review of
Lewis Yablonsky's Robopaths
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 14, 2008

This isn't, necessarily, a GREAT bk. Yet, I give it a 5 star rating & recommend it to everyone. Published in 1972 when I was 18 & 19, this describes the world I grew up in as perfectly as anything I've ever read. The filmic companion to it cd be Peter Watkins' "Punishment Park". I'll be making a short movie called "Robopaths" wch excerpts text from the bk. [May 1, 2014 interpolation: I actually made a feature-length movie (1:48:20) that I finished in May, 2012. More info can be found about that by looking at entry 369 here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/tENTMoviesIndex.html . Despite at least 5 tries to screen it somewhere I've been unsuccessful as of 2 yrs later.] Below are a few of those quotes from early in the bk:

Paradoxically, although it is increasingly a distinct possibility, the final outcome of people versus their technological robots may not be the total physical annihilation of people. People may in a subtle fashion become robot-like in their interaction and become human robots or robopaths. This more insidious conclusion to the present course of action would be the silent disappearance of human interaction. In another kind of death, social death, people would be oppressively locked into robot-like interaction in human groups that had become social machines. In this context, the apocalypse would come in the form of people mouthing ahuman, regimented platitudes on a meaningless dead stage.
The relationship between potential social death and imminent megamachine wars that cause physical death is complex. A fact that can not be ignored is that it is after all the masses of people who ultimately permit their energies and financial resources to be heavily spent on ecologically suicidal technology and doomsday machines. If a majority of people in a society permit, or desire, this condition to exist they must be relatively devoid of compassion and humanistic values; or, to take a more charitable view, they have become so out of touch with reality, and have become so powerless, that they no longer exert any control over their elected acompassionate robopathic leaders.
Whatever the reasons, the people in power are actually developing the technological machinery for "a world wired for death," and a majority of people in contemporary societies are socially dead, living a day-to-day robopathic existence.

- page xiii, Robopaths - People As Machines: Preface, Lewis Yablonsky, 1972


Robopaths enact ritualistic behavior patterns in the context of precisely defined and accepted norms and rules. Robopaths have a limited ability to be spontaneous, to be creative, to change direction, or to modify their behavior in terms of new conditions. They are comfortable with the all-encompassing social machine definitions for behavior. Even the robopath's most emotional behavior is ritualistic and programmed. Sex, violence, hostility, recreation are all preplanned, pre-packaged activities, and robopaths respond on cue. The frequency, quality, and duration of most robopaths' behavior is predetermined by societal definition.

- page 7, Robopaths - People As Machines: Robopaths, Lewis Yablonsky, 1972


In a robopathic-producing social machine, conformity is a virtue. New or different behavior is viewed as strange and bizarre. "Freaks" are feared. Originality is suspect.

- page 8, Robopaths - People As Machines: Robopaths, Lewis Yablonsky, 1972


As a child a strong attempt was made to impose a completely robopathic regimen onto me: I was expected to mow the lawn regardless of whether the grass had grown to the height of the cutting blades, I wasn't allowed to sit on the furniture in the living room, there was a certain routine for putting butter on bread that was to be strictly followed, it went on & on. Naturally, I was in trouble a fair amt.

Yablonsky differentiates between sociopaths & robopaths by explaining that sociopaths commit their victimizations outside of the rules of society & that robopaths commit them w/in. B/c of this latter, no matter how heinous the effects of a robopath's behavior, it's all well & good & sanctioned by society. The robopaths can even be self-righteous about it. War? Genocide? No problem. All approved by the robopathic society, the social machine. ( )