Posts Tagged ‘ Mass man ’

The System and its Functionaries

The System I don’t have to explain, although it might be hard to explain to creatures from another planet. If we said “The System has taken the place of God,” this wouldn’t help much either – although that would certainly be true. But the System is more technical than God was – and in our minds, better.

The System is different in another way too: God had people, but the system has functionaries. There is a difference. Functionaries are objects or things. They are trained, or programmed, to perform certain functions that the System needs done. The System makes everything work together – at least in theory. In practice, as we are finding out, it doesn’t work very well.

We are strictly forbidden to notice this. Why? Because if we lose confidence in the System it will quickly collapse and the world, as we know it, will be over.

Am I exaggerating the importance of belief in the System? Consider what happens when any bubble collapses. Panic sets in. Nothing changes but people’s attitude toward some part of the system – but all hell breaks loose, and the results can be very serious.

Why is this? Because the System, although it claims to be God, is really operated by, and only benefits a few – the rich and the powerful. Our political conservatives, as well as the sycophants in every organization, are aligned with them and their interests.

This is obviously not a desirable state of affairs. How did it happen? Because people had been converted to functionaries who cannot think for themselves – simply because they were no longer people.

Right here is where I lose everybody, because they do not understand the difference between being a human and being a functionary (a thing). They cannot imagine how such a conversion could happen.

I have a hard time imagining it myself. But it did happen, and I can imagine some of the reasons why – mainly involving our relationships to technology. I watched two college students, a young woman and a young man, talk on the bus – meanwhile checking their cellphones constantly. I realized, with a jolt, how their cell phones were part of them! Just as when I was young, a car was part of many young Americans. And, for that matter, is now part of nearly everybody.

Our things have become body-snatchers, and now own us – when we think just the opposite. This is easy to say, and intuitively people can believe it – but the implications, which are vast, are beyond them.

As I have said elsewhere, we seem headed for another Middle Ages. Hopefully, this will force us to reconsider our relationship to technology, and we can start over – this time with us firmly in charge.

2011
10/06
CATEGORY
Economy
Technology
The Self
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What are we Doing Here?

The answer seems to be “Getting as much as we can,” although few will come right out and say that. It sounds too much like greed – which is, after all, what it actually is. I wrote about this recently in Pennies from Heaven: How Mormon Economics Shape the G.O.P.

The Mormons clearly preach the gospel of material salvation, and in this way they are completely American. But they are also involved in something else: following their God-appointed leader, the prophet Joseph Smith. His writings, such as the Book of Mormon, to them are scripture. Exactly as the Mohammedans regard their prophet Mohammed and his writings.

To Americans, none of this matters. The Mormons are different, and that makes them unacceptable. However to their many converts, this is exactly what attracts them.

I see I am getting off the track, I only brought up Mormonism to show how America got off the track in the early 19th Century. The Mormons were very much mass men, as described by Ortega y Gasset, people who showed up mysteriously about the same time as the Industrial Revolution. I have written about this too in Mass Production Produced Mass Man .

Try speaking to one of their missionaries, and you will quickly find yourself speaking to a strange being who is only partly human. One you cannot reason with at all. But they are capable of going far in the business world – who only wants a certain kind of people – those who are obedient to, and supportive of, the corporate code. To answer the question I started with “What are we doing here?” We need to examine this corporate code. What is it, really?

I have already described part of it: greed. But this implies something deeper: destructiveness. It’s basic goal, I believe, is the destruction of the world.

We should be asking ourselves “What are we doing for the world?” Since the world is the wonderful place that mysteriously made us and gave us our being. We should be helping it – as much as we can. But instead we are destroying it.

I hasten to add that this whole process was unconscious, and that the unconscious was also discovered (or perhaps created) during the same period: the 19th Century. We could now do the most horrible things, and claim, truthfully, to not be aware of them, and to deny them completely.

I have been studying the Existential philosophers, and were amazed to note they have omitted Ortega y Gasset from their company – even though another Spaniard, Miguel de Unamuno is included. They have also refused to acknowledge the unconscious – the most powerful part of us. If our philosophers are this incompetent, no wonder we are in such a mess.

Something fishy is going on here: we refuse to see the most important activity in our time: the destruction of the world – and ourselves.

2011
10/03
CATEGORY
Economy
History
Philosophy
Religion
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The Illusion of Freedom

This is probably the most powerful illusion Americans have: that they are Free (with a capital F). For a long time they posed Communism as a threat to their freedoms – while they were industriously dismantling their freedoms in every way they could think of.

This idea is not new with me, Sheldon S. Wolin spoke of it in his book Democracy Inc. – Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. His notion of inverted totalitarianism is the same as Ortega y Gasset’s description of mass man: total conformity – something any office worker is well aware of. They may occasionally acknowledge their status as wage slaves, but do not take this seriously. The do not consider the implications of what this means for two reasons.

First they are strictly forbidden to, and second because this knowledge would be too scary. All of this is part of their unconscious processing – which allows them to deny all of it completely – but as the existentialists would say: in bad faith.

2011
10/02
CATEGORY
Philosophy
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What I am Not

It is important to know what we are – but also important to know what we are not. Or at least it seems that way to me. In this posting I am going to concentrate on what I am not. I have the strong impulse to stand up on my hind legs and “I am not this horrible mess I see all around me!”

Not that it will do much good, no one else can see the mess I am talking about. They can see lots of little messes but not the Big Mess. This to me is simply amazing, but I have to accept this is the way it is.

One exception is Ortega y Gasset, who discovered mass man – a remarkable discovery that almost everyone has ignored – which, once again amazes me.

In another posting I wrote Covered With Elephant Shit, but Can’t see the Elephant. I thought this was funny, and sent it to the man who had once been my Gestalt guru – back when Gestalt psychology was popular. I am sure he said to himself “This is just some nutty thing from Hal,” and ignored it. To be honest, I didn’t understand it myself, but this morning I do – kind of. The elephant, or more correctly the elephant shit, is what I referred to earlier in this posting as the Big Mess.

We have been making this mess for two hundred years, during the 19th and 20th Centuries, and now it is getting ripe. Another label would be overdevelopment – the condition the affluent world is in now. We inherited a perfect world, but we have been developing it to death. This has been commented on so much it has become trite.

But no one has been commenting on just who is doing this overdevelopment. No one wants to admit the human race has become so degenerate it is fouling its own nest. There is no lack of preachers who will dwell on our sinfulness – but none who will say we have become something inhuman. We still think we are God’s children who have somehow gone astray – and only need a minor course correction. When in fact we have become something that even God would not recognize.

I do not think this makes us a hopeless cause – after all some of us know where we are. But since we are now ruled by the mass, minority viewpoints can be easily disregarded. As I have said in other posting Can Technology Make Us Better?, this may require a new Middle Ages, to give us time to come to our senses.

Meanwhile I live my own inconsequential life in a remote area that development has not reached. Life could be worse.

2011
10/01
CATEGORY
History
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Man Must Know Himself

This probably strikes most of you as a strange statement. Very few have this urge, and those that due are rather odd. Most have the opposite urge: to know as little about themselves, and others, as possible. We already know everything we need to know, and trying to know more is in exceptionally bad taste.

Nevertheless, the admonition to know thyself, is an ancient one, and probably good advice – even for us in our highly advanced state.

Ortega y Gasset says the following in his Man and Crisis, beginning on page 21.

Man is a most strange entity, who, in order to be what he is, needs first to find out what he is…

The essence of man lies in the fact that he has no choice but to force himself to know…He needs to know, and whether he likes it or not, he needs to work at the best of his intellectual means. This is undoubtedly what constitutes the human condition.

To define man by saying that he is intelligent, a rational animal, an animal who knows, homo sapiens, is dangerous because, however carefully we use these words, we note that if we ask ourselves “Is any man, even the greatest genius that ever existed, truly and in the fullest meaning of the word, intelligent? Does he understand with the required fullness of intelligence, does he really know anything with a complete and unshakable knowing?” –  if we ask ourselves this, we note very quickly that the matter is highly dubious and problematical. On the other hand, I repeat, it is beyond question that man needs to know.

Man does not busy himself in learning, in comprehending, simply because he has talents and intelligence which enable him to know and understand, but on the contrary; for the very reason that he has no choice but to try to comprehend, to know, he mobilizes all the abilities of which he stands possessed, even though for that necessity these may serve him badly.

If man’s intelligence were truly what the word indicates – the capacity to understand – he would at once have understood everything, and would have no problem, no laborious task ahead of him.

That task, as we have said, is called “living”; the essence of living is that man is always existing within an environment, that he finds himself – suddenly and without knowing how he got there – projected into and submerged in a world, a set of fixed surroundings, into this present, which is now about us.

Heidegger makes the same point: we are thrown into the world, and we have to survive the best we can.

But mass man in his unconscious collective mind (the only one he has) believes he knows everything – and acts accordingly. He doesn’t want to know more.

The book Ortega’s “The Revolt of the Masses” and the Triumph of the New Man has a glossary of Ortega’s terms. For mass man he has:

A kind of person who lives for the moment, vaguely cognizant of the world outside himself, having no particular vision for life, and strongly opposed to others who do.

I quote also from the last paragraphs of that book:

The reflective and vitally felt life creates an aura of influence around it that because of its self-awareness cannot fall prey to destructive external forces. The life of “revolt” – at least as we have come to witness the progression of that empty term – rejects all genuine convictions, instead opting for mass appeal, immediate satisfaction and the allure of power that the politicization of all aspects of life entails…

When a cavernous moral, intellectual and spiritual cavity has been created where man formerly dwelled, what remains is the politicization of culture and human life. Revolt cannot help but to enjoy the fruits of “liberation” given that the incessant resentment of the hollow man fails to realize when it has indeed triumphed.

Get the book.

2011
09/30
CATEGORY
History
Philosophy
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Mass Production Produced Mass Man

The things we create, create us. What we do, and how we do things, end up being part of us. Man is always something in the making, making himself.

I know this is obvious, but I also know this is being ignored by everyone. Being something of a thinker (a defective, but stubborn one) I ask myself “Why? Why is everyone so eager to overlook this?” The answer comes immediately: “Because honest acceptance of this would make us less divine.” I use the world divine here with considerable reluctance, but I cannot think of a better word.

America has been described, very nicely, as a nation with the soul of a church, as a Google search shows. But this valuable insight has not been taken seriously enough by enough people. I intend to remedy that – or at least try to, by putting it into the larger context provided by Ortega y Gasset (who writes about mass man) – expanded still larger by including technology. And making the whole thing into a massive complex. The key concepts here are religion, mass man, mass production – and, very importantly, mixing all this into a complex.

Our ability to think of complexes has been one of breakthroughs of modern science, but we have been reluctant to expand this breakthrough to include the social sciences – for reasons I hope to make clear.

To return to the beginning of this essay: We become whatever we become obsessed with. We have always been obsessed with religion, in one form or another (including the development of heroic science) – and we have now become obsessed with our things (and the process of making and consuming them), so much so that we have become thing-like ourselves. Religious thing-like creatures – something hard to comprehend, but easy to observe in contemporary America.

One side-effect of this was the importance of manufacturing in the industrial economy. Our whole way of life revolved around this; this was where everyone was employed. Now China has become the manufacturer for the world, we are baffled: what are we going to do with all the unemployed in the rest of the world (including America)?

Perhaps my own life provides an answer. I have never worked in manufacturing, this was not what high-tech was about. What was high-tech about, or more appropriately – what IS it about? This is not an idle question, it is the question of our time: what will the post-industrial economy be?

The answer seems to be “Duh?” But I think a better answer would be to examine the technology involved. Starting about the middle of the 19th Century, oil and electricity became more and more important. Oil produced the automobile and electricity produced a whole host of things that changed us into watchers of images instead of readers of text. It made us couch-potatoes.

Ultimately, it produced the computer/software/internet complex that has changed everything. The world will never be the same – but more importantly, the people in it will never be the same either. They have been damaged permanently – and have become unable to comprehend most higher-order effects.

This is a sobering fact, and I need to say more about it. My only help here is Iain McGilchrist in his book The Master and his Emissary. I heard of him from an article in Poetry Magazine, of all things. Among other things he has taught English at Oxford University, but he has also been a brain researcher – and this is what he talks about here: the way the brain hemispheres affect our operation as an unique species. A species that has become endangered, not from outside forces, but from inside forces – from ourselves.

2011
09/28
CATEGORY
Business
Economy
Philosophy
Psychology
Religion
Science
Sociology
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Covered With Elephant Shit, but Can’t see the Elephant

This is our problem now. We all know the problem of the blind men examining the elephant – using their hands, of course. What if one of them was standing at the right place, at the right time, when the elephant took a shit? Would he be able to detect the presence of the elephant?

Unfortunately, the answer is “No”, because we are not just blind, we have lost all of our other senses too – most importantly, our common sense. We have been pooped-over, but never knew it.

Fritz Perls spoke of different kinds of idle conversation – as I recall, the most trivial kind was chicken shit and the most pretentious kind was elephant shit. I have been unable to find any online conformation of this. But the expression Elephant in the Living Room has a Wikipedia entry.

Elephants do shit a lot. I was in Sri Lanka during a religious festival in Kandy when two of them were imported to grace a temple courtyard. The smell was awesome, enough to make a believer of anyone.

2011
08/21
CATEGORY
Aphorism
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