DANGER: The Dehumanization of Humanity

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.—Thomas Sowell

It is far easier to de-humanize than it is to re-humanize. Like it’s way easier to smash a clock than it is to make one or to destroy a building than it is to build one. Anybody who regrettably watched the World Trade Center buildings come tumbling down in a matter of seconds might not fully appreciate how hard they were to build. My neighbor did, because he spent several years of his life making truck runs from a quarry in Pennsylvania to downtown Manhattan with beautiful gigantic slabs of symmetrically matched marble for the glorious light-filled lobbies and mezzanines—all reduced to rubble by pure misguided evil. And that was just him helping with the lobby walls.

Multiply that work times billions over centuries and you start to understand what goes into creating our modern civilization. It’s almost impossible to comprehend the level of sophistication and advancement in every human endeavor that is required to realize our existing world. It’s not just truck runs, it’s entire lives in pursuit of hard-earned achievement, education, knowledge, skills, passed on secrets, moral values and much more over generations. If ChatGPT is trained on trillions of words from the Internet, those words were trained on centuries of knowledge and experience far beyond that.

Each generation, not being destroyed nor corrupted, has an opportunity to build upon the shoulders of the last. Therefor we might progress and build upon a solid foundation of human enterprise and such things as computers could be invented, software to run them and new materials created and medical cures discovered on and on, including learning from the past and correcting our mistakes.

If however at some point in history, the people become dull-minded or lazy and refuse to carry the torch or are corrupted to be uninterested or discouraged in knowledge and history or are turned into sheep where everything is done for them (or to them), then there is a danger that the chain can be broken. Before long, not enough people understand how things work or got to be the way they are, or even worse, don’t care, and the little barbarians basically take over and a “dark age” ensues.