“Everything is functioning. That is exactly what is so uncanny, that everything is functioning and that the functioning drives us more and more to even further functioning, and that technology tears men loose from the earth and uproots them.”
--Martin Heidegger, Der Speigel Interview
"Homo non intelligendo fit omnia [Man has become all he is without understanding what happened]."--Giambattista Vico, Opere
Man is less himself than ever before.
It happened as a consequence of his increased specialization and the speed and complexity of communication technology instrumental in making that specialization possible. Man is awash in stimuli, knowledge, resources and statistics to which he also supplies his tiny piece. Man no longer knows from whom or whence his ideas come. He is a tiny part of vast, faceless cooperation, with no one man having any grasp on the whole or its direction.
His specialization leads him to rely upon the others in all things. He does not live without them. He is all of them and none of them. The complexity of man’s systems requires of each man that the others are always included. Indeed, man is today mostly unknown to himself: lacking the breadth of skills to survive on his own, he lives out his life inside a complex and anonymous system he does never comprehend.
There are no longer faces or traditions, and where man is without a face and tradition he lacks any home.
He has relinquished his home, his neighbors, and his traditions for a place in something vast and inexpressible. He is thereby uprooted from the earth.
--Martin Heidegger, Der Speigel Interview
"Homo non intelligendo fit omnia [Man has become all he is without understanding what happened]."--Giambattista Vico, Opere
Man is less himself than ever before.
It happened as a consequence of his increased specialization and the speed and complexity of communication technology instrumental in making that specialization possible. Man is awash in stimuli, knowledge, resources and statistics to which he also supplies his tiny piece. Man no longer knows from whom or whence his ideas come. He is a tiny part of vast, faceless cooperation, with no one man having any grasp on the whole or its direction.
His specialization leads him to rely upon the others in all things. He does not live without them. He is all of them and none of them. The complexity of man’s systems requires of each man that the others are always included. Indeed, man is today mostly unknown to himself: lacking the breadth of skills to survive on his own, he lives out his life inside a complex and anonymous system he does never comprehend.
There are no longer faces or traditions, and where man is without a face and tradition he lacks any home.
He has relinquished his home, his neighbors, and his traditions for a place in something vast and inexpressible. He is thereby uprooted from the earth.
Man, this is it. Why do I have to argue with myself about leaving this system of facelessness, when I KNOW it is not real. It is propaganda and brainwashing, this idea that I need them to be happy. I argue with myself, the argument lasts one block at a seven-minute-mile pace, and I always win the argument.
ReplyDeleteAnd once one has won this argument, the amount of effort required to sustain energy in the matrix increases significantly to the point where a man can no longer spend one more *second* doing something for the faceless many who are fodder and fuel for the matrix. It becomes unsustainable and unbearable: once a man knows how to give energy to his own project, once a man because to create his own culture ex nihilo, he has not one drop of energy he could give to feed the growing tentacles of the monster.
ReplyDelete