More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Whereas in a society where human relationships are impoverished and toxic, life will be difficult and unbearable, however “advanced” such society may be in terms of mechanical-technological evolutions.
This drug that deformed thousands of babies and destroyed thousands of lives wasn’t withdrawn from the market until 1969.
The first-generation of male offspring were at increased risk of nodules on the epididymis, while the second-generation of male offspring had a higher rate of ureteral abnormalities. Nobody knows if, and in which generation, the abnormalities caused by DES will cease to exist.
up to 90 percent of the effects of medical treatments can be attributed to psychological
factors. If this is correct, most medical treatments would more accurately be described as (unacknowledged) psychotherapy.
Humans have found themselves in a state of solitude, cut off from nature, and existing apart from social structures and connections, feeling powerless due to a deep sense of meaninglessness, living under clouds that are pregnant with an inconceivable, destructive potential, all while psychologically and materially depending on the happy few, whom he does not trust and with whom he cannot identify. It is this individual that Hannah Arendt named the atomized subject.
The child breathlessly fixates on the mother’s face and imitates the expressions that play on it; it listens with the closest attention to the sounds she makes and even with its earliest sobbing and crying already echoes the melody and tones of her speech.
life in the womb has predestined it to resonate with that specific voice.
The young child’s body gets “loaded” with a series of vibrations and tensions that become embedded in the deepest and finest fibers of its body. They form a kind of “body memory” that not only programs the function of the musculature, glands, nerves, and organs, but also predisposes the child to certain psychological conditions, or disorders.
This tension determines with which (social) phenomena one will resonate; it determines the frequencies to which one will be sensitive in later life.
They are connected with one another through a psychic membrane that transfers the slightest ripple in body and soul.
This complex phenomenon degrades when digitized.
“In digital interactions, our minds are tricked into believing that we are together, but our bodies know that we are not; what’s so exhausting about digital conversations is being constantly in the presence of the other person’s absence.”13
Digitalization dehumanizes a conversation.
In such a situation, anyone can sense that the digital wall will not be scalable for the words in which the drama seeks its expression.
Unless there really isn’t any other possibility, offering a digital conversation in such a situation seems indeed almost inhumane.
Uncertainty is the preeminent characteristic of human experience—no other animal is so haunted by doubt or plagued by existential questions—and this is especially true of our relationship to the Other.
In short, people feel psychologically safer and more comfortable behind a digital wall but pay a price for it with the loss of connectedness.
This brings us to a theme that will recur repeatedly in this book: The mechanization of the world causes man to lose
contact with his environment and become an atomized subject, the kind of subject in which Hannah Arendt recognized the essential ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
In such a case, the melodious echoes of the mother’s voice will no longer be reflected in her newborn’s cries. Instead, the baby will arrive in the world, already “socially adapted.”
Life itself can be defended only in terms of metaphor and poetry, yet these usually sound less loud than the monotonous droning of mechanistic arguments.
The fact that man and nature form a mystical unity and can exist in harmony is considered to be a romantic and unrealistic idea, even downright dangerous, considering the pressing issue of the climate change.
The triumphant music of the mechanistic ideology always contains a discordant note.
Why is mankind so hopelessly seduced by the mechanistic ideology? Partly because it’s under the influence of the following illusion: that one is able to remove the discomforts of existence without having to question oneself at all.
The prospect of an afterlife dwindled and was readily replaced by belief in an artificially created, mechanistic-scientific paradise.25
It is here that we, together with Hannah Arendt, situate the undercurrent of totalitarianism: a naive belief that a flawless, humanoid being and a utopian society can be produced from scientific knowledge.
The Nazi idea of creating a purebred superman based on eugenics and social Darwinism, and the Stalinist ideal of a proletarian society based on historical-materialism are prototypical examples, as is the current
rise of transhumanism.
When we hear about such ideologies, we like to believe that they are the products of deranged minds. This is a misconception. Plato, for example, found eugenics a commendabl...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
And the twentieth century taught us that this practice does indeed lead to certain “successes.”
As Hannah Arendt states, totalitarianism is ultimately the logical extension of a generalized obsession with science, the belief in an artificially created paradise:
“Science [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.”
a naive belief in the measurability of reality and the excessive use and misuse of data and statistics.
Until this recent crisis, societies were not primarily governed on the basis of numerical data. They were guided by stories, first by mythical and religious stories and later by political stories.
This is the way in which past societies went from bad to worse: stories – subjectivity – irrationality – poignant injustice – absurd horror.
When people see numbers, they believe them to be objects or facts.
This illusion blinds people to the nonetheless obvious truth that numbers are always relative and ambiguous, that they are constructed and produced from an ideologically—and subjectively—shaded story.
Something caused society to collectively continue reacting in the same, frenetic way, as if it were acting
out a pressing, psychological need. In chapter 6, we will discuss this
And a German study suggested that about half of the high mortality in ICUs during the first wave was due to mass intubation (ventilation).
And so we see that an entire society can completely ignore what is undoubtedly the most basic question in medicine: Are we sure that the cure is not worse than the disease?
this way, as a society, we are
mesmerized by an endless procession of numbers and never arrive at what really matters: an open debate about the subjective and ideological frameworks from which we interpret the numbers.
This is commonly referred to as the allegiance effect—the effect of a researcher’s loyalty to a particular theory.
The fanatical belief in the objectivity of measurements and numbers, which is typical of the mechanistic ideology, is not only unfounded, it is also dangerous.
Indeed, if you’re convinced that your own subjective fiction is reality, you will also think your reality is superior to the fiction of others. This is how we become convinced that our fiction can be imposed on the other by any possible means.
But in the meantime, these numbers are used over and over to impose the most far-reaching measures and to set aside all basic tenets of humanity:
and a fanatical ideological belief that justifies deception and manipulation and ultimately transgresses all ethical boundaries.
We will see that the flight into false security is a logical consequence of the psychological inability to deal with uncertainty and risk, an inability that has been building up in society for decades, perhaps even centuries.
