Silicon Valley and a Meaningless Life
(This is an excerpt from Ted Gioia’s consistently provocative Substack: The Honest Broker.)
More than 100 years ago, sociologist Emile Durkheim studied the problem of anomie. That’s not a word you hear very often nowadays. But we need to bring it back.
Anomie is a sense that life has no purpose or meaning. The people who suffer from it are listless, disconnected, and prone to mental illnesses of various sorts. Durkheim believed, for example, that suicide was frequently caused by anomie.
But the most shocking part of Durkheim’s analysis was his view that anomie increased when social norms were lessened. You might think that people rejoice when rules and regulations get eliminated. But Durkheim believed the exact opposite.
When the old structures go away, people encounter a crisis of meaning in their lives. In extreme cases, they kill themselves.
He wrote:
Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him from all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him.
….I daresay, Durkheim would grasp the comparable risk to human society in the present moment.
I am often skeptical of sociology, but nothing could be worse than the current situation. Today social engineering is implemented by profit-seeking technocrats with no expertise whatsoever in social dynamics or individual psychology.
In fact, a large percentage of these tech leaders appear to be socially inept, and disconnected from the people around them. They are the last folks on the planet you would trust with reinventing society.
Perhaps they understand semiconductors and super computers, but they have no grasp of how individuals will respond to the rapid…shifts they are forcing on a reluctant public.
How do you destroy the purpose and meaning of human life? Is it even possible?
Unfortunately it’s not only possible, but already underway. Silicon Valley shows us how it’s done, step-by-step.
I’m not saying that tech companies deliberately intend to create social havoc. I believe their goals are merely to maximize money, power and control. But the end result is the same, no matter what their motive.
Source: Ted Gioia, www.honest-broker.com
Can anybody deny that this agenda is getting implemented rapidly by the technocracy—who are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to make it happen as fast as possible?
The people who smugly tell you that we need more research before we can figure this out are disingenuous. These dangers are intuitive and obvious to all unbiased parties. You and I already see and feel the consequences all around us, every day.