“Vanished past the day of the truffids”
The quote below signified the end of the old world and the dawning of a new, uncertain, and dangerous one. It reflects the idea that the world before the Triffids was gone forever, as illustrated by the survivors’ struggle and the new social order that emerges from the chaos.
When The Day of the Triffids was published in 1951, Britain was just emerging from World War II and entering the Cold War. People were haunted by recent experiences of totalitarian regimes, wartime rationing, government control, and the dawning threat of a nuclear or biological catastrophe. Wyndham’s novel channels those anxieties into fiction — not just as a disaster story, but as a reflection on what kind of society might rise from the ruins.
We haven’t suffered from a freak meteor shower that made most of the world’s population blind, which led to the emerging of the Triffids taking advantage of the chaos that followed. But we have and are experiencing a manipulated societal shift, which is delivering a similar phenomenon; a more dangerous and hateful world. A less prosperous and free world. A world where it’s becoming increasingly acceptable to silence and even kill people others disagree with. A world where increasing numbers of people are being blinded to the dangers of reliance on the Government to save them.
What we have instead of Triffids are groups and individuals doing precisely that; Net Zero acolytes, Marxist and far left groups, pro-Palestinian groups, Religious fundamentalists and terrorist who are extremely skilled in manipulating a naïve west into supporting them and condemning those fighting for their survival against the brutality. We have the leftist elite, the Sovereign Citizens and other groups of their ilk. And dare I say, far too many elected representatives in our parliaments. All intent on smashing our tenuous free society to gain power and control to mould society into what these groups and individuals deem an acceptable society.
In his book, John Wyndham explores the fragile balance between freedom and order in the aftermath of catastrophe, offering a more hopeful vision than many of his postwar contemporaries. Like George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Fourand William Golding in Lord of the Flies, Wyndham questions whether humanity can preserve freedom when civilisation collapses. Orwell portrays freedom as destroyed by political control, while Golding depicts it as undone by humanity’s own savagery. Personally, I believe we are fighting against a mix all three.
And, as we discover in the post-Triffid era, social orders are not free in the liberal sense. Most of them impose hierarchy or compulsion as the price of survival. And Wyndham’s seems to explore how fragile freedom is when civilisation collapses — and how easily it gives way to control when people are desperate. Which raises the question about the deliberate attempt of interested parties to smash society and to quench their thirst for greater and greater control over us.
However, Wyndham suggests that moral responsibility can sustain liberty even in chaos. He sees this as being led by protagonist Bill Masen’s rejection of authoritarian plans for rebuilding society. Masen, a biologist, becomes a key survivor after the meteor shower blinds most of the world’s population. His temporary blindness from a prior triffid encounter saves him from the effects of the “comet” shower, leaving him as one of the few sighted individuals to navigate the post-apocalyptic world alongside other survivors like Josella Playton.
There are lessons here for us because through Bill Masen’s rejection of authoritarian plans for rebuilding society, Wyndham argues that true freedom arises not from the absence of rules but from voluntary cooperation, compassion, and ethical restraint. His survivors choose to live freely by conscience rather than by compulsion, embodying a distinctly postwar optimism: that civilisation’s survival depends less on institutions than on the moral choices of individuals.
But to do this requires society to wake-up and to accept responsibility for the part they’ve played in destroying the prosperity and freedoms our forebears fought so hard to gain for us. And we don’t have long to do that. Because the world that is ahead of us if we don’t change will make the apocalyptic Triffid assault look like a children’s game.
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