> Our main way of relating ourselves to others is like things relate themselves to things on the market. We want to exchange our own personality, or as one says sometimes, our "personality package", for something. Now, this is not so true for the manual workers. The manual worker does not have to sell his personality. He doesn't have to sell his smile. But what you might call the "symbolpushers" , that is to say, all the people who deal with figures, with paper, with men, who manipulate - to use a better, or nicer, word - manipulate men and signs and words, all those today have not only to sell their service but in the bargain they're to sell their personality, more or less. There are exceptions.
> What is finished... is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It's the individual that's finished. It's the single, solitary human being that's finished. It's every single one of you out there that's finished, because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It's a nation of some 200-odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings, and as replaceable as piston rods... Well, the time has come to say, is dehumanization such a bad word. Because good or bad, that's what is so. The whole world is becoming humanoid - creatures that look human but aren't. The whole world not just us. We're just the most advanced country, so we're getting there first. The whole world's people are becoming mass-produced, programmed, numbered, insensate things.
-- "Network"
I don't think that's hyperbole, minus the futilism. If we reduce everything to "what can be objectively measured", we remove humans. In some way or another, sooner or later, either completely or as a form of soft lobotomy that begins at birth and never lets up.. just weighing things that can be measured slightly more, just keeping to erode everything else little by little.
> Humans, in so far as they are more than a completion of functions able to react, whose lowest and therefore most central reactions are the purely animal like ones, are simply superfluous for totalitarian systems. Their goal is not to erect a despotic regime over humans, but a system by which humans are made superfluous. Total power can only be achieved and guaranteed when nothing else matters except the absolutely controllable willingness to react, marionettes robbed of all spontaneity. Humans, precisely because they are so powerful, can only be completely controlled when they have become examples of the animal like species human.
-- Hannah Arendt
Insofar as we ignore everything we can't measure or somehow use to immediately "score", and therefore don't nurture it nor pass it on, it gets removed from the palette future generations have available. We can reduce humans to next to nothing in generations by simply not passing on things. The really devilish part is that the feedback is so delayed, and inflicted on people who have very little hope of connecting it with the lack of something they don't know.
I know this probably sounds like "tinfoil" stuff but personally I'm convinced we're doing this to ourselves, we're sleepwalking into it. Nobody is winning -- even being at the top of this compost heap of humanoids would not be as desirable as being a poor person in a somewhat decent society of humans. But with the comparison being in the memory hole, the only comparison will be people lower on the totem pole of humanoid society, so the obvious response to keep basically push even more in what I would call the wrong direction.
> Es ist typisch für die entmutigende Oberflächlichkeit des heutigen Denkens, daß das Wort "Größe", das eine Quantität und nicht eine Qualität bezeichnet, als ein Ausdruck der Anerkennung, wie zum Beispiel "Schönheit", "Güte", "Weisheit" verwendet wird. Was heute groß ist, wird also fast automatisch als schön und gut angesehen.
-- Sebastian Haffner
> It is typical for the discouraging superficiality of todays thinking that the word "greatness", which describes a quantity and not a quality, is used as an expression of appreciation, like for example "beauty", "kindness", "wisdom". Nowadays, what is big is nearly automatically considered beautiful and good.
-- Erich Fromm, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu-7UDT0Xe4&t=1m34s
> What is finished... is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It's the individual that's finished. It's the single, solitary human being that's finished. It's every single one of you out there that's finished, because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It's a nation of some 200-odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings, and as replaceable as piston rods... Well, the time has come to say, is dehumanization such a bad word. Because good or bad, that's what is so. The whole world is becoming humanoid - creatures that look human but aren't. The whole world not just us. We're just the most advanced country, so we're getting there first. The whole world's people are becoming mass-produced, programmed, numbered, insensate things.
-- "Network"
I don't think that's hyperbole, minus the futilism. If we reduce everything to "what can be objectively measured", we remove humans. In some way or another, sooner or later, either completely or as a form of soft lobotomy that begins at birth and never lets up.. just weighing things that can be measured slightly more, just keeping to erode everything else little by little.
> Humans, in so far as they are more than a completion of functions able to react, whose lowest and therefore most central reactions are the purely animal like ones, are simply superfluous for totalitarian systems. Their goal is not to erect a despotic regime over humans, but a system by which humans are made superfluous. Total power can only be achieved and guaranteed when nothing else matters except the absolutely controllable willingness to react, marionettes robbed of all spontaneity. Humans, precisely because they are so powerful, can only be completely controlled when they have become examples of the animal like species human.
-- Hannah Arendt
Insofar as we ignore everything we can't measure or somehow use to immediately "score", and therefore don't nurture it nor pass it on, it gets removed from the palette future generations have available. We can reduce humans to next to nothing in generations by simply not passing on things. The really devilish part is that the feedback is so delayed, and inflicted on people who have very little hope of connecting it with the lack of something they don't know.
I know this probably sounds like "tinfoil" stuff but personally I'm convinced we're doing this to ourselves, we're sleepwalking into it. Nobody is winning -- even being at the top of this compost heap of humanoids would not be as desirable as being a poor person in a somewhat decent society of humans. But with the comparison being in the memory hole, the only comparison will be people lower on the totem pole of humanoid society, so the obvious response to keep basically push even more in what I would call the wrong direction.
> Es ist typisch für die entmutigende Oberflächlichkeit des heutigen Denkens, daß das Wort "Größe", das eine Quantität und nicht eine Qualität bezeichnet, als ein Ausdruck der Anerkennung, wie zum Beispiel "Schönheit", "Güte", "Weisheit" verwendet wird. Was heute groß ist, wird also fast automatisch als schön und gut angesehen.
-- Sebastian Haffner
> It is typical for the discouraging superficiality of todays thinking that the word "greatness", which describes a quantity and not a quality, is used as an expression of appreciation, like for example "beauty", "kindness", "wisdom". Nowadays, what is big is nearly automatically considered beautiful and good.