You are Number 6

Miscellaneous General
1

With planned surgery a week ago I rediscovered and order the series “This Prisoner” on DVD - and have spent the past few days watching it (let’s see - I was about 5 when it first came out…) AMC has a site on it here, and or course there is the wikipedia site here. I saw also AMC seems to be doing a remake series, which I’m sure will be a fetid regurgitation - oh well.

So Patrick McGoohan’s quest in the series was that he was not a number, that he was a free man. And in each episode there is always a new “Number 2” - and number one is not revealed. Who is number 1? I saw an interview (several parts) on YouTube where Mr McGoohan speaks of the problems as “progress” and Madison Avenue advertisers - although I don’t get the impression that his words put him in the far-left Michael Moore camp we might immediately associate with such thougths.

An old question is always “If you could have dinner with one dead person, who would it be?” I wonder about 2 dead people - if McGoohan and Rothbard sat down to dinner, would they find any common ground - any agreement about ‘prisoners’ and ‘free man’?

2

Just watched this great series. I looked for a libertarian message, but I couldn’t really find one, besides vague echoes of voluntarism.

I think it’s really all just about Patrick McGoohan’s internal struggle as to why he quit his very successful former TV role as a secret agent. If anything, it’s about the committee of personalities in one’s own mind. Very very interesting as a study of mind. Also, one of his committee of personalities was an anarchist (but what did that really mean back in 1960s Britain?).