More on Stephen King’s The Institute
Some thoughts on part of King’s recent novel. Here are some quotes from it.
“It was ludicrous, but Luke supposed it also made a crazy kind of sense. He thought of the Roman satirist, Juvenal, who had said that if you gave the people bread and circuses, they’d be happy and not cause any trouble. He guessed the same might be true of booze and cigarettes, especially if you offered them to scared and unhappy kids who were locked up.”
This is from the Wikipedia entry for the above-referenced Juvenal:
He “was a Roman poet active in the late first and early second century AD. He is the author of the collection of satirical poems known as the Satires… Juvenal wrote at least 16 poems in the verse form dactylic hexameter… The Satires are a vital source for the study of ancient Rome from a number of perspectives, although their comic mode of expression makes it problematic to accept the content as strictly factual. At first glance the Satires could be read as a critique of pagan Rome.”
Well, satire can be an effective way of fighting against authority, and of course the Roman Empire did eventually collapse. How much satire had to do with it is an open question. I think the point of the excerpt from the recent King novel is that institutions trying to improve the behavior of the individuals they forcibly incarcerate can actually cause trauma, anxiety, and addiction instead. I think it is true.