A village is the antithesis of a civilized society. Why did the world urbanize? Because people wanted to leave the village environment in which everybody knew everybody else’s business. But as early as the 1970’s, Marshall McLuhan predicted that, thanks to modern mass media, we would all soon live in a global village. He was more correct than he knew. He was writing pre-Facebook and pre-Twitter.

McLuhan’s vision has been realized in spades. The busybodies are in the saddle. Billions of people are on Facebook, sharing the most intimate details of their lives with tens of millions of their closest “friends,” and being subjected to their “friend’s” details in return. And it gets worse; with Twitter, you receive an update on all this trivia minute by minute, your smartphone (which is smarter than you)  insistently dinging or buzzing like an angry wasp to force you to read the latest nonsense.

You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Telepathy has now left the Ouija board and entered the real world. Some non-mad scientist neurophysiologists have successfuly connected two rats together using little thinking caps, and what Rat One thinks, Rat Two knows. And the connection wasn’t physical wires, joining them like robotic Siamese twins; it was a datalink mediated by the internet.  Let us think about the implications of this technology as it matures, as technologies are wont to do.

The first application, of course, will be cheating on tests. By implanting the transmitter and receiver in the mastoid bone behind your ear, you will be able to surreptitiously transmit each question to your buddies outside the examination room, who will either look up the answer on Google or calculate it using their supercomputer. And presto, as soon as they obtain it, their new knowledge of the correct answer will appear in your head. Everyone will have a 100% average in everything, and the average SAT score will rise to 2400.

But it gets much better. The fear and uncertainty that characterizes one’s entrance into a room full of strangers, say a cocktail party, convention session, or a holiday dinner with the family, will be a thing of the past. You will know immediately if the smile on the face of the lovely young lady or handsome young man across the room denotes interest or disbelief. You will know if the person walking down the street talking to no one at the top of his or her lungs is on the cell phone or suffers from Touretz Syndrome.

The nature of government will also change. Our masters will hire professional thinkers to think about the government’s orders and think them to us. They will also develop high-powered thinking transmitters which will overwhelm your personal thinking machine, ensuring that you only hear politically correct thoughts.

And think of the impact on advertising! You may be able to mute today’s TV commercials, but you won’t be able to block the thought bolts from Target and Subway, because the gummint will allow compliant companies (aka campaign contributors) to purchase the same high-powered brain wave transmitters that the government uses to brainwash you politically. You, of course, will not be permitted that luxury, since these transmitters will be denied to all but government officials and their sycophants, sort of like semi-automatic assault rifles.

Where will it all end? You will spend essentially all your time thinking somebody else’s thoughts. But the thoughts you receive will immediately become your thoughts, and hence will be re-transmitted to everybody else, who in turn will re-transmit them again, leading to an endless loop. Within a short period of time, your brain’s capacity will be exhausted, your head will explode, and you will be relieved from the unending cacaphonous din.

Thank Heaven for small favors!