Have Human Beings Given Up on Being Human?
On human separation, artificial stupidity, bullshit jobs, and the war on care (and what we can do about it)
“… applying always the same test: does this make me more human or less human?”
— George Orwell
Human separation and connection
Love, faith, joy, intimacy, struggle, spirit, compassion, suffering, beauty, trauma, fear, courage, choice, freedom, and purpose.
Have we humans abandoned these mainstays of human thriving and struggling as inconveniences? Is the good, deep, and caring life being replaced by the easy life bereft of connection to anyone? It seems increasingly that way to me. I don’t like it, and I am not going to swallow this mindless, programmed destruction of the human fabric. As a human race we may disagree on many things, but on this we should agree— It is time to WAKE UP! Being human is not a given, especially in an increasingly mechanized, automated, and artificial world. It is time for a rebirth of the deepest and best of humanity.
Given their actions, or lack thereof, an alarming number of people seem to collectively believe we no longer need memory, focus, or a broad and deep critical education because we just “look that stuff up on Google,” that is, until Google censors and manipulates its search engines. Oops. An alarming number of people have let go of human connection in addition to critical thinking. Even movie-going is evaporating. A significant portion have been “tempted” by the alleged benefits of holing up in their houses with their “laptop class” jobs, their cups of coffee, and their bathrobes. ACTUAL personal worlds are shrinking, while VIRTUAL impersonal worlds are expanding, supplanting human endeavor and connection with electronic entertainment and manipulated information.
Artificial stupidity, unaccountable technocrats, and bullshit jobs
We are prodded to entrust our decisions to “artificially stupid” algorithms that keep showing us ads for what we just bought. We are dragooned by internet clickbait into the nonsensical and moronic. We are encouraged to listen to faceless, non-accountable, failed “experts” and simply focus on our smaller spheres. This does NOT pass Orwell’s test: These surrenders make us less human, not more.
An emerging and power-hungry technocratic juggernaut no longer whispers; it SHOUTS: “Hey, disappearing middle class tuck into you little subsidized fantasy away from the complexity of the world. You will be taken care of. “You will rent everything and own nothing and you will be happy!” Effortless leisure and soma… lovely! Why meddle with real human life at all? That takes too much effort to confront and engage. Retreat, retreat into a bubble of non-concern as your paycheck rolls in and your “cog” job rolls on?
Forget the larger picture and obligations or concerns about the working poor or the “frontline workers” who experience risk, low pay, and long hours. Let’s channel attention and money to the cushy, mostly inessential “ones-and-zeroes-pushing” jobs. [Anthropologist David Graeber calls these “bullshit jobs”— jobs that even the people who do them, don’t think they really accomplish anything vital to human interest.] The overriding message seem to be that human connection itself is passe: “It takes effort to get out and meet others, and we can just do it on Zoom, and, well, not really that either, because… do you really miss it?” Umm. Yes, I DO really miss human connection and I want it to come back even stronger than before Covid!
What happened to community and people who care about each other?
I grew up in Central Ohio, which like many midwestern cultures has a generally welcoming and friendly culture. You can usually strike up a conversation with a dog-walker, and that still holds true today. In the last year, however, I have struggled making more substantive and long-lasting connections with my surrounding Clintonville community, an uber-liberal Columbus, Ohio neighborhood. I moved to back to be near family and create a stable support for my son’s high school education. With the notable exception of the Christian community (where faith, family, and community apparently still DO matter), opportunities for human connection (I had assumed to be intrinsic to society) seem to have just vanished, and this human disappearing act seems to extend across cultural and ideological divides.
The Columbus Free Press used to have an in-person second-Saturday gathering of grass-roots community activists. That died with Covid, and doesn’t look like it is coming back. A dad’s group on Facebook. Nope. That’s dried up too. “Meet-Ups?” The concept appears nearly moribund, except for a couple one-offs I try to get parents together from my area from my son’s school, but the Parent Teacher Student Association and the school itself seems to have allowed the parent directory to die along with Covid, and expresses no interest in reviving it.
Everything is becoming faceless, perfunctory, hollowed out and shallowed out. The notion of character education, virtue, and nobility appear to be lost in a sea of bored, hypnotized unconcern. Schooling assignments have been moved almost exclusively online, especially in so-called STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) schools, without any attention being directed to tangible writing, moving, acting, singing, caring. What happened to PHAT (Philosophy, History, Art, and Theater)?
Almost everything educational has been reduced to a process of external testing and internal bureaucratic standards that have precious little to do with real human needs much less the tangible world. So-called “higher-ups” are consistently shielded from the consequences of their screw-ups. One need look no further than the disastrous and wrong-headed public health response to Covid that both green lighted and accelerated dehumanization and poor health. Lockdowns, masking, jabs, online “learning”, school closings, and social media manias that amped fear, obesity, anxiety, and suicide rates, devastating physical mental, and emotional well-being.
I just learned that all he local Medicaid offices and state and county aids for the poor continues to be closed now for three years! There is NO emergency. Everything is open, so why are the most vulnerable being sacrificed as fodder for a bureaucratic system that seems intent on denying even their needs for survival. Oh, but they have an exterior drop-off box, and a wall of forms for you to fill out, and an “inquiry card” to drop into a blue box, to get a response (from whom and when?).
What the hell is going on? The banality of evil.
Kafkaesque absurdity has become the rule rather than the exception in a post-Covid post-industrial world that still runs on the fumes of a materialist, bureaucratic, technocratic neo-feudalism. Like the medieval ages, fiefdoms of power are set up, but not in castles or tracts of land or the territorial boundaries and armies. These physical fiefdoms have been replaced by cultural and political ideologies, enforced and/or imposed with an amplified social media (trans debate, Black Lives Matter, etc.) and government policies (vaccine mandates, censorship, etc.). Much of this devolution takes on the flavor of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”, in which (in the U.S. case) the most important human needs (universal health care and care for the poor, for instance) are scrapped in favor of adventurism and inequality (military spending and tax cuts for the hyper wealthy).
This philosophical Aeon article describes this tendency well:
Can one do evil without being evil? This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organising the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in support of the Nazi’s Final Solution.
Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong’.
Can one damage young people with lockdowns and masks, while believing you are doing good? Yes. Can we try to “save the people of an invaded country” while being mired in a proxy war, that actually kills more of them than peaceful alternatives? Yes. Can we engage in climate concern and introduce interventions that actually make matters worse? Yes, to all of these. Doing evil or doing damage, does not require bad character and bad intent ESPECIALLY with complex systems.
What we must realize is that we need to introduce POSITIVE and HEALING SUPPORT which LEARNS from these complex systems, rather than imposing simplistic (and expensive) mechanistic “solutions” that just coincidentally make a handful of people many billions of dollars while making all the rest of us poorer and sicker. It is chilling to note that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars which actually made matters WORSE, creating a power vacuum, consumed and incredible 8-9 trillion dollars according to presidential candidate Robert. F. Kennedy, Jr. That is some real money, real lives lost, and real lives that could have been saved if the money were used elsewhere.
I see the same dynamic in a more innocuous form in university administration. As a person who secured a lecture job as a Ph.D. “School and Society” instructor for a large well-respected research university, I get paid 5,000 dollars to teach a 16-week course to about 24 students. That amounts to about 312 dollars per week, divided by 20 hours of work per week, about 15 dollars an hour, or what you can be paid during a labor shortage for a shift at MacDonalds. The scary thing is that certain colleges are paying as low as 1,500 dollars for a similar class. That amounts to less than 5 dollars an hour. Where does the tuition money go? More and more of it is going to pay burgeoning administrative bureaucracies.
My university inbox is so choked with “newsletters,” “workshops,” and “surveys” that I sometimes find it hard to find my own students’ messages! I get about 10-15X more administrivia than emails from students. I finally had to let out a laugh when I found this latest emailed “friendly reminder”, soliciting my precious time and energy to help them “learn more about how faculty and staff utilize and engage with various sources of news and information.”: A bureaucratic office to monitor the other bureaucratic offices!
Answer: I don’t at all! I simply trash these emails after a quick perusal, because none of it actually helps me with my work for the university. I am too busy teaching, and this clusster hinders rather than helps my ability to do my job. How do you think my true feedback would be received? Not well, I am guessing. They are looking for information to justify THEIR positions, departments, and jobs. If they weren’t, they would ask ME what I needed for SUPPORT in my job rather than having me spend my time and resources catering to their priorities!
A hopeful alternative: Reawakening to human connection
But there is another story, a very hopeful and increasingly emerging story. Just as the Great Awakening happened in the 1700’s in response to the increasing soullessness of the so-called rational “Enlightenment”, so now is spirit coming to the fore in another Great Awakening in response to a mechanistic, techno-dystopian Great Reset, in which the sins and errors of today’s so-called “elite” are washed away, but consolidated control and money continue unabated.
As we have our humanity degraded and divided from the top down by opportunistic oligarchs, we begin to experience more and more how much we have in common (including a common opponent) from the bottom-up. We no longer buy into the stories and scares of would-be puppet masters who play us off against each other. We are beginning to experience that we have real power if we disconnect from fear-mongers and create solidarity across ideologies and identities. Free to breathe and be ourselves, we come from every direction to resist every manipulation. We civilly disobey and refuse to be herded into labels, categories, and other prisons. We reject promises of prosperity and opportunity that promise only to enslave us.
We don’t need pronouns; we need real justice and care.
We need righteousness to rain down like mighty waters. We need a vital pluralism and we need each other— our spirits, our loves, our souls, our humanity, our ability to work together to preserve principles (conservative), care for others (liberal), and to create a vital future (progressive), guided by a stalwart freedom (libertarian). We need to desire difference as a natural outgrowth of our unique, genuine, creative selves. We need to embrace common decency, integrity, and respect. We need to rediscover what it means to be human again with a fierce, compassionate, and affirmative vengeance.
Just this morning I was denied financial aid through an impersonal online application portal and a perfunctory mailed denial letter. I left my number in a call-back cue with the relevant office, and the most wonderful guardian angel of a person named Eureka called me back. Straightaway in about 5 minutes she not only was able to get my application approved but signed me up for another program which also was approved. I let her know that her name was Greek, which she did not know, and I was ready to shout, “I found it” when I found her, that human-angel in the maze of a bureaucratic system.
How can we accelerate the rise of humanhood?
Here are my offerings as to how we can re-ignite the human and open up our beings, and break the various spells that have been cast over us in the form of control, censorship, manipulation, and de-spiritualization and de-moralization.
Renew pluralism: “Desire difference!” “I don’t want you to agree with me! I would rather you to be a creative, unique, authentic, passionate self.” Let us break from the habit of seeing the “good” as the familiar and the different as a threat. We CAN learn to love that we don’t agree with and embrace the human fact that we are both imperfect and glorious.
Reawaken passion: A student in my class was fruitlessly casting around for what to research. When I asked her what she was passionate about, she mentioned softly that she really enjoyed teaching her Bible class. So I said, “Perfect! Talk about the issues around religion in education especially amid increasingly secularized and relativistic higher education institutions.” Her work, which had been largely lacking inspiration up to this point, took a quantum leap in quality. Passion drives excellence.
Realize divine genius: You have a “nowhere-else-in-the-universe” talent, experience, and knowing. Let that be your offering, and let it guide your path. Society seems intent on beating originality out of us, but learn to be “wise as serpents (savvy), but innocent as doves (open and aware) about taking our native, unique gifts to relationships and institutions that can honor them. We also need to allow ourselves to propose ways we can use our perhaps unconventional talents in conventional arenas. Negotiate with teachers and bosses to do work or projects built around your deeper gifts and interests. Do not accept the humdrum or the patent!
Revive democracy: Have the courage to go to bat for people of integrity in leadership positions. Who among us has a track record of fighting for the little guy and being correct in their convictions, even when it was unpopular to do so? I am a big fan of RFK, Jr. in this regard. Love him or hate him, the man has integrity, a capable team around him, a nose for evidence, a heart for those who suffer, and a vision for a brighter, achievable future. We can all be champions for democracy, demanding contrary views get respected and included UNCENSORED. We can all ensure that people have access to voting and running for political office at every level. We can get more involved in local cultural, political, volunteer positions that require REAL humans to triumph over impersonal processes.
Reassert evidence and reaffirm reality: Do not buy this post-modern crap that all reality is subjective “performativity” and “narrative” and “power games”. Objective reality exists, and both facts and evidence matter. That means that you cannot simply reference vital reality with your own preferences and feelings. You have to include the real experience and feelings of others and critically discern whether you are mistaken! In this curiosity and inquiry is indispensable. Instead of simply assuming “this is true” ask, “What is true? And why is it true? And how does it connect to other truths?
Rebel positively: Non-violent civil disobedience, humor, and organizing continue to be some of the most powerful forms of social and personal action. Use them to full and creative effect. Insist on free, full, and informed consent, and resist all mandates, censorship, vilification, and other attempts to control the behavior of others, even if they happen to be exhibiting “micro-aggressions.” There is nothing more unseemly than a scold who insists the world contort itself around his or her own self-righteous certitude.
Reject manipulation and know your history: Don’t let manipulators hijack your empathy and innocence to be used against you and others who might happen to be powerless. Have the courage to call out and confront any and all bullies, like, for instance, so-called trans-activists who do not represent nor support that vast majority of trans people need and want— to be treated with respect and dignity WITHOUT trying to take over the space of women. It is an insult to insist that a lesbian has to sleep with a biological male with a penis or be deemed “transphobic.” It’s an absurdity to have biological males competing against women in sports just because they “identify” as women (see also “reaffirm reality” above). This should be no more catered than me claiming not only that I “identify” not only as a Wimbledon tennis competitor, but as a Wimbledon CHAMPION and therefore deserve the prize money.
We need to WORK for our future and we need to share our talents and rewards. The time for insulated fantasy and distractions are over. Let’s go forward together and get real pluralism and democracy done!
What are your suggestions for moving us into a more human future?
Thank you for recognizing there are people out there living authentically in the midst of all the chaos, finding the ways of passion, compassion, love, peace and truth. People often question how I can work for the US Federal government and also authentically be a healer working with Reiki energy. My answer is to inform them that civil servants work incredibly hard to do the right thing in spite of the constant turnover of politicians and administration, pointing out that many are in service for decades whereas political appointments average about 18 months. Higher education is much the same, in my experience working at a local college for four years. The faculty and staff show up for the students, and the work of administration is to create the highest good in spite of the profit-orientation of board members and others. Wherever people find themselves, finding the way is a delicate, difficult, divine art. It is our work here in this dimension. We are wielders of divine light, using the miraculous vessel of the human form to create on Earth. Every day, we should be asking ourselves and each other, what shall we create today? . . and remember that love is the most powerful creative force with which to work.
somethin to put pieces together ....
https://peacefulinhabitant.info/the-magical-money-machine-full-length-eustace-mullins/