Awah's entry for: Project Hope competition #2 by @josevas217
This post is created in response to the competition created by @josevas217 for Project Hope
A few years ago, I found myself in a camel market in North Africa.
It was incredibly hot and dusty. I was invited by a local to his house for dinner and the facilities were basic. We were about 8 hours drive from the city where there was an airport. There was no hospital for miles. The houses were made of mud, there was no running water and most didn't have electricity. Lots of local people came and joined us for dinner and what surprised me was how happy they all were.
They say money doesn't buy happiness and what these people had was something very powerful. They were a close tight community that supported each other. They didn't need much in life to enjoy the blessing they had. Yet their lives were quite simple and straightforward. There was no sophisticated education available in this remote place.
In our modern world driven by technology, are we losing this magical experience - the experience of life?
Education makes machines that act like men and produces men who act like machines.
Erich Fromm.
To understand modern technology you need to have a deep education and through learning and developing, we can invent even better technology. It is an ever-increasing spiral of development - but where will it end?
Erich Fromn was a psychologist and a cultural critic. He believed that as we developed we will humanize technology. This was the main theme in Fromn's book entitled, "The Revolution of Hope: Towards a Humanized Technology". This was a concern of many from his time and we see the same theme in Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World.
In this theory, overtime we develop technology so that we have robots that mimic human behaviour and start taking on more and more of the work that we used to do. We can see this already happening and it seems an inevitable future where one day we will be speaking to human-like androids who seem very real but who can do all the things that we don't like doing.
At the same time, our education drives us to achieve more and more. Life slowly becomes about consuming more and producing more. We become enslaved to the system and we lose touch of the human and communal life that I experienced in the camel market town. We are numbed with entertainment through games and TV that provide an artificial stimulus.
Consume and produce. We have become robotic because we are controlled through the media and mass information that we are fed that stops us thinking about higher things.
Personally, although I do believe there is a degree of truth in Fromn's vision for the future of mankind, I also believe that for many of us we can achieve so much more. We need to live life and open our minds to what is going on about us and not be enslaved by the system we created.
Hmmmm. Actually I never realised this not until I read your write up that we oursleves have become robotics by allowing the media to control and the mass information.
That is definitely true. Though we might not look robotic in appearance but I guess we are already getting fine tune to behave ina. Robotics way nowadays which we need to look into
Too many people don't even think. They are content to just digest the latest soap opera, reality tv show or movie. We have become enslaved to the system but there is just so much more to life.
Hello @awah
It's an incredibly good post.
I like your point, and I share it.
I miss that feeling of familiarity you describe at the beginning of the post, and I've only managed to experience it in rural areas of my country.
Some time ago, when I was studying my first career, I did some activities in really poor areas, and I managed to feel that, they really had very little in terms of material, but they had each other, and that's important.
I tell you, my first contact with Fromm was when I was 16 years old, when I read his book "The loneliness of Man". They are a set of essays in which he talks about automation, mechanized work, and the dehumanization of man as a result of industrial monotony...
It was shocking to realize that, from that moment my philosophy of life changed.
Thank you very much for participating in the contest.
Hi @josevas217 - Thank you for your kind and thoughtful comment. To be honest, you have really inspired me to go and read more Fromm. As I was researching for my post, I have become hungry to read more.
Thanks for organising such a great contest.
Greetings @awah
We receive enormous social pressure, which conditions us to be happy in highly sophisticated contexts, where in addition to technological devices, clothing is a presentation card to be accepted, and where eating and drinking is a reason for exuberant expenses, this makes us move away from this type of experience like the one you describe. I fully agree with you, we cannot be slaves of the system that we have created, and that so much dehumanizes us.
Hi @lupafilotaxia - I agree, we are always on display to see if we accept to the norms with continuous conditioning. We have lost the simplicity and beauty of life itself. Thanks for your comment and stay safe.