Inhuman Systems

We in the developed world inhabit a big contradiction. In theory, we have the richest, healthiest, and most technologically advanced societies in human history. Most of us have enough to eat. All but the poorest have the safest, most various and (if we are careful) the healthiest diets ever. We have access to wildly unprecedented amounts of information and entertainment—so much so that we have to restrict our children’s online access to make sure they get enough sleep and don’t obsess about the wrong things. We commute to work, in an hour or so, over distances that once took our forebears half a day to walk or ride. We can travel around the globe in less than a day. More of our people go to college and graduate school than ever before. We developed genome-based vaccines against Covid in record time, helping to shorten a dangerous pandemic.

So why aren’t we happy? Why are so many of us anxious, angry, depressed and fearful? Why are mental illness, drug overdoses and suicide exploding? Why are we Americans more divided politically than ever since our Civil War or War in Vietnam? Why can’t our pols agree on much of anything? Why is extremism running rampant among us? Why do we seem to be losing the thread of civilized society—that thin veneer of respect and civility without which even relentless growth in GDP can only gild our self-destruction?

I’m a progressive, but I’m also a capitalist, sort of. In the sometimes bloody battles and frequent economic trials of the last century, capitalism beat socialism in productivity and innovation virtually every time. (There is no real socialism in America today, only the bare word hurled as an epithet in political propaganda.)

But there’s capitalism and there’s capitalism. In the First Gilded Age, a century ago, unregulated capitalism put 25% of us out of work and threw us into the Great Depression, which led to the most horrible war in history. In our Second Gilded Age, still ongoing, capitalism has brought us the greatest inequality in human history: over a thousand billionaires richer and more powerful than ever was Genghis Khan, some living cheek by jowl with squalid homeless settlements in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the richest and most fortunate areas not just in our nation, but in human history.

So just like every good thing, capitalism needs management. It needs rules, guard rails, and restrictions. When it runs rampant, we get unpleasant, divisive and dangerous gilded ages. When it runs regulated, with strong rules and strong labor unions, it produces the promise of equality and the rapid social, educational and technological advancement that characterized our sixties through eighties in America. The Fed under Jay Powell is just now re-learning this valuable lesson with our banking system, as it re-discovers that bankers, driven by profit, do not always intelligenty regulate their own risk-taking.

But the ceaseless left-right struggle between ordinary people and our oligarchs is not the subject of this essay. With good will and care, we could figure that out and make the compromises needed to let our society become a well-oiled happiness machine. We used to be good at that: finding practical solutions to make everybody better off. But we no longer seem to be. Why that is happening to us is the subject of this essay.

I submit that we’ve simply forgotten who we are. We are naked apes. We evolved in small clans of about thirty individuals. In those clans, we got to know everybody as if they were family. We knew their personalities, desires, needs and idiosyncrasies intimately. So we could trust them, not because everyone was inherently trustworthy, but because we knew them well.

That doesn’t mean we could trust everything our clans-mates said or did. It meant that we could predict with some confidence what they would “like,” what they might do, and when and how we could rely on them. So each little clan was like a well-oiled machine of humanity, every individual knowing each other intimately and working together knowingly, however awkwardly. You could trust your neighbor because you knew, with the certainty of long familiarity, how he or she would react to almost anything.

Now we have a different system. We have Facebook, which now disguises its agonies, social depredations, and discomforts under a new name, Meta. It invites you, by virtue of the “miracle” of electronic communications, to have a thousand or more “friends.”

But you can’t. It’s physically impossible.

I’ve done the numbers. If you had 1,000 friends, you could devote only 57.6 seconds to each daily, even if if you didn’t eat, work, commute (without texting) or ever read a book or newspaper. Just contrast that mentally with your relationship with each neighbor in our hypothetical thirty-person evolutionary clan.

Facebook only offers you only an inhuman illusion of friendship, with all the social and psychological problems that portends. Most adults understand this truth intuitively, because they know what real friendship is from having practiced and experienced it. Facebook has a greater effect on youth, who are in the process of discovering what “friendship” really means by trial and error. (That’s only one of six good reasons why I deleted my Facebook account, which I had rarely used, five years ago.)

But Facebook is only the tip of the iceberg. It’s nearly unique because Mark Zuckerberg, its self-willed, nerdy CEO, is one of the very few, if not the only, CEO of a major corporation who rules it absolutely and numerically. He rules Meta as Genghis Khan once did Mongolia, despite our over-invested and highly regulated corporate culture. So much for “corporate democracy”!

But there’s more, much more. Remember those nineteenth-century sweatshops with endless rows of identical sewing machines (for women) or lathes (for men)? They oppressed hapless workers equally with “efficiency experts” patrolling the aisles, “no talking” rules and limited bathroom breaks.

Without really thinking about it, we’ve managed to reproduce that same inhuman, oppressive environment for service workers. What are telephone-queue “boiler rooms,” or the equivalent for “chat” agents, but modern “service” sweatshops, with communication devices replacing the endless rows of sewing machines or lathes?

So-called “agents” or “reps” communicate with “customers” they will never see or know, by reading from a script. They have no authority to modify any rule or policy, let alone to negotiate. Remote reps, in foreign countries or other states, often know little or nothing about the business that they represent, let alone its products or services. Their crowning achievement comes when they are forced to recite, after failing to solve your problem, “Is there anything else I can do to help you today?”

Can you imagine any more grotesque caricature of a normal, human “customer relationship”? Again, just contrast it mentally with a relationship in that 30-person clan, for example, with a witch doctor trying (without science) to cure your ailment. Unlike the witch doctor, the phone or chat rep knows to a virtual certainty that he or she will never deal with you again. What basis for a human relationship is that?

There is no follow-up, no continuity, and no expectation of any. The relationship is like a customer watching a puppet show of one, with the script-meister pulling the strings, often in disregard of what the customer says.

It gets worse. Inhumanity has now infected our health-care system, too. In the good old days, you used to have a main doctor, who knew you intimately—as a person and as a patient—from frequent visits over years. Even within a big city, your doctor was like one of those thirty people in your personal clan. He or she knew your personality, your quirks, your hypochondria or stoicism, your fears and your physical weaknesses. So he or she could quickly separate fears and quirks from something that might be serious. Some doctors even made house calls, especially for emergencies. (At least they still did when I was in high school.)

Now, if you are lucky, you might get a telemed appointment for an urgent condition. If something is really emergent, you won’t likely get even that. You’ll have to go to a hospital emergency room, or to an “urgent care clinic,” which can bandage wounds and dispense antibiotics and maybe antivirals, but will refer you to the emergency room for anything serious or complex. There you will deal with doctors who are competent but most likely have never seen you before and never will again. There is absolutely no basis for a human relationship, let alone for the knowledge of long familiarity that can be critical in medical diagnosis. It’s the phone queue or chat room all over again, but this time it could mean life or death.

Yes, you might still have a personal physician, with the august title of “primary care provider,” or “PCP,” meaning basically a non-specialist. But your PCP cannot treat you for any emergent condition because you simply can’t get an appointment in time. So the anonymous intern or resident at the local emergency room—perhaps after an urgent-care clinic has failed to solve your problem—becomes the equivalent of the chat-room rep. There’s no continuity of care, let alone any chance for a human relationship. Your “physician” might as well be a computer running an AI.

This pathological, inhuman health-care system exists not by accident, but by design. I recently got a new PCP, in a city where I spend part but not all of each year, after my earlier PCP there retired. By sheer accident, I was able to see my new PCP for an emergent condition on a previously scheduled appointment. He reported relentless pressure from his business management to keep his daily schedule absolutely filled, weeks in advance, so as never to “suffer” any down time. This left him no room to accommodate “drop-ins,” or even days-in-advance appointments, to address emergent conditions. In other words, his system was designed to make anonymous emergency-room doctors everyone’s PCPs, and so to take the human relationship out of medical care entirely.

I don’t want to prolong this essay unnecessarily, so I’ll make just three more points. First, this phenomenon of dehumanization is ubiquitous. Computer and Internet technology are so powerful, and seem so “efficient,” that we have allowed them to squeeze human interaction out of almost every business or non-profit transaction, including online “education” during the pandemic. We buy our stuff on Websites. We get our information from them. We try to exchange stuff or get it fixed on Websites. We even register to vote (if not actually vote) on them.

So, as you go about your daily online or on-phone life, you’ll be able to recognize many other examples of squeezing the humanity out of daily transactions. Not the least is the ubiquitous substitution of often useless and annoying automated telephone menus for human receptionists who once knew your name, your business (and a bit of the business’ business!) and your likes and dislikes.

Second, the primary driver of this relentless push toward inhumanity is the profit motive. Like most of what’s taught in business schools today, it’s not a smart profit motive; it’s a clueless, short-term approach.

How much more money could businesses make by hiring real people to know their customers and deal with their problems and questions personally? How much repeat business could they get? How many ideas for improving products and systems could come from real, human interaction with customers? We’ll never know, because business schools have taught that “efficiency” increases profit, apparently without any consideration of the human side of business. We’ll never even know whether profit and repeat business might increase if telephone queues made an automatic effort, by recognizing your phone number, to connect you with one of a small group of reps, so that you might have a chance of connecting with the same human being more than once.

Finally, the recent explosion of artificial intelligence that can “communicate” (really, assemble information) as if human is going to make this phenomenon worse, much worse. Of course an AI is not really human. It doesn’t have likes or dislikes. It doesn’t have tendencies or a personality, except what’s programmed into it. So you can’t have a human relationship with it. You can’t maintain “continuity” and “trust” with it as you might have with a member of your 30-person clan. A new element of programming, or a new data point or essay vacuumed up from the Web, could change its “personality” in a microsecond. Isn’t that what the reporter who got an AI to “fall in love” with him found out?

Thus, there is no human basis for “trusting” an AI. The more we rely on AIs for our information, the less trust our society will have. Distrust and discord will increase exponentially.

At the end of the day, the inhuman use of computer systems, including AI, could explain the so-called “Fermi Paradox.” That’s the fact that, although there are trillions of stars in our Universe, and probably millions of planets in the “Goldilocks zone” for carbon-water-based life, we don’t seem able to detect any intelligent species but our own.

Maybe when other species get to our stage of technological development, they, too, lose sight of their evolutionary origins. Maybe their evolution, like ours, involved conflict and competition between individuals and groups. So maybe, when they lose sight of their intelligent “humanity” and its evolutionary origins, they, too, lose trust and respect for each other. Maybe they, too, neglect their technology’s effect on their planets and their climates. Maybe they, too, can get to the point where distrust becomes so rampant, and automated “intelligence” so ubiquitous, that AI’s start throwing nukes around. These terrible possibilities seem far more probable than that our little blue planet is the only one of a myriad of good candidates on which intelligent carbon-water-based life could have evolved.


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Taiwan, Ukraine, and the English-Speaking World’s Open Secret

“Governments . . . deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed[.]” — one of five “self-evident” truths enumerated in our Declaration of Independence.

One surprising thing about our world today is the extraordinary influence of English speakers. It’s well known that the US has only about 4.2% of the world’s population. But add in all the population of other notable English-speaking lands, and the total is not much more. All together, the populations of the US, Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand amount to less than 478 million people, or about 6% of our species’ estimated current population.

That’s less than one in sixteen people. Only when you add nations in which English is a “lingua franca,” but hardly the dominant day-to-day tongue, such as India and South Africa, does English begin to look like a globally significant language. And yet English has in fact become the dominant language globally in commerce, trade, air travel, science, diplomacy and arguably even entertainment. It’s the world’s favorite second language, by far.

Why is this so?

You can argue, as I have done, that the English language has intrinsic advantages of compactness, brevity, and precision (if not ease of spelling!), which facilitate abstract thought. Its version of the Roman alphabet is the world’s simplest writing system, with the possible exception of Korean Hangul. All who have studied instructions for using appliances, written in several alphabetic languages, know that the English version is invariably the shortest.

But are simplicity and efficiency alone enough to explain the global predominance of English? I think not. The culture, values and humanity behind the language seem to have made more of a difference.

To see the point, consider Britain’s global position at the time of our American independence, 1776. This tiny island nation bestrode the world like a colossus. The great fleets of Chinese Admiral Cheng He (sometimes transliterated “Cheng Ho”), which had explored most of the world first, had faded into history. China had turned inward upon itself. The great Mongol empire, crippled by the Black Plague and dissipated by distance, was only a memory. Britain’s rival European powers—France, Holland, Portugal and Spain—did some colonizing, too. But they had nothing like Britain’s fleet. Some 400 British ships fought us Americans in our Revolutionary War alone. No rival power could match that fleet, the greatest ever assembled since ancient China’s heyday.

Britain lost that war, and we won our independence. But our win was something of a miracle, by dint of distance, the help of France, and sheer dogged perseverance. The great historian David McCollough outlined the improbability of our victory in his book 1776. Until the late twentieth century, that was the longest war (six years) that we Americans had ever fought. The mighty British Empire, which had fought it to squeeze us financially (remember “taxation without representation”?), had had to chalk up a big, costly loss.

But the Brits learned their lesson. Never again did they squeeze their colonies as hard as they had squeezed us. Even Australia, which had started out as a penal colony, eventually had its own elected government, ruled loosely by an appointed governor, whose actual power faded gradually over the centuries like the British monarch’s own.

The end result came last year, when Queen Elizabeth II died. She died a “monarch” in name only, with no political power at all. Her only “power” came from the example of own intelligence, caring, devotion to duty, and Reason. Yet she died the most widely revered monarch in human history. Even some former colonies, whose non-white people had been subjected to racism and disdain, paid her respect.

The reason: Britain had ruled with a little delicacy and finesse. It had preferred loyal subjects to restive and sullen slaves. It had squeezed just a little more softly and ruled just a little more humanely than the other colonial powers. And that made all the difference.

I saw an example of this with my own eyes on visiting New Zealand in 1996. The native people there, the Māori, were protesting the government’s failure to observe the Treaty of Waitangi, which the British had made with 540 Māori chiefs in 1840. At stake were rights to land and commerce on the more populous North Island worth billions of dollars. By 2018, there had been settlements under the Treaty, in the Māori’s favor, amounting in total to $2.24 billion..

Other examples of English-speaking people’s concessions and compromises are now the stuff of history. In 1947, Britain agreed to India and Pakistan becoming independent after a long civil struggle, but with little open warfare. In the mid-1960s, the US passed legislation abolishing the Jim Crow era of apartheid in the American South for descendants of slaves. In the period 1990-1994, South Africa abolished its own stricter Apartheid and eventually established a democratic government.

All these transformations took place without major warfare, or anything like our own War of Independence. To be sure, all required brilliant leadership on the part of extraordinary people of color, respectively, Mahatma Gandhi, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. Our own American transformation is still a work in progress nearly sixty years later. But, so far, as tentative and partial as they all may be, these transformations all occurred without the destruction of entire cities, massacres of civilians by militaries, the horrible, bloody battles, the confinement of prisoners of war, and the sorts of massive extrajudicial murders, rapes and other war crimes that we see now in Ukraine.

And so we come to the nub of this essay: will Taiwan meet the same fate as Ukraine?

We need not dwell on Ukraine’s sad fate. Russia’s unprovoked invasion cited no law, let alone a negotiated treaty. Putin rationalized it with unilateral fantasies of a common “race” and culture, citing the forced “unity” under the Soviet Union but eliding the great Stalin-caused famine, which Ukrainians call the “Holodomor.” Those rationalizations were, and are, nothing more than transparent excuses for imperialism.

The result, so far, has been horrific, and the war has months or years to run. Almost one-third of Ukraine’s vast population has fled, whether abroad or internally. Eurasia’s “breadbasket” is sowed with land mines that will take decades to clear. Innocent civilians have been starved, murdered, tortured and raped. Beautiful cities and quiet towns are now little more than rubble, with hospitals, theaters, libraries, monuments, and apartment blocks obliterated. It would be hard to imagine a course of action more brutal, stupid and cruel.

So as Xi Jinping turns his lustful eyes toward Taiwan, what will it be? Will the end result look more like Ukraine today, or more like New Zealand under the Treaty of Waitangi?

There is reason to hope. The last time China mounted a major, unprovoked external invasion was under Mongol leadership, in the thirteenth century, against Japan. Great tropical cyclones destroyed the Chinese fleet, twice. (The Japanese named these saving cyclones “kami kaze or “divine wind,” the same name they later applied to their own suicide bombers in World War II.) In all the intervening time, China has foregone unilateral, unprovoked military expansion, preferring to deal with its neighbors by means of diplomacy, commerce and the sheer pressure of its size.

Will Xi forsake this near-millennial tradition of peace and trade for brutal and destructive expansion? Will he risk destroying TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company—the world’s most advanced chip-making plant, which now dominates global supply? Will he risk maiming the industrial and commercial infrastructure that supports it, without which no such sophisticated enterprise can thrive? Will he, like our own infamous Lieutenant Calley, the convicted author of the Mi Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, think he has to destroy the village in order to save it?

Men age more like eggs than wine. They tend to stink as they get older. This is especially true of tyrants, who have few restraints on their dark, senile whims. So it’s certainly possible that Taiwan could end up like Ukraine. But it hardly seems likely. Xi seems far less brutal, stupid and cruel than Putin, and China’s history as a great civilization cautions against him assuming that role.

There is a middle ground. Xi could isolate Taiwan with a naval and air blockade and so bring it to its knees without massive destruction. Most or all of the fighting would occur in the air or at sea, with most or all of the human casualties confined to military personnel. China has the advantages of propinquity, its huge population, and distance from the United States. With patience, skill, and a bit of luck, Xi might “take” Taiwan by isolating it by military means and bringing it to its knees without destroying it.

But then, what would he have? He would, I think, have another Hong Kong.

Mere years ago, Hong Kong was Asia’s undisputed financial center, the place where people with money went to make deals. Now it’s a mere shell of its former self. With literally decades of warning under the 1997 “one country, two systems” treaty, Hong Kongers having money and ideas exploited their British citizenship to emigrate to, or buy second homes in, London, Melbourne, Vancouver, Sydney, or Toronto. Some went to America: Los Angeles, New York, or San Francisco. Now, after the pandemic has shown the world how easy it is to work remotely (let alone in an abstract “hands off” field like finance), there is no reason for bankers or brokers to live as sullen, restive slaves.

So Hong Kong’s days as a global financial center are over. It can’t compete as a manufacturing center with Guangzhou, right next door, because China’s great factories are already there. Of all the great business movers and shakers that once inhabited Hong Kong, only the courageous media billionaire Jimmy Lai stayed long enough to go to jail.

Xi Jinping has ample intelligence to understand that his political “victory” over Hong Kong was pyrrhic. He “won” the city by squeezing the life and commerce out of it. But it will never be the same again. Henceforth it will be just another coastal Chinese city, never again a subject of foreigners’ envy or dreams.

Will Xi apply that lesson to Taiwan? There are differences, to be sure. Chip-making is not like banking; it requires massive, extremely expensive factories, with huge, delicate and ponderous machines. Its work can’t be done remotely. And Taiwanese do not, as a birthright, have the international citizenship of once-British Hong Kongers.

But necessity would make a way. Already, the US and Europe are ramping up their domestic chip-making capacity, despite the difficulty of doing so and the greater costs of production there. That, in fact, is the entire purpose of President Biden’s recent Chips and Science Act, with its $280 billion of funding and subsidies for domestic research and chip production.

As for people, skilled chip-makers now have globally recognized value, much as Hong Kong’s bankers once did. Most of them already read or speak English because that’s the language of the engineers and scientists who created and designed chips in the first place. Xi would have to shoot down civilian aircraft and patrol all of Taiwan’s coasts, day and night, to keep Taiwan’s skilled chip-makers in. If he didn’t, they would flee, just as have Hong Kong’s bankers and brokers.

Xi is one of the world’s most intelligent leaders, period. Among autocrats, he is by far the smartest. Surely he understands these realities. And he can change his mind. His dime-turnabout on Covid appears to have resurrected China’s industry and commerce, albeit at the estimated cost of over a million Chinese lives. His abandonment of China’s one-child policy, although a potential disaster for our planet, also shows flexibility.

As befits their long history, the Chinese, as a culture, value patience. From modern China’s founding in 1949, China’s leaders have yearned to incorporate Taiwan. But so far, they have understood that a truly successful reuniting requires the “consent of the governed.” Force will, if it doesn’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, make the goose sterile, as Hong Kong now has become.

China’s top governing committee, its Plenum, used to have nine members. Two were effective apprentices, waiting in the wings to assume China’s top posts after a ten-year period. If the Plenum were still that way, and not crippled at Xi’s whim, I think China might stay the course as a patient suitor. But Xi is only one man, and there’s the rub. China might have to wait beyond his lifetime to attract Taiwan into the fold without force. And Xi, as he ages, might morph into Putin light, without the stamina to wait for economic growth, prosperity, ties of culture and language, and social change to produce the results he seeks.

So an old man’s impatience might yet reproduce another Ukraine in the East. And that, dear readers, is what makes democracy, as Churchill said, the worst system in the world, except for all the others. Unlike an aging tyrant, a whole people can wait for change to occur naturally, as long as it takes, without seeking to speed it by counterproductive, brutal force. Let us all hope that the debacle of Xi’s “zero-Covid” policy has taught Xi a lesson, just as our own Revolutionary War once taught the British Crown.



For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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