On Treating People As Things

 It's another serious one - I'm afraid I am quite cross with the state of the world at the moment. Sorry folks...

As I recently quoted in my blog on AI, a character of the late, great Terry Pratchett once said - “Evil begins when you treat people as things.”

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Indeed, I’ve thought about it a lot over many years, as anyone who has read my book may have noticed, given treating people as commodities who exist only to serve a purpose for others is one of its major themes. But as I said in my blog on AI, when I stated I feared it would be used to enhance man’s inhumanity to man, in this modern age, the idea of a person as a living, breathing entity with feelings and an existence that is worthy of consideration and respect in its own right seems to be getting lost somewhere. And rather terrifyingly, it seems to be fairly universal.

The obvious example is those in positions of authority and power. More and more, one can’t help but feel that modern politicians have divorced themselves from the idea that they exist to take care of the people of their nation – indeed, they now seem often to consider that it should work the other way around. Voters exist to keep them in power – “wonderful idiots” to quote the British MP Julian from the sitcom Ghosts, who exist to pay their expenses, not complain and vote how they are told to by their betters, and how offended they become when we don’t. We should put up and shut up, accept what ever we are told and keeping voting them in regardless of how many of our services are cut, how much money is squeezed from us or how many of our rights and privileges are removed in the name of “progress” we never asked for. The idea that they are actually out there to look after the people of this nation and not keep themselves comfortably in power has vanished and is actually becoming a joke.

And then there is big business, for whom customers are so often not individual people to whom a service or product is being offered in exchange for money and who should be served as well and kindly as possible. Instead they are the cash cow, to be milked for as much as can be extracted while being offered as little as can be gotten away with and the same goes for their employees. Money has become more important than the people crushed in its generation.

And as for the media – I’m scared to even broach this subject because honestly, I can rant about this for hours, they make me so angry. They will ruin a person’s life, with or (more often) without justification, merely for the sake of a story that might not even be true. They will drag people through the mud to sell papers or get clicks, with no care of the life-destroying carnage they leave in their wake and with little apology if what they have said turns out to be untrue or exaggerated. They will surround and harass and photograph people at the worst moments of their lives, when they are in shock or in mourning or in turmoil without a care for what they are going through. They should be ashamed of the way they behave and it terrifies me that they aren’t.

But it’s not just those in power who seem to be losing their sense of humanity – it’s the ordinary people too. More and more, people seem to be viewing those who aren’t like them as a homogenous mass of general badness, rather than considering them as actual human beings who simply live a little differently. And, sorry if this makes me sound like an old fart – and before you say it, yes I am aware of the irony of where this is being posted – a awful lot of it comes down to the rise of Social Media.

Because Social Media is like road rage. People seem to forget that those on the other end of the distant screen or those about whom they gossip and thrown up conspiracy theories are real people with real lives and real feelings and that their actions towards them have real consequences that range from mere upset to causing genuine distress or even harm. That separation allows dehumanisation – and once people become accustomed to saying these things freely in the safe forum of anonymity, they feel bolder about saying them out in the world and even taking action against those they have build up a violent hatred for unchecked. It encourages people to live in a bubble of self righteous self entitlement, surrounded by their own opinions. In the name of free speech and being able to say whatever one chooses, humanity has lost its filters, that bit of thought that comes with saying something to a face and not a screen and no one seems to think or care about the harm what they say may be doing to other people, far away. They can cheerfully shout down or insult anyone who pulls them up on hatred or cruelty or downright inhumanity with happy detachment. The world has lost its kindness.

Because Sir Terry, as ever, was right. One only has to look at the world today to see that evil begins when people are treated as things. I just wish more people were looking.