to our society, I shall be focusing on the

implications of their methods.

Let us consider an argument that the (public) university system is a tool of the

government as a systematic tool for the dissemination of information, the episode The General,

makes this very clear. The General, as No. 6 (Patrick McGoohan) discovers over the course of

the episode, is an extensive programmable machine, resembling the ENIAC computer of the

1950s. The operator, programs The General with specific instructions and information under

the direction of No. 2 and the Village authority. The General then feeds the specific information

it was programmed with, to the residents (prisoners) of the Village via the intercommunication

system and with its own kind of personal flare. The General therefore is an artificially

intelligent propoganda tool of the Village authority. Propoganda and its many tools of

execution are probably the most well-known methods of government control of the masses,

since ancient times. The most effective propaganda is often completely truthful, but some

propaganda presents facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis, or gives loaded

messages in order to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information

presented. The desired result is a change of the cognitive narrative of the subject in the target

audience (Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia). The Village desires to change the cognitive

narrative of its residents (prisoners) to become complacent symbiotic tools to spread its

influence over new arrivals—especially rebels like No. 6.

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Consider for a moment that Texas A&M University in College Station, being a very

conservative oriented public university, and that it received the George Bush presidential

library and by comparison The University of Texas at Austin is the location of the LBJ

presidential library, and the UT Austin has a reputation for being a very liberal oriented public

university: the strategic location of the records and papers of these two past presidents can be

seen as a method of pre-determined information provisions. Since at least the 11th century,

universities were attracting the greatest of European minds. The University of Bologna started

to shift its focus from the sciences and humanities alone to political theory and law, by

integration of specific information--the Justinian Code of Law, into its curriculum (Columbia

Electronic Encyclopedia). The Village can then be labeled the antithesis of the university,

because it tends to dissuade individualism and produce groupthink.

Within the episode of The General, the specific information that No. 2 feeds to the

prisoners is a series of lectures on facts and dates from British history. The continuous method

of rote recitation of history lectures by the prisoners, may appear to be anything but a

government plot against the people—the prisoners of The Village. If that were true, then why

on earth would Patrick McGoohan have written it into the script? Seriously, one of the major

features of each episode of the series The Prisoner is that each small detail per episode is a

reflection of modern society in one or more forms. Consequently, this seemingly futile history

question and answer session between the prisoners, is a subliminal method of brainwashing or

radical Pavlovian conditioning.

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No. 6 brings this to light, after catching on to a mistake in facts, recited by a fellow

prisoner, and then discovers that The General (machine) is not the perfect machine that No. 2

and the Village ascendancy made it out to be. If we relate The General to the professors of a

typical public university, and the Village, to the Board of Regents, or the Government officials

who regulate the curricula and methods of their faculty, then a rather beautiful analogy is

painted by this episode alone. However, another episode takes a more direct approach to the

same objective of dissemination of specific information.

Another popular method of government sanctioned, Pavlovian conditioning, is torture

and espionage. The Schizoid Man, we find No. 6 being replaced by a conditioned doppelganger

by name of No. 12, and the viewer can easily lose track of which is the REAL No. 6 and which

one is the REAL No. 12, all the while asking the question who is playing who between No. 2, 6,

and 12. This built-in confusion only adds to the theme of conditioning on the part of the

audience in conjunction to the characters in the episode. The writers of The Schizoid Man may

have intended to keep the audience confused and second-guessing which No. 6 was the real

No. 6, conditioning them to keep the same approach to the successive episodes of the series.

The immediate reason for this conditioning (and torture) of No. 12 is to trick and/or

replace No. 6 within The Village population, and thereby obtain the very information that No. 2

wants from No. 6, from episode one. The Village ascendancy went to extreme efforts to make a

perfect copy, physically and mentally, of No. 6. As a finishing touch, No. 2 arranges for both the

doppelganger and the victim to be in direct contact and to feed off each other. The problem

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was that No. 2 continued to underestimate No. 6’s resolve and this close proximity between the

real No. 6 and No. 12, backfired.

The government sanctioned use of torture, also has tended to backfire (produce the

opposite result than from what was the original purpose). U.S. interventions into Latin America

and eventual sanctioning and training of local death-squads in Guatemala and Nicaragua,

backfired. American trained Latin American death squads were sanctioned by the Reagan, as

part of a desperate effort to prevent Soviet influence—rolling back communism. This

desperate effort achieved world-wide damning consequences, such as the promotion of

neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is an economic system that promotes free trade, at the expense of social

welfare of the working class. Chile had neoliberalism promoted brutally and violently by the

dictator General Augusto Pinochet, and legitimized by the U.S government (Green). One could

argue that government sanctioned torture is effective, in wartime and that may be; however in

the process of conducting that torture, the intentional non-combat pain, someone has to

sacrifice oneself, at the same them they are sacrificing another. That which is being sacrificed is

one’s moral, ethical self, as is illustrated by the sacrifice of No. 12, by his own government (The

Village). In this analogy, The Village acts much like the U.S. in its relationship to Latin America

(No. 6 and No. 12, respectively).

These two particular episodes of The Prisoner: The General and The Schizoid Man, I feel

are excellent respective illustrations of The Villages extreme methods of getting what they

want. The university system is the minor extreme, and the doppelganger impersonation and

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torture are the major extreme methods of the data acquisition (information). The common

quote heard at the beginning of each episode is No. 2 saying, “By hook or by crook, we will”

[get the information we want]. In each episode, No. 2 and the Village ascendency indeed try

multiple hooks and crooks to break No. 6, like a piggy bank.

Works Cited

Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. Reference.com. 2008. <http://www.reference.com/browse/columbia/>.

Green, Duncan. Silent Revolution: The Rise and Crisis of Market Economics in Latin America. 2nd Edition. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003, pp. 9-11.

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Midterm

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