An Individual in an Advanced Economy

Here I am, struggling as ever, to find how I can fit into this insane modern advanced economy, where every job is so specialized that it is unnatural.

What is so terrible about economic specialization? The fact that people enter into occupations and progress deeper and deeper into specialties, as if they are cavers going ever deeper into an endless cave system. Never will they ever again get to see daylight, until they are finally retired.

When in Marxist times there were oppressed workers who effectively were enslaved in industrialized factories, it was easy for intellectuals to observe how unnatural it all was, and thereby concoct all sorts of dreamy alternatives.

Now technology has moved on, so that much of the more manifest slavery has been replaced by more sophisticated machinery, electronical controls, and robotics. Or else the factory form of slavery has been exported to countries like China and India, or even less developed countries.

Hence today the unnatural condition of being part of such a specialized advanced economy is less obvious to the naked eye. Intellectuals themselves have become so specialized that they cannot comment on what is outside the caverns that they have gotten stuck in. The few people who are still on the surface in the daylight are generally not in any capacity to influence change.

Humans are having to evolve with their specialties, and unite occasionally under the Gods of Money, Music, Church, Sport, Television and other escapist communions. There can be no spontaneous uprising against this. The human super-organism will eventually grow to a size whereby it has exhausted all the resources the planet can afford, or else it will be so big and complex that it will become susceptible to catastrophic failures whenever various minute components have aged, worn out, or died out.

The many, such as myself, who do not fit in with the human super-organism, are laid to evolutionary waste and left to subsist under the rules of humanitarianism until we one day conveniently die. The malignancy of the unnatural condition of our over-specialized, advanced, global economy is disguised by the humanitarian contract: that we are until we die to have an uninterrupted supply of water, food, law and order, and healthcare.

Marx predicted all the wrong things. How can there be natural uprisings and revolutions, when the humanitarian contract guarantees that like our farm animals (e.g. in the film BABE) , our carefully maintained welfare will prevent us from ever seeing that we humans are not free. Once again, I have to conclude that we are already in The Matrix.