n a t b s

What to do when the whole world is crazy?

When “sanity” is anything but sane?

When you realize you’re hopelessly trapped?

When your mother is dying and your soul has been stolen?

What to do?

A woman and her poodle-with-a-coat walk past a freezing homeless person. An intellectual blogs about it from his iPhone.

When you think about it, society is really a machine that uses us.  I’m not sure who invented it or who controls it (no one?), but we are mere cogs in this giant machine.  And the reason we don’t respect human rights is because all we care about is the machine.  If it says that these 300 people need to be fired, they get fired. It doesn’t matter what it does to their lives because the interest of the machine is what’s most important.

I guess it is run by people.  Let me clarify that, it’s run by a few people.  Several thousand at most.  And I think the point of the machine is to make their lives better. The lives of the few that run it.  As for everyone else, it’s purpose is to provide us with just enough that we don’t revolt.  That’s right, it gives the people the absolute minimum that it takes to keep us pacified and never an inch more. The selfish bastards who run the show have no interest in us other than as instruments of cheap labor. All they really care about is themselves and their families.  We’re so hopelessly oppressed we’ve forgotten that we are oppressed. But we are, and we’ll never be free as long as we buy into their crap. All this consumerism, and nationalism, and religion, it’s all bullshit. All are modes of oppression. We are not free people, for  ”slavery is determined neither by obedience nor by hardness of labor but by the status of being a mere instrument, and the reduction of man to the state of a thing.”

I’m a human being, not a cog in your goddamn machine.

My life has value. My autonomy matters. I’ll never find what I need in a store.

The capitalist bosses and owners are losing their identity as responsible agents; they are assuming the function of bureaucrats in a corporate machine. Within the vast hierarchy of executive and managerial boards extending far beyond the individual establishment into the scientific laboratory and research institute, the national government and national purpose, the tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the facade of objective rationality. Hatred and frustration are deprived of their specific target, and the technological veil conceals the reproduction of inequality and enslavement. With technical progress as its instrument, unfreedom-in the sense of man’s subjection to his productive apparatus-is perpetuated and intensified in the form of many liberties and comforts. The novel feature is the overwhelming rationality in this irrational enterprise, and the depth of the preconditioning which shapes the instinctual drives and aspirations of the individuals and obscures the difference between false and true consciousness. For in reality, neither the utilization of administrative rather than physical controls (hunger, personal dependence, force), nor the change in the character of heavy work, nor the assimilation of occupational classes, nor the equalization in the sphere of consumption compensate for the fact that the decisions over life and death, over personal and national security are made at places over which the individuals have no control. The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves, but they are slaves, for slavery is determined

“Neither by obedience nor by hardness of labor but by the status of being a mere instrument, and the reduction of man to the state of a thing.”

-Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (emphasis mine)

Here is the internal contradiction of this civilization: the irrational element in its rationality. It is the token of its achievements. The industrial society which makes technology and science its own is organized for the ever-more-effective domination of man and nature, for the ever-more-effective utilization of its resources. It becomes irrational when the success of these efforts opens new dimensions of human realization. Organization for peace is different from organization for war; the institutions which served the struggle for existence cannot serve the pacification of existence. Life as an end is qualitatively different from life as a means.

-Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man