When human beings look back on this age — yes, we’ll still be here — it will be remembered, I think, for a unique, bizarre, and gruesome phenomenon. One we can barely make out, and even if we do see, I’d bet we say to ourselves something like “no, that can’t really be happening. Can it?” I’m going to put it as simply and precisely as I can.

The world appears to be losing its mind, my friends. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I don’t mean it analogically. I mean it as literally as it can be meant. People are becoming what I’ll describe in this essay as “decivilized”. They are becoming something a little bit like staggering, hungry zombies. Something is regressing people back to a point where their worst, primal, animal impulses are being unleashed — unable to think, reason, use facts, hold evidence, perform logic, weigh consequences, judge truth, discern meaning, or cultivate a higher purpose than appetite, vengeance, and ruin. There appears to be something like a mental plague spreading around the world. Do you think I’m kidding? Then consider the following story.

In India, on reading WhatsApp rumours, villagers have begun to literally kill their neighbours. Why? Because they think people are…stealing children. Why? Because ethnic propaganda says they are. Wham! Mob killings. One after the other. But note what’s going on here. Nobody seems interested even slightly in the smallest way. In remotely interested in verifying or checking a single fact before they lynch people. They are human hair triggers — bang!! — who can be operated via remote control. Their minds are not working anymore. But doesn’t that sound precisely more or like the fascist and extremist movements rising across the globe — only maybe sans the lynching? Isn’t the rest of the story the same — the propaganda, the alternate reality, the hair-trigger, the snapping, the mob attacking?

And yet think back just ten or twenty years. Wouldn’t you think people who began killing their neighbours because…some random person they didn’t even know said their neighbors were going to stealing their children…had lost their bloody marbles? That something had snapped apart their minds? So why is it different now?

Hence, in this little story, we see the two factors behind what I can only describe as a growing global epidemic of mental breakdown, revealed precisely. (I’ll caution, though, that I don’t mean this in the sense of “mental illness” — but of “mental disorder”: this is a spectrum, and if you ask me behaviour like the above is obviously and profoundly disordered, imbalanced, jumbled, out of proportion, but not “ill”, which often raises questions of a genetic component.)

The first force is technology — social media, the internet, smartphones, and so on, all put together. Now, if we don’t like reality — we can simply choose whatever reality suits our preconceptions and needs and wants. Those people aren’t waiting for the bus — they’re dangerous child kidnappers. Get them! Those little Mexican babies are monsters, who might infect a whole nation with their laziness and dirtiness and slovenliness. Put them in camps! Do you see what I mean?

But why is that? The reason is that social media lets us dehumanize people costlessly, frictionlessly, with ease — tap, I erased you, click, I destroyed you. It is probably the single greatest dehumanizing mechanism in the history of the world, so far as I can see. Before, to dehumanize someone, they had to be labelled, institutionally “processed”, and so on. Their material existence had to be altered. But thanks to technology, dehumanizing people is automatic routine, algorithmic, a swipe away. And it is a feature, not a bug — because it is profitable, too.

When I look at you, on my smartphone, what do I see? Well, I see a “what”, not a “who.” I don’t see a person, do I? I see an object. The output of an algorithm. Squeezed into a few lines of text and a picture. It is the crudest representation of the fullness of a human being — cruder even than a medieval portrait — and by reducing people to that, dehumanizing them has never been easier. You don’t see their pain. You don’t see their suffering. You just see the parts of them you want to hate. They’re a dirty liberal! He’s a filthy immigrant! Do you see what I mean? The wholeness of a person has been excised away. I only see you as something to revere — or to loathe. I am not seeing a person — I am seeing a monster or an idol. But both are fearsome things.

In that sense, technology has become a great decivilizing force today. Perhaps the greatest and strongest in history. What do I mean by “decivilizing force”?

I mean that the primary task of this thing we call “civilization” is to civilize us. And it spends the better part of our youth trying to do just that. It takes a great, great deal of investment — time, attention, nurturing, education, energy, ideas — to civilize a human being. They must be taught history, literature, art, science, and so forth. We’ve built whole institutions to do it — schools, colleges, universities, academies, athletics, contests, and so on. And these things must all fit together — so that a person understands the purpose of “civilization” — that we are here, at our best, to lift one another up, and though we will often fail, and give in to our own selfishness, greed, and folly, for precisely that reason, a life of meaning, purpose, and fulfillment comes from our virtues, never from our vices, from construction, not from destruction. All that we call the task of “civilization”, to “civilize” someone, and when they understand all the above, they have been “civilized.”

We don’t kill our neighbours if we are civilized people. And so the simple fact that more and more of us are hungry to kill our neighbours — or at least quite happy to watch as they are threatened with violence, harm, and abuse — tells us we that there is a very real, very swift, process of decivilizing happening. A very large scale. A global one. At work in India as much as it is America, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Turkey.

So there I am, a person whom society has worked hard to civilize. And then along comes technology. Wham! It can undo all that in the blink of an eye. I watch bizarre, inane YouTube videos, I listen to strange, unhinged podcasts. The work of years — down the drain in…a year, a month, a week, who knows? We haven’t studied it — but the real world results are obvious to see. Technology is beginning to undo the civilizing work that institutions do. What is learned painstakingly in a school over decades is unlearned now by technology in a flash. The earth is flat! I don’t need vaccines! Fascism is democracy! Freedom is my right to abuse and demean you! Let’s go get those baby-smugglers! And so on. Do you see what I mean by “decivilizing force” now?

(I am beginning to think that these things cannot coexist. Technology — of this kind, unregulated, unmonitored, left to its own ends — and civilization. Because civilization is never much wanted by those it is meant for. How many kids enjoy going to school every day? Who really loves going to college? Maybe some of us — nerds, like me and you. But the average person, my friends, does not. And now we are building a world where they the choice to never really be civilized at all. To believe all the foolish things that they want.

No, it is not really your “right” to believe any foolish thing you want. Beliefs, too, exist only within boundaries. If you believe things which will lead to destructive actions, then society rightly polices you. It does for terrorists, doesn’t it? In fact, if we think about it, society polices many kinds of beliefs — there are many things which, said in many places, will earn you a swift visit from local law enforcement. So the “right” to “believe what you want” is not absolute — nor should it be, precisely because to be a civilized person does not mean we “believe whatever we want”. It means we believe in what is genuinely good for us, as human beings, in a non-trivial sense. And yet the beliefs that the decivilized have come to hold are not really being “chosen” by them at all. In fact, they are not really “beliefs”, at all, in the genuine sense because they have not been chosen. What are they?)

The decivilized have begun to believe in delusions. Delusions are fantasies — things which give us a kind of pleasure. Which we retreat into because they defend us against a reality which is too painful to bear.

And that brings to me second decivilizing force: imploding capitalism. What did capitalism do, in a nutshell? It promised the average prole a life of glittering wealth, fortune, and riches — in which he’d forever get richer. And yet that was just a con game, a marketing trick — it never had any interest in making him richer. Why would it? Capitalism exists to make capitalists richer. And so the proles was promised great wealth, growing forever — but what he has got is less, shrinking forever.

Wouldn’t you find that too painful a reality to face? That you’d been had? Hoodwinked? Conned out of the truest things that you had — your energy, time, creativity, affiliation, admiration? You’d feel like something less than a fool if you admitted it to yourself. A mark. A simpleton. A nobody. You would come to the shattering realization that you had only ever been the instrument of your own oppression. And in that way, your life would hold no meaning. It would hold purpose. And it would no worth, either. It would have no identity. You would be a void — it would have been better if you had never existed at all. But that is a thought, if it is held too long, destroys all psychological functioning.

A mind cannot bear that level of tension, of inner pain. At least not unless it is a very, very strong one and a very, very wise one. The average mind, weary and wounded by capitalism, to begin with, can scarcely hold that thought, without shattering like glass. And so it doesn’t. It rejects that thought because it is a thought which cannot be held without breaking the mind wide open. And so it must be deflected, as quickly and sharply as possible.

Hence, people turn to delusions. The giveaway is that they always blame those less powerful for their problems — that is exactly what we’d expect to see if the dynamics above were true, that their minds couldn’t bear the reality. Otherwise, they’d be enraged at those who’d left them in the state of contradiction — capitalists, mostly. But they are not. The Indian villager murders his neighbour. German Neo-Nazis beat up refugees — they don’t attack industrialists. The Trumpist cheers when little Mexican babies’ minds are destroyed, as they are separated from their mothers.

The delusion is directed at those who the deluded can destroy. Why? Because that way, they can take what capitalism has promised them, only by force: a feeling of power, a sense of strength, the rush of superiority and status at long last. Now he has a glimmer of all that burning, delirious pleasure capitalism promised him — and it has only cost the life of an unperson. And what does such a life matter, anyways?

Delusion has become destruction thanks to decivilization. The twin forces of implosive capitalism and cheap information have broken people’s minds apart — capitalism making reality too painful to face, technology giving them the power to create delusions, which go right back to satisfy the desires capitalism has told people must be satisfied, but will never satisfy itself. What does that leave people doing? Destroying each other, for the status, power, and superiority they were promised.

Bang! Wave after wave of violence, ugliness, obscenity — fascism, authoritarianism, extremism, lynching, concentration camps — rippling around the globe. What is really happening is that people are losing their minds. Literally, not metaphorically or analogically. Together, imploding capitalism and cheap information have driven them quite mad. They have lost contact with reality. They appear utterly incapable of handling reality — facing it, integrating it into their psyches. There appears to be an almost complete and absolute conflict between such people’s minds, and what is real. Climate change is a hoax! Have you thought about what that really means? It means: I need pleasure from superiority over you so badly, that I’ll sacrifice the whole planet to get it. And so on.

The decivilized must have what they have been told they need and deserve — but have been thwarted from having, by the very same force, which is capitalism — and they will do anything, anything at all, from murdering their neighbours, to burning down their democracies, attain it.

Such people are operating on a primal level now, not an adult level, of functioning. They are all impulse, pure need, with no brakes, far below the level of reasoned thought. They are simply not there in a cognitive or emotional sense. There is just a void, and teeth.

If you think I am likening the decivilized to zombies, you are right. They are, poor things, dangerous things, the zombies predatory capitalism made — what remains after capitalism has eaten right through a person’s mind, and only a staggering, lurching shell is left. That shell is all appetite — purely primal — and it will do anything to be fed. Including destroying every last thing the person that used to be the shell once cherished, prized, and loved, just so they can feel, at long last, the glittering pleasure capitalism once promised them, instead of the searing pain it delivered instead.

Umair

September 2018