A bit of context for this post: I'd been cleaning our washing machine. Just cleaning it; not even "fixing" it. It suddenly occurred to me how little I know about how anything in my home works. Humiliating. I guess I wanted to be competent.
Oh! I had imagined you meant something like "the political and economic systems that make my life possible are at times messy, dull, or immoral. The idealized society that keeps me company in my head has found out about all this and I am humiliated."
I think if that I was the case I would have written "I am bored by how things work." Humiliation requires a more technical, material sort of messiness.
In a sense, I guess, I am humiliated by the messiness, dullness and, at times, immorality, of my own attitude to technology. It's a kind of laziness. But it's also kind of unavoidable since a Zen-like mastery of all our appliances just isn't feasible.
It's sort of like how torture can be humiliating at a serious existential level even though the situation is wholly out of the victim's control. The victim is forced into a corwardly posture (Orwell's torture scene in 1984 drives this point home.)
But we understand less about how the carrot works than the washing machine. And long before the washing machine, we were dependent on the carrot. And at least in the case of the washing machine, we can go further in remedying our ignorance. Maybe God is more to blame for our humiliation than civilization.
Here's how a carrot works: you plant the seed, it grows, you harvest. Then you eat it.
God made stuff that doesn't humiliate us. Thoughts of the washing machine humiliates me. It's science (man's work) that makes the carrot seem like a complicated machine we don't understand.
I am convinced that people back in the day would have felt less humiliated by things, but I wonder if they didn't feel more victimized by things, and if civilizations don't have to make trade-offs between feeling victimized and feeling humiliated
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What did you want to be, that now you're humiliated?
A bit of context for this post: I'd been cleaning our washing machine. Just cleaning it; not even "fixing" it. It suddenly occurred to me how little I know about how anything in my home works. Humiliating. I guess I wanted to be competent.
Oh! I had imagined you meant something like "the political and economic systems that make my life possible are at times messy, dull, or immoral. The idealized society that keeps me company in my head has found out about all this and I am humiliated."
I think if that I was the case I would have written "I am bored by how things work." Humiliation requires a more technical, material sort of messiness.
In a sense, I guess, I am humiliated by the messiness, dullness and, at times, immorality, of my own attitude to technology. It's a kind of laziness. But it's also kind of unavoidable since a Zen-like mastery of all our appliances just isn't feasible.
It's sort of like how torture can be humiliating at a serious existential level even though the situation is wholly out of the victim's control. The victim is forced into a corwardly posture (Orwell's torture scene in 1984 drives this point home.)
But we understand less about how the carrot works than the washing machine. And long before the washing machine, we were dependent on the carrot. And at least in the case of the washing machine, we can go further in remedying our ignorance. Maybe God is more to blame for our humiliation than civilization.
Here's how a carrot works: you plant the seed, it grows, you harvest. Then you eat it.
God made stuff that doesn't humiliate us. Thoughts of the washing machine humiliates me. It's science (man's work) that makes the carrot seem like a complicated machine we don't understand.
That is a good point.
I am convinced that people back in the day would have felt less humiliated by things, but I wonder if they didn't feel more victimized by things, and if civilizations don't have to make trade-offs between feeling victimized and feeling humiliated
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