It’s the end of the first week of 2020…and I’m already exhausted. And I bet you are too. How dystopian can the headlines be? Continents burning, lunatic Presidents ordering assassinations, nations turning to violence.

It strikes me that above all, we live in an age of a great dehumanization. A time of precisely the thing that great minds like Arendt, Orwell, Camus, Frankl, and many more warned us about. We seem to have lost our way — badly — as people, in society after society. It’s a time of a shattered moral compass, of an invisible and unseen rending of the soul and breaking of the mind. A strange, lethal plague of rage, cruelty, aggression, and hostility seems to have swept the globe. More and more seem to regard everything…everyone else…the planet…life on it…as nothing but worthless, meaningless commodities, to be dominated, abused, and discarded. Which, of course, is what capitalism taught them — and a key way it becomes fascism.

(How did Americans become the kind of people that can put little kids in concentration camps — and not impeach a President for it? How did Indians become the kind of people who turn to outright fascism, banning a whole religion from citizenship? How did Brits become the kind of people who cheer on the self-assured destruction of Brexit? And so on.)

I think we are being dehumanized, faster and harder than we know, by a set of forces, which have converged, to form a kind of perfect storm. Let me begin with the most obvious.

The first great force of the great dehumanization is technology. It’s easy to see by now that without Facebook and Twitter and so forth, the new wave of authoritarianism sweeping the globe wouldn’t have received nearly the support it does. Why is that? Well, consider what research tells us happens on social media. The more that we use it, the more angry, lonely, depressed, and unhappy we are. The instant we stop using, our mood, our emotions, slowly lift and rise.

What is social media really doing? Something so terrible yet omnipresent we don’t see it. It’s pulling apart genuine social bonds, and replacing them with cheap, flimsy, artificial substitutes. But just as junk food doesn’t nourish you, so too, junk bonds don’t really do what true social bonds do: elevate you, expand you, enlarge your capacities to relate, know, hold, see, touch others. Just as junk food isn’t really food at all, so too, the junk social bonds formed online minimize, starve, and diminish all our genuine social needs and capacities. The need to be esteemed, valued, to belong, for one’s life to mean something, for one to count as a thing of inherent beauty and intrinsic worth. Online, what we are really doing is trying to gain some glimmer of those things by taking them away from others. And the net result of that game should have been obvious: the world turns hostile, aggressive, selfish, narrow, hair-triggered, antisocial.

In other words, social media dehumanizes us. That should be obvious to see, too. I’m just a profile. I have a rating. I’m numbers. I have this many follower, this many fans, this is me, a tiny digitized set of pixels. I’m this hot, I’m this attractive, like me, love me, want me. We’re reduced and shrunken, in other words, to an extreme, by this particular form of communication. How can we say much meaningful to one another in 140 characters? How can a Tinder profile yield a true love? And so mostly, these things don’t. They don’t lead us towards our humanity. They cheat and rob us of it.

And yet we use them addictively. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean it literally. Why do we use the very things that dehumanize us? Because we are addicted. They give us very real surges of dopamine. Why? Because they are giving us a feeling of superiority, supremacy, a catharsis for our anger and disappointment and sense of failure and lack of self worth — usually after rubbing in and reinforcing how worthless and little and small and ugly we are — which is the pain that constantly haunts us.

That pain, the one which follows us around like a ghost, which we are barely only now learning to talk about — “Am I a failure? Does anyone really see me? How did my life end up like this? Why is it that no matter how hard I try, I don’t seem to anywhere? How come following the rules of being a good and decent person only leads to ruin, not success?” is the result of deeper forces of dehumanization, which brings me to my second and third forces: stagnation and inequality. Why is it that we mostly walk around in a state of anxiety, despair, rage, and helplessness? These aren’t distributed equally, to be sure. But what’s equally true about both “left” and “right” or young and old or black and white or whatever other arbitrary social distinctions you wish to make groups out of is this: people feel pretty terrible. That’s again a simple empirical fact. Depression, anxiety, anger, and suicide are all skyrocketing. Why?

Let me discuss stagnation first. American economists often crow: “Those Chinese! We’ve changed their lives! Why, now they’re building iPhones on assembly lines — instead of farming rice!! Woo hoo!!” That, my friends, is the kind of thinking history will regard as a) foolish b) hubristic and c) fatally simplistic to the point of being dead wrong. Sure, those Chinese are building iPhones on assembly lines. How do you think they feel? I bet they feel a little bit — or a lot — like this. My life could have been something more than this. I wanted to be a great chemist, musician, scientist, author, doctor. And here I am…still just another subjugated prole, whose life will never amount to much more than…this. How meaningless. How futile. How depressing.

Do you see my point? Stagnation is the feeling that a life has never matured, reached fruition, and never will. It is the sense that one could and and should have been more, but simply withered away, because nobody ever invested much in you — money, time, attention, care, concern, love. It is the feeling of abandonment and betrayal — that breeds resentment, rage, and discontent. It is the knowledge that one was left to fend for one’s self, orphaned — and so never realized one’s potential. It is a terrible kind of pain — and we don’t recognize it as such, but we should and must.

The tree’s potential is to reach the sky. The koala’s potential is to climb the tree. The human’s potential is to gently carry the koala and watch the stars. Do you see what I mean a little bit? And yet none of us are reaching our potential these days. Not the tree, not the koala, who burned down as Australia caught fire. Not you and me. There we are, stuck in our crap, pointless, go nowhere jobs, mostly — whether we’re on Chinese assembly lines making stuff for Americans, or whether we’re Americans in now mostly notorious “low-wage service jobs.”

That, my friends, is an entire world’s potential going to waste. The trees aren’t reaching the sky. The koalas can’t climb them. We’re stuck working jobs we mostly hate so we can’t touch or hold or save either of them. Think about that for a second — really think about it. A whole world’s potential — just squandered. What the?

Why is so much potential going to waste? Because of my third force, which is inequality. The average person — whether in China or America — is stuck in a pointless, go nowhere, dead-end, totally meaningless, absolutely soul-crushing “jobs”, if they have one at all, for a very simple purpose. To…make billionaires…into trillionaires. Sure — we work those crap jobs to pay the bills. But the social function is very simple: to maximize profits, which go to the “owners” of capital, and that way, capital’s share of the economy forever increases. Translation: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle becomes the new poor getting poorer. Like in America — where billionaires have doubled their fortunes, but the average American now dies…in debt. LOL — wait — what?

Inequality dehumanizes us with a terrible, crippling one-two punch.

The rich who become the ultra rich are dehumanized by the moral illogic of absurd wealth. Again, research tells us that much. What do you lose as you gain extreme wealth? Empathy, compassion, judgment, sanity — in other words, the capability to have real relationships disappears as wealth reaches absurd levels. You begin to regard yourself as superior, supreme, different. Maybe you are a Sun King, maybe you are a Duke, maybe you are a Baron. And so on. What you are not anymore is like them — those dirty, filthy ordinary humans. You don’t share their concerns. You can’t relate to them. And you end up like, say, the Waltons — who gave employees a paltry Scrooge like “bonus”, instead of time off for the holidays. Or the Sacklers, who happily profited from an opioid epidemic. Or a Buffett, the aw-shucksing grandpa who’s making money hand over fist from Goldman. Or like a Goldman Sachs, who’ve never met a catastrophe they thought was too horrific to profit from.

If you’ve gone from a mere hundred-millionaire to a billionaire, imagine the feeling. You have total impunity, and something like absolute power. Maybe, you tell yourself, you deserved it. No — this wasn’t the consequence of good fortune. It was because you are better, smarter, tougher, wiser. You are the creme de la creme. Maybe it is you who are the only true and good one, and the rest who are subhumans. It’s not so hard to see how extreme riches dehumanize — or, that they do, the ways that billionaires go on buying yachts and penthouses in the sky, while…the planet burns and democracy dies.

But the new poor are dehumanized by deprivation and anxiety and fear, too. What happens when you feel your security, stability, your base and anchor, slipping away? When the seas grow rough — and your rudder is broken? Perhaps you turn on the passengers. Perhaps you turn on the crew. As middles implode, this is what tends to happen — instead of claiming a fairer economy from the ultra rich, they turn on those even poorer and more powerless than them. Take America again, for example — where many blame…Mexicans…for their decline. LOL — what? Or take India — where many blame capitalism’s ills on…Muslims. Wait — what?

A hungry man will turn on his neighbours, his friends, his colleagues, to put bread on the table. He will steal from his own family to feed his children. There is no line he won’t cross. He’ll revert back to being part of whatever tribe or clan or mafia can protect him — even if he has to both suffer and do violence to gain that protection. That is how Russia and most of Eastern Europe became something like mafia states. Poverty is the most powerful force of dehumanization the world has ever known, and inequality means: the rich get richers, the poor get poorer, and the middle turns into the new poor. That is what the Weimar Era becoming the Nazi Era should have taught us — but apparently hasn’t.

Those three forces alone — technology, stagnation, and inequality — would have been enough to propel a savage wave of dehumanization. But there is another one, and to my mind, it’s the deciding factor. It’s what makes this wave of dehumanization deep and broad and wide enough to be called truly great. Now, this is a difficult idea to express, because it’s a cultural force, a kind of an attitude, pose, shared understanding, way of dealing with things.

I’m going to put it in Arendt’s terms: the banality of evil. I think that we have become inured, resigned, and apathetic to our own dehumanization itself. We mock it and joke about it and make light of it. Good, fine — these are necessary coping mechanisms.

But we must also learn to take our own dehumanization lethally seriously — and that part we fail at, because it asks us to be deeply vulnerable. We don’t say things to each other like: “I feel so angry, so frustrated, so hopeless. I know I’m just a commodity. On Tinder, at work, on Facebook, on Twitter. How did my life end up like this? I wanted more. I needed more. I wanted to be a great doctor, writer, artist, poet. My god! Instead, I’m haunted by this terrible anxiety and despair every day. How will I pay the bills? What happens if I lose this crap job I hate? Who will give us healthcare? And how will I ever retire, anyways?”

Do you see my point a little bit? We have forgotten, all too often, our true and great and noble dreams — and the pain of being this…abandoned, betrayed, sometimes destroyed, thing. This thing in such terrible and constant pain. Made to work for next to nothing, allowed no dignity, permitted no meaning, granted no inherent worth or value or self-determination. The pain of all that follows most of us around like a ghost, my friends — at least if we’re brave enough to be a little honest.

You wanted to be the next Jonas Salk. You became some corporate cog at an HMO. You wanted to be the next Thomas Edison. There you are, slaving away for an idiot like Zuck. And so on. But instead of feeling the full weight and scalding heat of that pain — really feeling it — expressing it, sharing it, talking about it, we muzzle it and stifle it. So where does it go? Usually, it erupts out of us, which is how the right turned authoritarian, and the left turned into attack mobs on Twitter.

The furthest we go is to make cynical and ironic jokes about it, like the millennials’ famed irony. But cynicism and irony, too, are postures of defeat. They are forms of distancing, of emotional dishonesty.

We are being dishonest about our own dehumanization, how painful it feels, how terrifying it really is — because that is what we have been taught to do.

But the result is that we never really feel better, our pain curdles into powerlessness, nobody can console us, and relationships never strengthen. You see, if you say all that to me — “My God! I wanted to be the next Salk, and I have to work this crap job just to give my kids healthcare! It hurts. It really, really hurts,” then we are really talking. Now I can comfort you and console you. Because I really see you and know you. Now I can maybe even plan with you. Can we overcome this system together? Maybe both of us can lift you up. Now you are not a failure, a nobody, a commodity. Now you are becoming a human being. And in seeing you, knowing you, having the challenge of holding you, all your beautiful and terrible weight — I am becoming a human being, too.

It’s a strange and subtle point I’m trying to make. Do you see it? We have been taught to be dishonest about our dehumanization, because vulnerability is death. Only the strong survive, the weak perish, and therefore, to show any kind of fragility or frailty, to tell anyone how wounded and scarred you really are — that is a mistake. Who knows how they might reject you, scorn you, mock you, or hurt you all over again? And so on we go, being dishonest about our dehumanization. But the only result of being chronically, perpetually, habitually dishonest about the searing pain of our own dehumanization, how much it hurts, how little and small it makes us feel to be worthless commodities with no dignity or meaning or purpose or worth or truth… is…that we grow even more dehumanized.

Enough of us are caught in this vicious cycle, anyways, that terrible things like concentration camps and kids in cages are happening again, all over the world, from America to China to India now. Banality becomes evil precisely and exactly when you and I stay silent to each other about our own dehumanization.

That is why Orwell wrote 1984. It wasn’t really about surveillance. The point was love. It’s about a society which has lost it’s capacity to love, because nobody is honest with anyone else, hence the constant theme of everything meaning its opposite — and when Winston Smith falls in love with Julia, he begins to understand all that. Love gives him the chance to be honest about his dehumanization — and now he feels the obligation, the duty, to act like a human being. He fails. And his failure teaches us just how epic and improbable and difficult the challenge of retaining one’s humanity really is.

We live in that kind of age now, my friends. The age that minds like Orwell and Arendt warned us about. But we don’t heed their warnings enough — because we don’t quite fully understand what they meant. They meant something like this. When we consent and assent to our own dehumanization — anything becomes possible, to the point that evil becomes banal, just like it has now. In ages like this, when technology seduces us with a glittering lure, when poverty tears at us, when inequality taunts us — all those forces gently whisper to us — and sometimes scream at us: “You are not a human being anymore! What was the point of ever being one? Where did it get you? What reward was there, for these foolish, pointless things called empathy, truth, courage, defiance, wisdom, love? Weren’t you only ever beaten for them and by them? Aren’t they the very things which ruined you? Give up on your humanity, friend, before it is too late. You are a thing of teeth and claws. What else will satisfy that aching hunger in you?”

It is at that moment, my friends, that we choose. Not just for ourselves. But for the world. For the future. For history. For life and death and time and dust. Let us then make the choice that the trees have always gently whispered to us, and the stars have always glittered for.

Umair

January 2020