Prefabricated reality
Too often it feels like the standards we hold ourselves up to have transitioned from aspects of nature to aspects of technology. Maybe this traces back to the industrial age which essentially marked a shift from an overwhelmingly natural environment to an overwhelmingly material one.
Then, we looked to nature for signs and symbols of life; while using morality as a means to temper that influence with the more synthetic aspirations and conditions of the human psyche. We looked to nature because it seemed to be the predominant bastion of life. However, since the advent of industrial technology, the overwhelming aspects of our environment, especially in cities, have become material phenomena.
In other words, as we once paid obeisance to the jungle for its infinite possibilities, its ancient spirit, and the virtually endless curiosity it, thus, facilitated, today the environment that confounds us is one of our own making. Towering buildings, large and heavy machines, computers and electronics in every nook and cranny — our minds, as reflections of our environment, have become predominantly mechanical.
And so, our metaphors have followed. Morality seems an obsolete paradigm for reflecting the human psyche as it relied largely on the common faith in divine metaphors — things beyond the reach and comprehensibility of the mind. However, that space has since shrunk; not for that we understand more of nature’s deepest secrets and mysteries now, rather that our technological capabilities have grown sophisticated enough to warrant a concentration of focus and involvement.
Things one categorised as sin are now largely seen as inefficiencies or deficiencies. They are seen as kinks in one's cognitive mechanics, rather than a reflection of their nature. And it does not take discipline or willpower to overcome these afflictions; instead, by the day, we synthesise ‘cures’ for these conditions; forgetting, also, that these traits (whether considered sinful or inefficient) are merely symptoms.
And yet, with this shift in our outlook, we have somehow retained the simplistic prescription of values defined in morality. That is to say, we approach a new paradigm of thinking with an obsolete framework for the basis of that thinking. This is the clash we often experience as culture gaps and the weight of modernity upon the individual.
Just as each cog in a machine is expected to know and perform its part to perfection, so too are the individuals of modern societies expected to know and to perform their parts with precision. However, individuals in a social system do not fit as neatly as cogs in a machine. Our purpose and functions are not prefabricated; we are constantly evolving in mind and in physical capabilities. And so, we fall short of the basic requirements for such an outlook to be an effective one. The human shape does not fit the blueprint of modern electromechanical sensibilities.
If we are to truly embrace this shift in the cognitive mapping of real and residential phenomena, we must also recalibrate our value systems. Our electromechanical sophistication, and each degree of advancement, emerged from a clear drive to increase leisure and reduce labour. And yet, we still hold labour as virtue and leisure as sin. Granted, that is gradually shifting in recent generations; but that is more to do with recreation itself being seen as more important, not so much with tempering the balance between recreation and occupation.
The state and adoption of these views are not generalisable because, ultimately, the burden of proof now falls squarely on the individual. Anything is true and anything is effective so long as someone is able to show evidence of its effect. The circumstances within which this effect is realised is often neglected in this consideration.
Laziness is a virtue only when a billionaire praises it as such. Labour is a virtue only when the worker praises it as such. The optics of preaching now are entangled with the act of preaching and the effectiveness of the principles being preached — a configuration that discounts the intrinsic relevance of hypocrisy. All arguments are defeated, ultimately, on accusations of hypocrisy; forgetting that just because you murder people doesn’t mean you should be okay with others murdering people.
But there is no space for such nuance in a mechanical reality. Hypocrisy is a symptom of a cog failing its prefabricated purpose; and so, it is a rot that must be eradicated. Laziness is a symptom of a cog unable or unwilling to perform its prefabricated duty and so it is a rot that must be eradicated. Greed is a symptom of a cog knowing its prefabricated purpose and overshooting its capacity to perform, so it is worthy of praise and must not be eradicated. Ambition emerges from greed as a way for the cog to oil itself and keep itself working well beyond its predicted capacity, and so it must become entrenched in the individual and the systems of participation.
What is good for the economy, is good; what is bad for the economy, is evil. We have supplanted any notion of transcendence with a strictly material, quantifiable, paradigm of effort. We exist to serve the economy — not god, not our souls, not even ourselves.
But, for a system purportedly advanced at each stage for the collective good and the collective capacity to experience leisure, these values seem lopsided. The economy was meant to make it easier to live, not to make people work harder to survive; and optimizing economic systems should be optimizing the lives of all people able to access it — not just the upper crust of the commercial population. We tried that already, it was called royalty and we repeatedly harp on its various inefficiencies and obsolete quality.
Why are we recreating an older, supposedly discarded paradigm with the sophisticated capacities of modernity? Why has our approach to life not shifted to accommodate the greater potential for wider leisure; why are we, still, operating in the mode of survival?
It seems that the more we expand our technological prowess, the less control we have over our own lives. And this paradoxical gap is nourished by the sophistication of commerce (or, at least, the sophistication that commerce coopts from our collective advances in knowledge) which is then wielded as whip to, banking on the technological ignorance of the masses, fuel an industrial way of life.
Our production lines now seep through our screens to inform our daily routines; by informing us that we are woefully ill-equipped to take on the complexities of modern life and modern environments by ourselves; that we have, in a way, returned to the jungle — albeit one of our own making. So long as we sustain this approach, leisure will remain just beyond our reach, as animals in a zoo separated from the full potential of their lives by a few narrow, but strategically implemented, bars of metal.