Interesting humanist article

 "Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms." - Fyodor Dostoevsky

 There is a great article over at Palladium Magazine about how modern societies are organized, and our unfortunate position in them.  It's a long and meandering article, but a couple of sentences stood out.  I'll quote them below, because they are very much on-point.  

The title of the article is "You Won't Survive as Human Capital" - and the emphasis of the article is how we are all basically tools to be used up, worn out, and tossed on the old broken tool pile at the end of our usefulness to our society, employer, whatever.  There's a great deal of truth to that point of view.  Anyway, on to the quotes.

 "You and I operate as human capital: an input in the process of social reproduction, rather than its master or even its goal. Much of our life from childhood onward is dedicated to proving our value within this paradigm. No one living today is responsible for this mode of life. Some people more directly enforce its norms, a few try to resist them, and most go along as best they can.

Our talents and abilities are quantified by large organizations like state bureaucracies and private corporations. The intangible aspects of our personalities that we think motivate our decisions—loves, hates, desires, fears—are conditioned in organized ways. These organizations only rarely answer to particular people, but rather to their own and often seemingly mysterious internal logic.

We all know this isn’t quite right, yet most of the world has staked out its existence on this logic. The places that don’t are increasingly rare in a world where even the Taliban of Afghanistan submit to the advantages of a professional bureaucracy. No one has yet come upon a different material logic to out-compete it.

Some of the shortcomings of the underwriting assumptions are becoming clearer as we travel deeper into the twenty-first century. One of the most important is reproduction: having children has become an inconvenient and inefficient trade-off. Many of our friends and relatives will never do so. No known form of natalism has been able to reverse the great dying taking place within advanced societies. Unable to exist without its human substrate, yet also unable to sustain it, this technocratic paradigm has a fatal contradiction within it: despite its hegemony, it is incompatible with life."

 And later on:

"For now, the human element is still the load-bearing one. As members of that element, you and I will only come out the other side by prioritizing our own success in biological and material terms over our usefulness to others as human capital."

And this:

"Modern states view their populations as human capital fully replaceable first by immigration, and then eventually by technology."

Once you think about it that way, the society we find ourselves living in is pretty cold and bizarre...