On Feb 6, 2018 11:54 AM, "Srini RamaKrishnan" <[email protected]> wrote:
On Feb 6, 2018 8:57 AM, [...] Stalin would consign to Siberia those who didn't believe in communism. Today, the banks will have us living under the bridge, if we are lucky, if we don't believe in capitalism. I tend to wonder about the little things that say a lot. When two strangers are introduced to each other at a party by the host, it's almost a rule that they are introduced by their profession, by their status or their wealth or education. I can understand that sort of protocol having value in a business setting, which is by design transactional, but why in a picnic or in someone's living room. This is purely the logic of the head. The heart whereas mourns the lost innocence - every adult was once a child who didn't care if his playmate in the park was well accomplished. Globalisation and the technology that aids it makes us all strangers to each other, constantly sizing up others. There's almost no room for the heart, and I am saddened by this. Capitalism with compassion does increasingly exist, where companies develop something resembling a conscience when their bottomline is sufficiently strong. However it's an after thought that is preferably displayed in the glare of the media. For humans it's who they are even when no one is looking. Machines ought not to rule men. The logic of the banks, the corporations, the governments are powered by the computers that have no room for the heart. Yet this heartless logic bites men. Currency lends itself easily to two decimal places, Bitcoin has an almost unlimited fractional capacity. We are only learning to divide better, not to unite. With the advance of technology men are being made in its fashion, guests at a party behaving like firewalls. I heard second hand about a retired government official who was denied his pension because his fingerprints didn't match the Aadhaar dataset. He had banked in the same branch for years, the manager knew him, his colleagues knew him, but none could help for the computer didn't know him. Kindness, compassion and all that heart stuff obviously has a place in human interactions. However when we replace humans with computers in the pursuit of ever bigger ambitions we risk losing what it means to be human. Another quote that stuck in my mind seems appropriate here, growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
