Odd Man Out!

A personal note to the reader: I reproduce this text as originally written, including the British way of spelling. After reading the text several times, I can scarcely believe it was written in 1969, by an author whose name most people under fifty have never heard of. How can a statement so prophetic, and so proven by time to be absolutely true today, have been intuited so precisely and accurately over forty years ago by a man no longer read by anyone?  Voila:

"It is the illusion of our time that the non-conformist is in the ascendant, that the heretic is the hero and the revolutionary is the new redeemer.  

     In fact, the odd man out has never been so much at risk or so completely menaced by that conspiracy of power which we are pleased to call government.

     The mechanics of social control are more sophisticated than they have ever been in history, more sophisticated in those countries where the legal and judicial odds seem loaded in favor of the individual. 

     The Marxist position is at least clear: deviate and you are dammed - to expulsion from the Party, to breadline subsistence, to the limbo of non-persons, to brutal confinement, to death without honour. The democratic method is more subtle, but hardly less effective. The taxing authority may invade your most private transactions, and what it cannot [prove it may presume, in default of contrary evidence. An employer may solicit, file and transmit details of your private life - and your refusal to communicate them may provide a presumption of hidden delinquencies. The social spy, the wiretapper, the pedlar of devices to violate privacy have become stock personages in our society. The growth of large monopolies in communication has forced the protestor into the streets and the parks, where his protest may easily be construed or manipulated into a public disorder. A whole industry has been built around the art of affirmation, but the dignity of dissent is daily denigrated, the doubter is in disgrace because he demands time to reflect before he commits himself to an act of faith, and the liberty most laborious to maintain is the liberty to be mistaken.

 But the threat to the odd man out is not merely an external one. It is internal as well. So much diverse information, so many divergent opinions, are poured into his eyes and ears that the effort to rationalise them all threatens, at times his very sanity..."

I can think of current examples that witness to the truth of each sentence and paragraph, both here in the USA, and abroad as well. Where did such prescience come from? Any idea as to the writer?  (Morris L. West.)Or what he is writing? (It is the preface to a three act play, The Heretic,  about Giordano Bruno during  1592 -1600,  the time of his trial by the Inquisition in Venice and Rome.) I haven't read the play yet. Don't know that I ever will.  I keep pondering the message of the  Preface.