Mel Brooks and Buck Henry created an Emmy Award winning show called “Get Smart” which ran from 1965-1970. Don Adams played Maxwell Smart the bumbling “agent 86” often saved by his assistant played by Barbara Feldon. “86” worked for the counterintelligence agency called “Control.” The bad guys were spying for “Kaos.” It’s a good idea to find something to laugh at even though the underlying reality of human behavior is anything but funny.
In P-B the ultimate fear is “chaos” and most of us rely on the illusion of “control” provided by our false-self survival strategy ironically creating the very chaos that we all fear. In some contexts (e.g., the restaurant industry), “86” is code for “no more left.” With our behavior in P-B we are well on our way to “86-ing” ourselves.
This is the schizophrenia inherent in the pursuit of plenty, pleasure and power as most of us fear that we are being “controlled” by the agents of Kaos (the Other), and yet we are the “agents” working for our own demise. Things can get a little crazy in P-B making Alice’s Wonderland look like a very haven of rationality.
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Find a much more in-depth discussion in printed books by Roy Charles Henry.
