Posts Tagged ‘ Mass man ’

Nietzsche and Ortega y Gasset

The first is well-known – the second less so. But their philosophies had considerable overlap.

Nietzsche had the advantage of being German – with a large (although posthumous) following.

Ortega y Gasset the disadvantage of being Spanish – with no following at all (during his lifetime or after). He did not realize himself what he had discovered – the worker in an Industrial economy – who was only good at two things: working and procreating (to put it politely). He called them the masses - and noted that, due to their numbers, they ended up controlling society.

Nietzsche called them slaves – and also noted that they had become dominant. But put them in a different historical context.

Wage-slaves – the combination of the two – have been noted by almost everybody. Not just by Karl Marx.

I am studying Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals. And to help me I bought a Reader’s Guide from the Continuum series, by Daniel Conway.

Ortega y Gasset is easier reading, and doesn’t need a guide.

Showing their overlap is not hard – and I intend to do it here. After I spend some more time on Nietzsche.

Ressentiment

According to the Merriam-Webster Unabridged this is:

Deep-seated resentment, frustration, and hostility accompanied by a sense of being powerless to express these feelings directly

German, from French – resentment

The pronunciation is French – a language I have not the slightest proficiency in. I have been banished to Latin America, where living is cheaper.

Nietzsche had a brilliant insight here – but also a massive oversight. There was a lot of suffering going on – people were not able to be themselves - because they had to be workers. or employees, or consumers, or whatever. They needed a way to justify their suffering. And ressentiment handed it to them on a platter. It made them good and made the guys who made them suffer (the Capitalists) evil.

Once you see that, you can see it in all kinds of situations. Wherever people complain about their suffering – and label those who make them suffer – evil. And consider themselves good by comparison.

These two roles did not succeed each other in time (as Nietzsche thought) but in our time coexist – people that suffer want to continue to suffer – and people that inflict suffering want to to continue doing that too. Freud would provide this insight later.

It is not clear to me if Nietzsche understood this ambivalence – but if he was confused his confusion was understandable. Modern people (who use Scientific thinking) were used to thinking in terms of only two variables – cause and effect – and thinking of many interacting variables would not come until much later.

Nietzsche (being a Classical scholar) noticed that things were different in Classical times – before Christianity invented ressentiment.

Ortega y Gasset had no inkling of this amazing insight. He had only one insight – he saw the masses right before him – where everyone else saw nothing. Nietzsche had a similar insight – but didn’t see the wage-slaves right before him.

Perhaps when he did see them – (in the form of a horse being whipped) he went mad.

2013
03/23
CATEGORY
History
Philosophy
3 comments

The Inner and Outer Self

The human situation is complicated, we can all agree on that. But in the last 500 years or so it has become much more complicated. But we cannot agree on that. Why? That is the subject of this posting.

Every organism is part of something much larger. All life is closely related – we are all built of cells, which are much the same the world over. Except for one kind of cells – nerves, which in the human brain have become incredibly complicated.

Actually, the right world to use here is not complicated, but complex. And complexity theory tells us something amazing – as systems become more complex new behaviors appear – out of nowhere. These are called emergent properties.

The human brain is full of these properties – as is human behavior, which is derived, somehow, from our over-developed brains. I want to talk about two of them – the inner self and the way we have become extended – the external self.

We have always been part of our technologies – this is what civilization amounted to: a complex of new technologies – including writing. And they have never been under control – we become whatever our technologies want us to become.

You may object that technologies do not have minds, and cannot will anything. You are right, technically. But practically, the combination of technology and people always results in people modifying their behavior to make maximum use of the newest, most successful, technology. This is what makes a technology successful.

This is most easily seen in warfare – a very human activity. A man with a spear is much more powerful than a man without one. And a phalanx of men armed with spears is more powerful yet. In such a situation the individual man disappears – and only the group remains. A transformation many find hard to resist.

This is the basis of the individual – group conflict. Which is usually resolved to benefit the group.

Modern history began with the Middle Ages – from which it emerged. Modernism was an incredibly complicated (or actually, complex) development – that people are now ignorant of – as they are of most everything. This posting is about how modern history evolved into post-modern history. Another very complicated development – which I can only scratch the surface of.

The big change involved the creation of mass production and mass man. This was a very clever idea – although not a new one. The Greeks had pottery factories operated by slaves, and hundreds of thousand of their pots still exist.

But the Industrial Revolution had something new - energy from fossil fuels – first coal, and then oil. And an explosion of new machines. This, as always, made a new kind of people – the human mass. Here again, this was nothing new. Ancient Rome was full of useless people who demanded bread and circuses - and got them.

But their modern counterpart was different – they could be put to work in the factories, manufacturing mass-produced commodities – at very low prices – to the immense profit of a few. This became know as Capitalism – whose most obvious feature was its ruthlessness.

But this is not what I started to write about. Completely unnoticed, something else was happening – people were extending themselves outward and becoming part of their technologies – which were themselves becoming more and more extended. As I said, this very important development has not been noticed – except for a few, and these have been ignored.

People could not resist this shameful new development – and they didn’t want anyone calling their attention to it. What was shameful about it? It meant they were abandoning their inner selves – which, after all, were their real selves.

Now I must start of the development of today’s subject – the difference between the inner and outer self. The outer self is all our possessions – which possess us. In the Computer world, this means we are networked all over the place. The Economy is also networked, which in practice means it can be manipulated by a few to their benefit. But this is nothing compared to the damage to our inner selves.

Every person, in the course of his (or her) normal development, develops his own personality. In Jungian terms, this is called individuation. And every individual is different. And is accepted as being different. In my little town in Costa Rica I can see this just by walking down the street, and taking note of the people there.

By contrast, if I go a two hour bus ride away to the Central Metropolitan Area (where most of the people live and most of the jobs are) the people have become homogenized – where everyone is much the same. And where everyone studiously ignores this.

I summarize – when people develop in externalized self, they lose their inner self. And cease to function as normal human beings.

You might ask “If you are right, why hasn’t this been noticed?” The answer seems to be “This is normal human behavior (which made it invisible to us) – but carried to extremes – which produced effects that we could not have anticipated.”

Of course, you will ask “What’s the solution?” My answer is “I don’t know, but the first step would be recognizing where we are – which seems impossible.”

2012
11/14
CATEGORY
Economy
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
The Self
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The Sun as a Model of the Human World

National Geographic Magazine – Solar Storms

This is the link for the text (which is excellent). To see the photos, click on the Photo Gallery on the upper left.

There is no way to adequately describe the Human Condition in words – and I have certainly tried. Words no longer have much of an impact.

But these images get the message across at the gut level. Human society is a blazing inferno of raw passions under the surface – while the surface (the outer shell) is totally dead. Except for the cracks where things are exploding.

Everyone is saying “Pay no attention to them! There is only one way to be: dead, like us – that way you cannot be hurt.”

2012
06/09
CATEGORY
Negative being
Philosophy
Science
Sociology
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Loosely Coupled Components

I continue my explanation of how software has influenced people. This influence continues a process that began with civilization: we became like our technologies – or from their perspective: they become like us. Each influenced the other, until it became difficult to separate the two.

Our fundamental technology, all along, has been the machine. And we have been hard at work at making them better – and inevitably making ourselves more like them, and they more like us. Without any awareness of this at all.

The result has been affluence on a massive scale – but also human degradation on a massive scale. The more we became machines, the less human we became. And we became unable to know the difference. This last change was the worst, and one we may never recover from. In order to become machines, we destroyed our ability to be human.

So far, I have said nothing new. People in the 19th Century (such as Emerson) were aware of this problem, but could do nothing to stop it – because they were unable (or unwilling, perhaps) to notice the arrival of mass man. Which were simply men completely adapted to the march of progress - or actually the march of greed and power – components of a huge social machine.

I repeat: society had become a machine, and one very proud of this – because it enabled them to do great things (all kinds of massive building projects). But it also destroyed their ability to be people, and the modern world ended with two World Wars – which made all previous wars look like nothing.

This is where I came in: a depression baby (1936), the son of parents obsessed with respectability (but unable to be human) in the most powerful nation on earth (at the time). This was bad enough – but they were also unable to understand themselves or their society – and didn’t want to understand. It was full speed into the future, and may the devil take the hindmost!

And for a time, in the Fifties and Sixties, they prospered – their cars got more and more powerful, and their houses got bigger and bigger. But (and I can testify to this personally) they treated their children badly. We were expected to become successful, and successful we became, but we could not become anything else. This was not a good time to be alive – because anyone who was alive (who was not a machine) was destroyed.

I see I have strayed from my subject, and went into a long rant about the way things have beome, instead. But I am unrepentant, I am standing up on my hind legs and making sure the world knows I exist. But let me (finally) get down to the subject: Loosely Coupled Components.

This will require some more history. After WWII, a new technology appeared – at the same time the Atomic Bomb appeared. The two were closely related as the book Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe, frankly admits. Both had enormous potential for good or for evil. We were aware of the danger of The Bomb (how could we ignore it?) but not of the computer – that seemed at first to be nothing but an enhanced calculator. Were we wrong! We had created a whale and it was going to swallow us.

I now want to describe that whale. It soon became apparent that computers needed programming – some way of ordering the things around. Otherwise they were useless. This did not bother the man on the street, who was not interested in the things, but it bothered business – who could clearly see its usefulness in helping them become more powerful.

Business became focused on power, and the computers became part of their power complex. A army of specialists appeared to serve them – big, expensive monsters, housed in their own rooms. IBM (International Business Machines) appeared to make and service them (and also sell them: their sales department was extremely effective.)

But let me return to programming the monsters. It soon became clear that this was a critical skill, and it became necessary to create more of these skilled people, and figure out ways of making them more productive.

At the same time semi-conductors were discovered, and ways of building large arrays of them on a silicon chip created Silicon Valley – and the whole industry went crazy. The whole world went crazy – we had discovered a way to create more and more with less and less!

But this required large amounts of something else: intelligence – smart software development. A special kind of intelligence was needed, and naturally these people appeared.  At first these were. derisively referred to as nerds: people with poor social skills, but good technical skills. I was one of them.

At first, the young women of the age put us down – but when they discovered how much money we could make, they quickly changed their minds, and became eager for their bodies to share in our income.

Then computer technology made a quantum jump – the personal computer (PC) appeared. These are now so common, we have forgotten what a bombshell they were. I had one of the first ones (the Osborne) which make desktop publishing possible – overnight!

At one point in my life, when I was between jobs (as was often the case), and had time to think, I gave some hard thought to this. Was this going to do me any good?

I came to the conclusion that this new capability (to produce more documentation faster) would simply be absorbed by the corporations we all worked for, with no benefit to us (the technical writers). And indeed, this turned out to be the case. We were back running on the treadmill, sweating more, but making less.

And I noticed, to my amazement, that no one was noticing this. Indeed, no one was noticing much of anything at all. I could only conclude (reluctantly) that my fellow-workers were no longer people. What they were I did not know, but they were not people.

Fast-forward ahead to the present, when I am living in Costa Rica with my high-speed Internet connection. I am studying, once again, for reasons I do not understand, software development. And I am learning about loosely coupled components - and I can hardly believe my eyes. I quote from Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework, page 73:

We want the components of our application to be as independent as possible and to have as few interdependencies as we can manage. In our ideal situation, each component knows nothing about any other component and deals with it only through abstract interfaces. This is known as loose coupling…

Replace the word component with the word person, and you have our present social situation!

I am reminded of my last relationship, back in Silicon Valley. I wanted to know everything about my new girlfriend, and she found this, not endearing, but alarming. I had to stay in my place, and she would stay in hers, thank you! Sex was totally permissible (and the more the better), but intimacy was not.

2012
05/09
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Software
Technology
1 comment

From the Monastery to the Corporation

It has long been recognized that the Monastery was the forerunner of Capitalism. Perhaps we should reexamine this development, and take it more seriously.

The first thing we notice is the extreme difference between the starting point, the Medieval Monastery - and the end point, the modern (or more accurately, the post-modern) Corporation. The two could not be more different – it seems.

The Monastery was a religious organization, but business has become our new religion. However, while religion was conscious in the Medieval world, it has become unconscious in our world. This is an important difference, but not one the majority of people can comprehend, since most of their activity is now unconscious.

To repeat, human activity has become unconscious instead of conscious. The discovery of the unconscious was one of our most important discoveries, but one we have refused to take seriously.

How else did Capitalism differ from life in the Monasteries? The Monasteries were designed to be self-sufficient. Some trading went on with the local economy, but that was limited. The Monasteries were benevolent, by intention. Capitalism involved trading over long distances and was selfish by intention.

It also involved many service organizations, such as banking and the building and servicing of its machinery (initially the Sailing Ship). These organizations were geographically dispersed with no coordination of end objectives – which resulted in massive economic instability (the Great Depression being the outstanding example).

The last difference is more complicated – the continual improvement in technology. This, along with the changes described above, resulted in affluence – which is widely praised as nothing but a good thing. It its indirect effects, however, have often been insidious – and have resulted in a deficient kind of person: materialistic mass man - who, for reasons we do not understand, has turned against the world which made him, and is destroying it.

I have a theory about this (actually several theories). It seems to me that these people have identified with their machines (which is what every technology is) and now see themselves as super-people whose job it is too eliminate ordinary people. It may also be, that having been denied the opportunity to be (a fundamental human drive) they have decided to destroy the world that would not let them be.

Whatever the reason, or reasons, the human race has become self-destructive – while being incapable of recognizing this.

I have wondered, over and over, if this perception was real – or just something I imagined. I always end up convinced it is real – whether is is recognized or not.

2012
03/19
CATEGORY
Business
History
Religion
Technology
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Demonic Machines

I have a strange obsession: I am determined to understand the world – and people in particular. People are the ones that give me the most trouble.

I am convinced we have changed greatly, and we now are only partly human. But saying just what we have become has baffled me. It is clear that we have become more like machines – but it is also clear that we have become demonic: intent on destroying ourselves. The two parts didn’t seem to fit together.

But this morning, after a night of nightmares, I can see (or rather, feel) how they fit together. The two metaphors I just used: (seeing and feeling) are those used by the two hemispheres of the brain. The right hemisphere is identified with the whole body while the left is identified with our extensions (as McLuhan put it), such as our machines. And as Iain McGilchrist tells us, it is not longer the Emissary, but has become the Master.

We have always considered our machines to be our helpful servants. And for hundred of thousand of years they were. But then, all of a sudden, they took over our world, with the advent of civilization – which was a complex of our technologies, and our reactions to them. Mankind struggled to cope with these, mostly unsuccessfully.

In our time, we have been hit with the most overwhelming of them all: the computer/software/internet/wireless complex. I have been alarmed to see how this has overwhelmed people, even down here. These new technologies have not made us better, but worse – by taking over more and more of our lives.

I am now reading The Condition of Man by Lewis Mumford, one of my gurus. In the first part of the book, he is quickly going over these developments in the Greek and Roman worlds. I wish you had the time to read it. Everyone should be forced to be a failure (like I was) and then given time to recover (like I have been). But I am getting off the subject, which is demonic machines.

Now that I have realized that such a thing is possible, it begins to make sense (as we say). My twenty years of working in high-tech were full of just such insanity – which nearly drove my crazy myself.

When I tried to explain to the friends I still had back in Silicon Valley that software development was a social process, and therefore subject to the problems of our society – they abruptly stopped listening to me. They were completely enmeshed (like a gear in a machine) in that society, and they were not about to question it.

For that society, the end of the world has already happened. They are on a one-way track that is going nowhere – with no awareness of this, or anything else. Their things become more and more, while they (as persons) become less and less.

2012
03/14
CATEGORY
History
Philosophy
Technology
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Control of the Mind

I continue to read Harold Bloom’s excellent book on the King James Bible. On page 27 he writes:

Sages and rabbis labored to control our perspective, and the Five Scrolls of Moses represent as successful a usurpation of our consciousness as does the Christian conversion of the Hebrew Bible into the Old Testament.

I immediately got out my highlighter and marked this passage, because he is talking about a very fundamental process – the control of our minds. Something that the majority of the people want to ignore – preferring instead to believe the very best in everyone – and at the same time, offering up their minds on a silver platter for other people to fight over. They like to watch the feeding frenzy that results.

This is what television programming is – a struggle for the minds of the people, which for all practical purposes have only one Mind. Whoever controls that, controls them – all of them.

Ideally, individual people (and groups of people) should create their own identity. Self-possession (which implies the existence of a self) should be vitally important. And people at one time would give up their lives to defend it.

But this is no longer the case. We want the same identity for everyone, and will destroy anyone (or any group) who is different.

Another way of putting this is that man has become mass man – who can have everything, but who can be nothing.

Being is a tricky concept. The best explanation I have heard of it is in The Master and His Emissary, which is about the two hemisphere’s of the brain. The right hemisphere knows all about being, and considers it the most natural thing in the world – it can feel it in operation.

The left hemisphere is not interested in being – and in our technology-obsessed culture it has become the dominant hemisphere – to our immense loss. We have become human things, not human beings.

The mind can think, that is one of its most important functions. But the mass, having no mind of their own, cannot think for themselves – and steadfastly refuse to do so.

These are the most important developments of our time – the rise of mass man and the movement of its Mind into its collective unconsciousness. They should be regarded as part of the same complex.

2012
02/23
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
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The Reality of Non-Existence

This is something new, one of the consequences of the post-modern world, which has produced people that do not exist.

This assertion no doubt will be discounted as nonsense – how can something that does not exist be the least bit important?  The answer lies in the way the mind works – which is not the least bit logical.

Throughout history man has alternated between periods of constructive activity and destructive activity. We have always identified with constructive activity, and overlooked our destructive activities – which have been equally powerful. We seem to feel that our destructiveness is not us – and can therefore be safely ignored.

This is clearly defective reasoning of the worst kind. We need to be aware of our destructive tendencies – and make them a special object of our attention – and not just sweep them under the rug.

Those of you who are paying careful attention to my reasoning may have noticed that I have associated non-being with destructiveness. What is the connection? Here again the connection is in the human mind, with its many unconscious interconnections – which, of course, we are not privy to.

But the effect can be easily observed in human behavior – people who cannot be are destructive. Possibly, and this is only my conjecture, they think since the world will not let them be, they will destroy the world.

Here you may have another objection – how come few have noticed this, if it is so obvious? The reason is simple – people like this, people who do not exist are not aware either – by definition.

Which leads to the really interesting question “What kind of people are these, who behave like people in every external way, but internally are not people at all?

This is a philosophical question, but one which philosophers, for the most part, have ignored. And they have not been encouraged to do so – because it would reveal something people do not want to see – that their destructiveness is real, and is self-induced.

Once we admit this, we can proceed to the BIG question – how can we fix this? But we have to recognize the problem first.

2012
02/09
CATEGORY
Morality
Philosophy
Psychology
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The Coming of the Masses

I am reading Ortega y Gasset again – starting with his most famous book The Revolt of the Masses. This was published in Spanish in 1930, and in English in 1932. Again I am struck by the forcefulness of his writing and the originality of his ideas.

I have also been struck by how he has been ignored – the Existentialists ignored him entirely, and the only philosopher who took up his cause, Pedro Blas Gonzales, has tried to make him more respectable – and something else entirely.

I can only conclude that he has hit on a sore nerve, and along with much else, has been swept under the rug - denied, repressed and hidden in our collective unconscious.

Here is the opening paragraph of the book, in the chapter The Coming of the Masses:

There is one fact which, whether for good or ill, is of utmost importance in the public life of Europe at the present moment. This fact is the accession of the masses to complete power. As the masses, by definition, neither should or can direct their own personal existence, and still less rule society in general, this fact means that actually Europe is suffering from the greatest crisis can can afflict peoples, nations, and civilization.

Europe was in the process of succumbing to Fascism, and Nazism in particular. This was clearly the rise of the masses, although it was not recognized as such by the intellectuals of the time – or of any later time, including our own. These intellectuals instead proclaimed that any society was a good as any other – and that the intellectual elite should not force their standards on anyone else.

This is exactly what the masses wanted to hear. Maybe they were stupid, but what did that matter? In some strange way their stupidity was the ultimate wisdom.

The American political situation, which has become a grotesque comedy, can be easily understood as the masses in action.  The masses took over in the 19th Century, and the results are now all around us.

2012
02/03
CATEGORY
History
Philosophy
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The Computer Is Not Human

We have always made our technologies part of us – or to put it another way, we have always made ourselves part of them. Looking at it from the perspective of power (which is our primary obsession) – our technologies have overpowered us. Once they are in place, we cannot control them. And they control us instead.

This is not a new observation, it is part of the reaction to the Industrial Revolution – which has taken over our lives so completely we cannot imagine any other way of life.  Business (the new incarnation of Industry) has become our new religion, and we worship  it with the same passion we always do.

The most powerful part of the business world (its computers) have displaced us as the center of our world, and reduced us to nothing more than its reproductive organs. A job we seem happy to fill.

When I refer to the computer, I am speaking of the computer/software/internet complex of technologies, and will refer to these as the CSI. I have a good reason to do this – these are now the dominant technology in our world. Even more important than the television, still a very important technology – and the automobile, also a very important technology.

And I want to emphasize, from the beginning, that the CSI is mechanistic – a distributed machine, and one distributed in an new and unusual way – that people (who haven’t changed much since the Stone Age) cannot comprehend, since it has a clever user-interface that makes it seem human. And rather than try to comprehend this, most people simply give up and assume (entirely incorrectly) that it is human – when it is nothing but machine with that looks alive  - it has the computer screen, which is a direct transcendent of the movie screen and the television screen.

People are annoyed when I insist on this distinction – because they have merged with this machine so successfully they have become machine-like (or computer-like) themselves. They do want to be reminded that they have lost the human part of themselves – which indeed they have.

2012
01/15
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
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