Work In Crisis: Part 1

A short series, In Memoriam Mike Cooley who died in September 2020

The Most Holy Habits of Men

Work, which holds humanity and its societies together, is under threat, partly due to technology and who controls it, but also because we have forgotten that work is not dispensable.

‘We have become far too smart scientifically to survive much longer without wisdom.’

— Mike Cooley, The Myth of the Moral Neutrality of Technology

‘Once workers were not slaves. They worked. They nurtured an honour, absolutely, as befits an honour: the leg of a chair had to be well made. It was natural, understood. It was supremacy. It did not need to be well made in order to get paid, or to be made in proportion to how much one was paid. It did not need to be well made for the owner, nor for the experts, nor for the owner’s clients. It needed to be well made for itself, in itself, in its own way. A tradition that came from, went back to the depths of, the human race; a history, an absolute, an honour required that the chair leg be well made: And every part of the chair that was not visible was made with the same perfection as the parts that were visible. According to the same principle as cathedrals…  All honours came together in this single honour. A decency and a fineness of language. A respect for the home. A sense of respect, of every respect, of the very essence of respect. A constant, so to speak, ceremony. Then again, the home was still often confused with the workshop, and the honour of the home and the honour of the workshop were the same honour. It was the honour of the same place. What has become of all this? Everything after waking up was a rhythm and a ritual and a ceremony. Every deed was an event; consecrated. Everything was a tradition, a teaching; all things had their own inner relationship, they comprised the most holy habit. Everything was lifting oneself, and praying, all day: sleep and waking, work and measured repose, bed and table, soup and meat, house and garden, door and street, courtyard and stairway, and bowls on the dinner table.’

 — Charles Péguy, L’Argent

Work is in trouble, and with it those for whom work is a central and vital aspect of their humanity and existence, which is to say just about everybody. In truth, most of us cannot imagine a world in which we would not need or be able to work. We think we would, that we would enjoy more leisure, more consumption, but wiser heads have already tumbled to the idea that these flimsy pleasures tend to function best when sandwiched between periods of intense and worthwhile working. The extract from Péguy, reproduced above, was written less than half-a-century after Karl Marx issued his stern warnings about the ominous drifts in the human workplace in Das Kapital.  Péguy, by then a Christian, composed in effect a requiem for a lost world of unity around work, home, food. This was the world that had been rudely interrupted by the first and second industrial revolutions — first coal, then gas — and which had been subjected to remorseless ideological critique by Marx. What this passage conveys is the intimate connection between work and human existence, the sense that they are not separate and cannot be disconnected without enormous cost to the human quotient. 

Questions of work and its future have been ignored in our culture, and yet not. The literature is all there, back to Marx and before, outlining the dangers implicit in the path the human race was on, the greater part of itself handing over control of its energies, creativities and livelihoods to a minority of people with access to investment capital. But little enough of this has made an impression on culture of the present, even as the situation grows daily more urgent. Precisely the power over communication maintained by the minority of controllers, together with their careful nurturing of ideologies to surround markets and technologies, have constructed barricades around the subject beyond which only those willing to be described as Luddites dare to tread. 

While the ‘technologisation’ of life may have made life more comfortable, it has also impoverished us in terms of knowledge, relationships, morality, openness to the meaning of things. Without a strong and deep daily experience of the tactile, man struggles to ‘belong’ to the world and to others. Work today makes the human operate without true knowledge, to become a button-pusher, and therefore no higher than a part of the machine, and the resulting demise of knowledge, sensual reason and moral orientation pushes us to emotionality, unreason and impulsiveness, which is when we begin to fall apart from one another and away from reality.

While the speed of virtualisation grows exponentially, our collective ethical capacity seems to be slowing down. As we lose touch with the concrete world and the intensity of its challenges and enchantments, we dismantle the frame of alignment that sustained not just the moral order but the capacity of reality to convey meanings we could hold to. By sidelining God, and the idea of gods, we have rendered ourselves as though mechanistic organisms, and at the same time reduced the very ‘equations’ of human existence and functioning so that we can no longer see or keep account of shifts in responsibility arising from ‘progress’. The secular-atheist society has no way of mitigating or discounting great calamities in the way that religious societies were able to. 

At the same time, work in our modern cultures has become much degraded, an activity oddly regarded as both an entitlement and an imposition. We claim for ourselves the ‘right’ to work, and yet appear to resent the demands work makes on our time, energy and freedom. Many of us no more than struggle out of bed, slouch towards our places of employment, and remain there for the minimum hours, all the time watching the clock, listening for the signal of release. On the radio, the disc-jockey on the piped radio station keeps us going with the promise of the weekend, which seems to start on Wednesday and continue, at least as a happy memory, until Tuesday.

There is something to consider here about our understanding of what it means to be free. In our conventional idea of freedom, life is always moving ahead of us, out of the present moment towards something else, some other, future moment, a moment that resonates with a promise lacking in the instant one. The demands of this present moment, therefore, are something to be endured, tolerated, moved through. Somehow, the desiring mechanism of the human has switched to ‘project’ — project as verb — skimming over the moment that actually exists and seeking its satisfaction and justification somewhere in the future — ‘going forward’. Our economic systems tend to mimic this tendency, or perhaps it is a refraction of their logic. They offer us a reward for our labour which is only marginally a means of subsistence or living — really, it is a system of compensation for the ‘inconvenience’ we have suffered by virtue of having our energies diverted from something called ‘life’ or ‘being’, to something called ‘work’. And, even as we project ourselves forward in anticipation of something better, we recoil in fear of that diverting future and seek to store up our security against its dangers.

Pope John Paul, in his 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens reminds us that work and life are not opposites, but intimately connected if not actually coterminous. Man’s duty to subdue the earth is not an objective assignment only: man is also the subject of this mission. The call to engage in the actions amounting to work is a directive to man to realise his humanity, ‘to fulfil the calling to be a person that is his by reason of his very humanity’. John Paul reminds us that Jesus, in the years He spent among us, devoted much of His time to manual work at the carpenter's bench. ‘This circumstance constitutes in itself the most eloquent “Gospel of work”, showing that the basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person. The sources of the dignity of work are to be sought primarily in the subjective dimension, not in the objective one.’

What this means is that the purpose of work is not its apparent object but the functioning of the human person who performs the task, no matter what it is. It also means that the classification and differentiation of work into categories relating to either the category of activity or its reward is beside the point. Work is good for man; it corresponds to his dignity. The fact that it can be used to enslave or exploit men should not distract us from its fundamental essence as a good. ‘Work is a good thing for man – a good thing for his humanity’, writes John Paul, ‘because through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also achieves fulfilment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes “more a human being”.’ Work is for man; man is not ‘for work’.

But man becomes more and more anxious about the future he can’t stop thinking about, and this anxiety seems to increase in tandem with his apparent success in meeting the challenge to ‘subdue the earth’. Something about the nature of work, as it is organised in the modern world, appears to tyrannise man more often than fulfil him. The rise of individualism and increasing specialisation in the workplace means that workers have but a diminishing understanding of their place in the general picture, of what their colleagues are doing up along the production line: each function is discrete and self-justifying, leaving each worker with the feeling that he is unimportant and dispensable — and therefore less than completely human. For many, too, the blurring of boundaries between traditional male/female roles leads to increasing confusion. The individual man/woman, finds more and more that work is a source of stress and dissatisfaction. In some respects, as John Paul and others remind us, this has arisen because man has allowed the technologies which were ostensibly developed to relieve us of the tedium of work to steal also some of the intrinsic satisfactions which work holds out. In some instances, he outlines, ‘technology can cease to be man’s ally and become almost his enemy, as when the mechanisation of work “supplants” him, taking away all personal satisfaction and the incentive to creativity and responsibility, when it deprives many workers of their previous employment, or when, through exalting the machine, it reduces man to the status of its slave.’ Work has been reduced to something onerous or at best ‘useful’: a means to a collective end rather than a personal journey for each worker.

It is interesting that these issues appear have a capacity to unite figures from across the ideological spectrum. A year before the publication of Laborem Exercens, Mike Cooley, a Marxist, lifelong trade unionist, technological philosopher and computer designer — born in Tuam, Co Galway — advanced an argument remarkably similar in substance to John Paul II’s in his book Architect or Bee? He worried that knowledge, which previously made up a man’s trade livelihood and meaning, was becoming trapped inside machines, where only a privileged few had access to it, and then only on a highly dedicated, specialised and need-to-know basis. 

Years before, Cooley had worked with Japanese computer manufacturers, when Japan was at the forefront of the technological revolution., developing some of the earlier portable computers. His concern was always to create ‘human-centred’ machines, i.e. ones that would respect and nurture the creativity, intuition and dreaming of the human person. A narrowly defined view of the machine, he maintained, was causing us to create technologies which not merely usurp the creative impulses of human beings but actually truncate our potential for further progress. He argued for the development of an approach to technology, systems and language which would enhance rather than limit the imaginative input of human beings. 

For a time, many years ago, I was in regular contact with Mike, and wrote about him several times in my Irish Times column and some of my books, in particular Race of Angels (1994) and Every Day Like Sunday (1995). When last I spoke to Mike, in the mid-1990s, he was concerned that something new was happening, that we were not merely building machines that both pilfered and stifled our creativity, but that human beings might, in their increasing dependence on technology, be blocking themselves off from further innovation and creativity.

Last week, on belatedly learning of Mike’s death last September, I wrote here describing an incident Mike had related to me from his childhood, in which he had acquired what would be one of the key insights of his working life. 

The incident occurred when he had gone with his father to a stonemason in his hometown, Tuam, to commission a ‘monument’ for the grave of his grandmother. Mike recalled the way the stonemason conveyed to his father the various options available to him: stretching his arms out to mimic an angel, joining his hands and looking joyously upwards, then looking sorrowfully downwards towards the ground, and so forth. The stonemason also described the process by which the angel would emerge from the stone, limb by limb, and invited the child Mike to come round and monitor the process every few days. Mike also described to me how, in designing computers for manufacturing systems in Japan, he has used the conceptual framework he had acquired that day in the stonemason’s workshop.  

Cooley’s way of describing things can reads as ‘poetic’ or antiquated now, just four decades since he wrote Architect or Bee? But the kernels of his thinking remain vital to the present moment. 

As an example of what was happening to work process under the cosh of a particular form of technology, he posited the very plausible notion that the skill of draughtsmanship was just one of the myriad human functions under threat from the computer. In the past, the draughtsman had been the centre of design activity: ‘He could design a component, draw it, stress it out, specify the material for it and the lubrication required.’ Not only had these functions been separated and vested in technology, but each one of them had been individually imprisoned in the machine.

‘What the draughtsman now does,’ he wrote, ‘is work on the digitiser and input the material through the graticule or teletype. An exact reading is set of the length of each line, the tolerance and other details. The design comes out as a tape which is expanded in the computer, after which it operates some piece of equipment such as a jig-borer or a continuous path-milling machine. After this the equipment itself will do the inspecting.’ In the past, he argued, a skilled tradesman had a tacit understanding of such disciplines as mathematics and mechanics. However, ‘more and more, that knowledge had been abstracted away from the labour process and has been rarefied into mathematical functions.’

Mike Cooley was certainly not a Luddite. His argument was never anti-technological, but rather a call for different forms of, and uses for, technology in the workplace. Were it not already far too late in the day for such nonsense, any of the usual knee-jerk arguments arising from the ideological force field constructed to protect this area from scrutiny — the suggestion, for instance that the thrust of his argument is such as to wish to impede ‘progress’ — simply will not wash.

The effect of technology, as Cooley illustrates, is multi-layered. In the first instance, of course, it destroys work, and also dehumanises what work remains. The general thrust of these processes is to reinforce the power of elites over the majority, and of systems over the individual.

When I last spoke at length to Mike Cooley in the 1990s, he was becoming increasingly concerned at the direction man had taken in the pursuit of a technological future. He maintained that a society’s technology is an integral part of its politics, and was already concerned that, since the computer was in his view a means of asserting economic and political control, this would place enormous power in the laps of multinational corporations. All this has since become reality. 

His concern was not merely the loss of human skills, but the loss of what the human-centred development of human skills means in culture, science and human progress. Here, as elsewhere, man was becoming too clever for his own good, upgrading his tools but in doing so pulling the ladder up behind him. In losing the immediacy of the connection between the worker and the world, man was severing the tendons that connected his mind and muscularity to the ‘concrete’ world outside.  

‘Quite apart from the destruction of the creativity the worker used in doing the job,’ he argued in Architect or Bee?, ‘what must be of concern to all of us is where the next generation of skills is coming from. Skills which will need to be embodied in further levels of machines. The feel for the physical world about us is being lost due to the intervention of computerised equipment, and work is becoming an abstraction from the real world. In my view, profound problems face us in the coming years due to this process.’

Cooley painted a most intriguing picture of what a post-technological society might be like, writing of the ‘proletarianisation’ of society, firstly at the blue-collar, and later the white collar level. The patterns had already been established; advancing technology would merely accelerate things. Society would first of all become conditioned to accept a permanent pool of unemployed persons, and this deterrent would be used to squeeze more and more out of the dehumanised ‘machine appendages’ still in work. This, he recognised even then, had profound implications for work and for people, but equally so for society, for democracy and for the very future of the human species. 

A considerable factor to be contemplated, Cooley stressed, was the extent to which the exclusion of large numbers of people from the active interest in society provided by work would create an entirely different model of society, in which democracy would come increasingly under threat.

His purpose was to show that it was possible to design computers that did not steal from the person, but instead augmented the creativity of each one so that we become freer rather than more entrapped, become architects rather than worker bees. At that time, several decades ago, it seemed that there was still plenty of time. Now, after nearly a year of the Covid cult — unleashed precisely to accelerate the introduction of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Great Reset, Cooley’s warnings come home to roost with a vengeance. 

The worst thing about the corruption of the cathedral media is not that they lie from morning till night; it is that they never tell the truth anymore. There is a difference: media have a responsibility, of course, not to lie; that is obvious and fundamental. They have been betraying their public contract in this regard for some time, but especially so since the start of the ‘pandemic’ in March 2020. But far worse than that is that they have not been telling the truth, which is actually their primary duty to the public. They have been telling us lies about what is happening in one corner of reality and, not coincidentally, refusing to tell us what is happening elsewhere. Conjurers call this ‘misdirection’.

‘The Great Reset’ is one heading in which this has been abundantly true. At least half of the time, the mockingbird media tell their readers, viewers and listeners that the Great Reset is a ‘conspiracy theory’. Most of the rest of the time they do not mention it at all. Yet, from time to time, articles have appeared which seemed to suggest that it is, after all, a serious matter. In November 2020, Time magazine devoted an entire issue to the subject, under a subhead that referred to how the ‘pandemic’ has provided ‘a unique opportunity to think about the kind of future we want’ and to ‘share ideas for how to transform the way we live and work.’

One implication of this was that the Great Reset was being launched in response to the Covid episode. But anyone who had had an ear to the ground had been aware that the Great Reset had been in preparation for several years, if not decades. The Time special edition went big on Klaus Schwab, the German professor who founded the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 1971 and ‘has been gathering heads of state, billionaires, and heads of big business’ yearly to discuss ‘economical and governance issues’, to ‘transform economies and societies’, to establish ‘common world rules to supersede national sovereign decisions’, and ‘promote nondiscrimination’. So now, several months into the Covid ‘pandemic’, the WEF was flashing its hand to see who might salute. The Time advertorial feature informed readers that the timing of the Great Reset had to do with addressing ‘an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis’, so as to ‘improve the state of the world.’

Far from this being a novel concept, Schwab had already published three books on the topic, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (2016), Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (2018), and COVID-19: The Great Reset(2020). In these works, Schwab leaves us in no doubt that the aim of the Great Reset is to turn the world upside down. 

In 2020, anxious not to allow a good crisis to go to waste, Klaus had emerged with a lightbulb over his head, as though the idea of the Great Reset had just occurred to him, warning that the crisis had exposed that ‘our old systems are not fit anymore for the 21st century’ and ‘laid bare the fundamental lack of social cohesion, fairness, inclusion, and equality’. Yes, but was Covid not supposed to be some kind of virus? Echo answered ‘virus?’ and Klaus went on to declare that this was the ‘historical moment, the time, not only to fight the virus but to shape the system’ for the post Covid era. ‘In short,’ he concluded, ‘we need a Great Reset!’

The World Bank website has for some time referred to the ‘Covid project’, which it informs interested parties will conclude in . . . March 2025. 

The Great Reset ‘project’ will replace what we call capitalism with something called ‘Stakeholder Capitalism’, which will bypass national sovereignty in favour of a One World Government under the WEF,  the UN and the Party of Davos. This will be, in substance and effect, a post-democratic dispensation, predicated on the needs and desires of corporations rather than the soon-to-be-obsolete concept of ‘the people’, and monitored and policed by Chinese-style surveillance systems.  As the Schwab rhetoric suggests, the programme of the Great Reset will be defined by Woke doctrines and Green dogmas, but inside this velvetish glove will be a fist of iron. In effect, the system of governance (no longer ‘government’ with its aftertaste of representative democracy) will be a mixture of Chinese communism and Mussolini-style fascism. The ‘stakeholder’s will be the elite, wealthy corporatists who, in return for the deliverance to them of the world, will subsidise the nouveau nomenklatura of the post-Covid project era, who will run the Brave New World in accordance with their demands. The new dispensation will be administered by Big Tech and Big Data, using systems of ‘social credit’ developed in partnership between Big Tech and the Chinese Communist Party: intensive surveillance of the most intimate realms; biometric ID systems; digitalised right-to-travel papers; health, conduct and liquidity passports; and punitive internal banishment for holdouts and dissenters. 

What awaits us, unless we awake, is a kind of neo-fuedal dystopia, as outlined in my article, ‘A Nouveau Aristocracy?’, in which I reviewed the recently published book by Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the global Middle Class (Encounter Books). 

Kotkin’s analysis swerves scarily close to Schwab’s, though without mentioning him or it, and Kotkin’s tone is cautionary. I summarised: 

‘The future of the West, according to Kotkin’s persuasive analysis, will include the collapse of the nation state, the virtual eradication of family homes, the elimination of most paid work, the emergence of new caste systems and gated cities, the decline of sexual activity, the explosion of loneliness, creeping censorship arising from the increasing leftward tilt of academia and media, the exponential growth of state power and authoritarianism, and the return to nature of vast swathes of the cultivated world. . . He describes a world increasingly in the grip of tech oligarchs hiding behind wokist slogans to further a deeply reactionary power structure, one that, if allowed to continue, will bury democracy and make of the vast majority of non-trillionaire humans a new underclass of chattel-less serfs. The new oligarchs are served by a secondary class Kotkin calls the ‘clerisy’, mainly the buffer layer of ‘experts’ and mediators like journalists and academics, who, in return for crumbs from the oligarchic tables, will provide the new aristocracy with ideological air-cover. The ranks of this clerisy are dotted, bizarrely, with refugees from traditional leftism, unable to figure out why they have been caught offside by history, and mostly not that bothered to find out; where once they railed against the capitalist exploiter, now they bow down before his successor, the baseball-capped, T-shirted geek who spouts communitarian slogans while looting and ransacking everything of value in the world that is not nailed down. The core of this ideology is the hoax of progressivism, really no more than a smokescreen to conceal the studied further enrichment of the already obscenely wealthy, a Trojan horse to take the oligarchs past the madding crowd at the gates of the New Jerusalem. The combination of globalist anti-values, technologised reality and postindustrial capitalist actuality will, Kotkin predicts, create conditions in which the majority will be reduced to subsistence living in hive cities, as the West moves inexorably towards a Chinese model of constant surveillance and social control schemes.’

‘Kotkin’s book hit the streets just as the Covid horror show was kicking off, and so reads from start to finish as an exercise in ignoring the elephant in the elevator. This might seem merely bad luck, except that, judging from his interviews, the author appears not to have noticed that the Time of Covid is, in effect, a pilot study for the now scheduled feudal ‘new normal’. He speaks of the virus as a dangerous bug that has randomly disrupted the world — seemingly oblivious that it represented the culmination of his analysis even while the print was still wet on his pages.’

The existence of the Great Reset plan is the reason why governments all around the world have sought to bury all dissent to their methods of dealing with the ‘pandemic’, and suppress any possibility of legal challenges to their actions. It is salutary as to grasping the rank state of our mainstream media that, far from shouting ‘Whaaat?!’ in response to the Time Klausplurge, they either hunkered down and said nothing or, in quite a few instances, continued with their ‘tin hat conspiracy’ nonsense. There has been some criticism of the Great Reset, but mainly in alternative media, online or in small-circulation magazines and the like. The legacy media, collapsing under pressure from the Big Tech giants who have prospered by preying on their content, had fallen victim to the Fourth Industrial Revolution even before it started, embracing the new technologies and products that were soon to suck the life from them,handing over their product to their competitors whose pittance they are now forced to accept in order to eke out another week of life. Wasting away, it is almost as if they wish to draw the rest of the world into the trap they’ve already blundered into.

The central question Mike Cooley raised was: Does human society have a point other than serving humanity with an aspiration to fairness? Or was civilisation created so that the obscenely rich could become obscenely richer, and all the rest go hang? From there, having arrived at the right answer (by no means certain these days), you can approach the other ethical questions, like: ‘Is it, firstly, ethical and, secondly, practicable, to place limits on the scientific reach of mankind?’ The answer to that question is probably No, which means that, before you even start the process, you need to have your ethical muscles in fairly good condition, which we don’t.

We should be in no doubt, Cooley warned, about the gravity of the crisis facing us. Our own cleverness as a species had led us to fashion technologies which liberate us from onerous physical tasks, but so successful have we become at conferring activities on machines that we have diminished ourselves to the point where we may not much longer be capable of invention at all. Part of what his analysis suggests is that the dynamic underlying technological progress may not be what it appears. The most fundamental hubris of which the human race has been guilty may be the belief that knowledge and competence are historically cumulative. In fact, as Cooley outlines, each new layer of knowledge supplants a previous one, pulling the ladder up on our awareness of how we got to this point. 

One way of putting it is to observe that mankind has followed a pattern of creating technologies in the likeness of himself, and then proceeded to see in such creations a precise mirror image of the human condition. There have been three broad stages in this evolution: machines that walk, machines that feed and machines that think. The first machines worked by clockwork: Man, by winding up a spring, gave life to something outside of himself. Art and culture began to mirror this, depicting human beings as machines, all sinews and cables and joints. The second stage was machines requiring an energy form like coal or wood. The steam engine, for instance, became active and independent once ‘fed’. We again began to see ourselves as such a machine. The third, perhaps final, stage is the thinking' machine. ‘You get the computer scientists,’ observed Cooley in one of our interviews, ‘saying things like, “The human brain is the only computer made by amateurs”, and, “Humans will have to accept their true place in the evolutionary hierarchy: animals, human beings and intelligent machines.”’

There is a high price to be paid, he warned, for this technological narcissism. ‘Once you begin to perceive machines as being capable of thinking, you begin to reflect on the human mind as a machine, and things like imagination and intuition go by the board. There's a kind of metamorphosis going on in which the created, the machine, is becoming more real, and the creators are becoming more artificial.’

Machine-centred thinking has spread like bushfire to other aspects of  human thought. We had already reached a stage, maintained Cooley in the 1990s, ‘where we can accept something as rational and scientific only if it displays three predominant characteristics: predictability, repeatability and mathematical quantifiability. And, by definition, this precludes intuition, subjective judgement, passive knowledge, dreams, imagination and purpose. And that, it seems to me, is going to be very damaging in the long term.’

This is the point of the concern to create human-centred systems: technologies which will preserve and enhance human nature as the core of progress. The kind of computer and other systems we have tended to create are fast, reliable, but non-creative. Mike pointed out that the human being, on the other hand was, in systems terms, slow, inconsistent and unreliable. The fact that humans are also highly creative is undervalued. What we have been doing is perceiving our own path of development as a species purely in terms of the One Best Way dictated by the developing machine and its controllers. Neither they nor we appear to understand that, if the human input into technology is curtailed, the machines too will stagnate.

Mike Cooley would explain that the dichotomy between right and wrong approaches can be seen as an undefined shape in the difference between analogic and digitalised views of the world — the capacity to see angels in a slab of stone or to see only the figures and measurements which describe its physical characteristics. 

As a species we seem to be coming to a cultural wall. Under the pressure of technology and convergence, the Tower of Babel collapses into a single heap of words, but coherence brings a shrinkage, rather than an expansion, of understanding. And we are all both perpetrators and victims. We lead ourselves to believe we are exercising choice and freedom, but the freedoms we choose are destroying more fundamental ones. So compromised are we by the consequences of accommodating ourselves to our own comforts that we have taken our eye off the place where the real action of human existence occurs — the place described by such an eclectic bunch of witness as Karl Marx, Charles Péguy, Pope John Paul II and Mike Cooley.

We are already being reset. By ‘we’ I mean us. The reset is happening in our heads, in our hearts, in our hopes and dreams. We are being taught not to have any expectations. We are being taught not to have any expectations, to be grateful for small clemencies from our new masters.  

We are also being prepared for obsolescence. We do not fit into the coming Brave New World, which will not be brave, and not new, and scarcely recognisable as the world.

In the second part of this series, we will ponder the possibility that Karl Marx may not have been wrong about everything.

Part II follows soon!