A Jane Hawk Essay
The Dean Koontz novels featuring this memorable heroine are a cautionary tale.
People should matter more than ideas. Jane Hawk
Stephen King and Dean Koontz are the foremost authors of suspense and horror fiction. Both are prolific. King has about eighty titles to his name. Koontz has more than ninety. Both count their total book sales in the hundreds of millions. King is better known, but Koontz has sold more books. My statement about King being better known may be biased by my own experience. Beginning in my 20s, I became a big fan of Stephen King and his books. I didn’t read everything he published, but I went through a number of his classics like IT, The Dead Zone, and The Stand. King’s collection of four novellas, Different Seasons, published in 1982, hosts my two favorite Stephen King stories. They are The Body, and Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. The Body was made into the movie Stand By Me (1986), and the other was, of course, made into The Shawshank Redemption. For me, this is peak Stephen King. There is nothing better in print or on film with his name on it. These two stories are brief, beautiful, and timeless. They deal in classic themes—coming of age, loss, courage, justice, and the enduring power of friendship.
In contrast, I never read a single word by Dean Koontz until about five years ago. By chance, I happened upon a piece in National Review Magazine that discussed some religious symbolism in the fourth of Koontz’s five Jane Hawk novels. Jane Hawk is the heroine in the books, and an FBI agent on the run. The five novels, all published between 2017 and 2019, comprise a single, lengthy, story arc. I was intrigued by the author’s description of Koontz:
Koontz transfigures general entertainment into what Paul Elie has called “pilgrimage” literature: riveting stories that teach us the truth about ourselves, our neighbors, the divine, and the relationships thereof.
Okay, I thought. Sounds like Stephen King at his best. I bought the first book in the series, The Silent Corner. Twenty-five or thirty pages in I was hooked. I devoured the first four novels and waited impatiently for Mr. Koontz to finish the fifth. The series quickly ran to the top of books I recommend to fellow readers.
Though I remain a fan of Stephen King’s writing, his political chatter on Twitter/X puts me off. Conversely, as I turned the pages of the Jane Hawk books, I noticed a consistency among the small band of helpers that Jane acquires and attaches to her cause. The consistency has nothing to do with race, gender, age, or sexual orientation. Jane’s tribe ranges from an autistic savant with the physical dimensions of a professional basketball player, to a black, midwestern Sheriff and his feisty, intelligent teenage daughter, to a widowed Jewish octogenarian, to a young tech genius named Vikram. To a person, what binds them to a common quest is the conviction and optimism that humanity is a blessing, not a curse, and that the world is not the property of an elite class that seeks to reserve all its wealth and beauty to itself. A junior member of the conspiracy that Jane is pitted against is described differently.
Wealth had not corrupted him. What he’d chosen to do with his wealth corrupted him. First he insulated himself from ordinary human experience, and then deemed himself superior to the masses, excused himself from all constraints not only of morality but also of tradition, and subsequently felt justified in casting off his conscience as a worthless artifact of primitive and superstitious minds. He had made of himself a malignancy in the human community.
Without giving too much away, I think I can divulge a bit of the plot. A shadowy group—business leaders, academics, scientists, politicians, law enforcement—has developed nano-scale technology that can be used to control the behavior of humans and animals.
I have written that Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom consists of three stages. Before the stages can commence, policy-makers must reveal their current version of “If Only” world. A current element of “If Only" world emanating from the activist class is the push to make everyone drive an electric vehicle. A group of interested parties gathers at a meeting or conference and someone says, if only we could get rid of the awful, CO2 spewing cars powered by internal combustion engines and replace them with electric vehicles. That would be a huge step towards reducing CO2 emissions. That might keep us below the dreaded 1.5C of warming. We must make it happen. Let’s do it! Inconvenient information like arithmetic that shows that audacious, essentially unachievable goals like replacement of 50% of the world’s fleet of internal combustion vehicles with electric vehicles in the next ten years will only decrease the world’s daily oil consumption by about 10%, is ignored.1
With the image of a better world in sight, the three stages begin. I wrote about these stages in my essay titled It's All Gone Crazy.
Initially, you are incentivized to support a cause. Buy an electric vehicle and we’ll give you a tax credit. When it turns out that some people, maybe most, prefer the vehicles they already know or have, the incentive turns to punishment. Drive an older vehicle in London’s ULEZ and you will be charged 12.5 pounds per day. The last step arrives when people still, through ingenuity and sacrifice, find ways to make their own choices. Punishment turns to command, backed by the policing power of the state. As of this day, private vehicles are banned.
The use of police power is messy, and sometimes dangerous. People get upset when you try to arrest them. If only there was an easier way to make people do what you want. In Jane Hawk’s world, the easier way has arrived. Dean Koontz’s dark vision conjures the specter of a fourth stage, direct control. A frightening aspect of the fourth stage in the Jane Hawk story is that the conspirators have determined that it is not necessary to control everyone. Rather, they have determined that control and/or removal of key members of society will allow them to bend the masses to their whims.
Who are the unlucky souls targeted by the cabal? It’s straight out of Orwell’s 1984. Anyone guilty of “thoughtcrime” and charismatic or influential enough to convince others of his or her way of thinking is at risk. Evincing themes of Nazi Germany, good-hearted souls dedicated to helping the less fortunate—the physically or mentally handicapped for instance—are also targeted. There is no space in the brave new world for the neediest among us to live lives of dignity, or any lives at all. Forgive me for being paranoid, but it seems certain that a sizeable number, maybe all, of the thoughtful Substack writers who pen sharp critiques of energy and climate issues would make the list.
In our world of WEF economic elites at Davos, tech geniuses too clever by half, Malthusian globalists at the UN, climate activists scattered throughout academia and government, and progressive, nanny state bureaucrats who want to tell us what to drive, what to eat, what to think, what to inject into our bloodstreams, and when to go on vacation (never), it seems there is no shortage of individuals and organizations who would—channeling Dr. Evil—break out the air quotes for a “laser” that would enslave unruly humans. To be fair, I’m sure that progressive, nanny-state bureaucrats, angst-ridden college students, and liberal arts faculties are equally convinced that “extreme MAGA Republicans” would use their own version of mind control to turn all the women into handmaidens and Stepford Wives.
If the technology existed, who would be more likely to use it? Here I turn to the great Thomas Sowell and his book A Conflict of Visions. The book is an investigation of two visions of humanity that animate discussion and disagreement on the “nature of reason, justice, equality, and power.”2 In the constrained vision, human nature is immutable, and flawed. Egocentricity and moral limitations are acknowledged as facts of life, and society is organized to make the best of the possibilities that exist within that constraint, rather than dissipate energies in vain and pointless attempts to change human nature.3 Mr. Sowell refers to Adam Smith’s classic work, The Wealth of Nations, in which Smith describes how the incentive of personal gain, operating within a general framework of laws, creates far-reaching societal benefit from the self-interest of individuals. Another feature of the constrained vision is that the knowledge of any individual, no matter how gifted, is considered entirely inadequate for the purpose of making decisions for all of society. Success requires more input than that, and time and competition winnow out what works and what doesn’t work. Sowell writes:
Knowledge is thus the social experience of the many, as embodied in behavior, sentiments, and habits, rather than the specially articulated reason of the few, however talented or gifted those few might be.
The unconstrained vision places no such limits on human potential. William Godwin, writing in 1793, not long after Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, describes a vision of man entirely at odds with Smith’s conclusions. To Godwin, the unintended benefits, whether economic or social, of an incentive-based society were hardly worth noticing. Godwin believed that man’s potential was not constrained, and that reason and disposition could be developed to a level where the desire to benefit others became a higher calling than the urge to help oneself. To Godwin, helping others on purpose was the essence of virtue, and virtue the source of true happiness. In the unconstrained vision, humanity is perfectible, and those who are closest to the ideal are expected to be teachers and guides for those less enlightened. Again, from Sowell:
Given that explicitly articulated knowledge is special and concentrated, in the unconstrained vision, the best conduct of social activities depends upon the special knowledge of the few being used to guide the actions of the many.
Only the constrained vision attaches value to the social experience of the many. The Jane Hawk conspirators are aligned with Sowell’s unconstrained vision of humanity and see no value in the constrained conception of knowledge, where even the least among us makes beneficial contributions simply by living in society and participating in the great winnowing and selection of products, behaviors, and traditions that stand the test of time. To the elite these people are no different than the invasive rabbits introduced to Australia in the 1800s. All they do is eat and multiply and take resources from the worthy. The conspirators see themselves as perfect, and perfectly able to judge and direct the conduct of all, though they fall short of Godwin’s ideal in key areas. Incumbent on Godwin’s higher functioning thought leaders was the expectation that they teach and guide others to the loftier virtues they already possessed. Jane’s enemies are not so patient or thoughtful. Their goal is simply to eliminate anyone who resists or defiles their program. So, who to fear? I’m going with the activists, elites, and nanny-state bureaucrats.
In nuclear engineering the concept of critical mass denotes the smallest amount of fissile material necessary to sustain a nuclear chain reaction. Critical mass is used more generally as well, to describe the minimum size or amount of something required to start or maintain a venture. In this sense, Jane’s quest is to disturb the actions of her enemies such that critical mass is not attained.
Critical mass is the hurdle facing all idealistic plans for a better world. You must convince a lot of people. Climate activists are frustrated because they cannot convince legions of citizens that it’s worth destroying the energy foundation of modern society for the possibility of different weather in the future. Just as it is rational to discount money that you won’t be paid for 50 years, it is also rational to discount future hardship, let alone the chance of future hardship. So beware, fellow citizens, of mounting frustration in the ranks of those who profess to know how to make you happy.
Near the end of The Silent Corner, in the aftermath of a vicious firefight in which a new friend was injured, and an old friend killed, Jane is traveling alone, at night, in California’s vast central valley. In a few sentences Koontz makes clear what is at stake, and why she will fight on.
The wide valley was crowned with stars, and the westering moon glowed with the promise of tomorrow’s light. Night air of crystalline clarity carried on it the distant lights of one farmhouse and another, of tiny communities where people lived out lives that the movers-and-shakers considered tedious if not squalid. All of it was grand beyond her powers of description, full of wonder and potential, all of it precious, all of it worth dying for.
🖤Like this essay, or I’ll take control of your mind and make you like it.
Mark Mills, Energy Information Has Never Mattered More—So It’s Time to Reform the IEA, Watts Up With That?, January 16 2024, https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/01/19/energy-information-has-never-mattered-more-so-its-time-to-reform-the-iea/
Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions (New York, Basic Books, 2007), back cover
Ibid, p. 12
What worries me the most about the present scenario is that the perpetrators of the current flavor of totalitarianism are also the owners and designers of AI. AI will inevitably take its philosophy, its moral values, its definition of purpose, from its owners. Weve had~a flood of wisdom and caution from the artistic community, science fiction writers, and Hollywood movies, and King and Koontz and how many more.....but the matrix is almost here, now........and nobody is stopping it.....
I would add the Dark Tower Series for me from King in addition to the ones you referenced. I started reading the first one before the second one was released. There was lots of anticipation waiting for the next one to be released over the span of several years. I did read some of his recent work but it does create the same excitement and anticipation as it used to. I have previously read Koontz but couldn't tell you what books. I don't have that gift to remember the books that I read. I will see if I can borrow the first one in the series you referenced and get hooked.